Michael Moore: The most powerful man on the planet

This was something I originally wrote around the summer of 2004:

It seems to me that Michael Moore, despite being just a documentary filmmaker, is the most powerful person on the planet because he is single-handedly shaping America's minds about whom to vote for in the 2004 election. This film is enormous, and it has an ability to impact people. Maybe there is a class of educated freethinkers who can think for themselves and might be able to do research about what Michael Moore is saying, but I think the majority of Americans might have just enough information to make a decision of who to vote for based on this movie. And so it follows like this, Michael Moore=the potential difference maker over who wins the election=who becomes president over the most powerful nation in the world=Which of 2 radically different visions of foreign policy are carried out.

Coming into the film, I thought that while I thought Bush was wrong about the war in Iraq, I wouldn't just hand over the presidency to anyone just to beat Bush, and I didn't like Kerry much (I wanted Dean), but the film appealed to my emotions as films do and it made me realize that "You know what: this war is wrong, it's inexcusable and I cannot commend the war effort by voting for Bush so I have to vote for the other guy." So Michael Moore got my vote and i can't tell you who else's vote he might get.

You know who else is powerful. I would say Mike Phelps is the 2nd most powerful person on the planet. You know the 19-year old swimming phenomenon who's breaking all the world records this week at the Athens Olympics. He's on TV 24 hours a day this week. You know how many people are lining up to interview him? Simply in terms of how much of the world's attention is devoted to him this week, he definitely is ranked up there with anyone. If aliens were trying to learn about the human species by watching TV, if they were watching this week, they would think that Michael Phelps was the emperor of the world.

Just imagine if Michael Phelps and Michael Moore joined forces.