http://www.slate.com/id/2164832The Anti-Michael Moore:
How Vanity Fair nipped a budding right-wing poster boy.By Kim Masters
Posted Monday, April 23, 2007, at 4:34 PM ET
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In 2004, Dollard suddenly ditched his show-business life in Los Angeles and went to Iraq. Not long after he arrived, he e-mailed a photo of himself to friends and family. It depicted him in combat gear, surrounded by Marines, with his hair cut into a mohawk and the word die shaved into his chest hair. Experiencing "vivid clarity," he later said, feeling as though he'd had "a message from God," Dollard discovered that he was a "warrior" whose mission was to make a documentary that would spark support for President Bush and the war.
He began shooting many hours of footage of the Marines, some of whom came to see him as a hero in the mold of Hunter S. Thompson. "My goal is to de-sensitize young people to violence," he told Vanity Fair. "I want kids to watch my film and understand that brutality is the fucking appropriate response to a brutal enemy."
Dollard's message had considerable appeal to a number of Bush supporters, who began grooming him as a poster boy for their cause—the guy who ditched the Hollywood life to spread the word. Ann Coulter was a fan, and Dollard was a guest on Tony Snow's Fox radio show before Snow moved to his job at the White House.
These people could hardly have been pleased by the Vanity Fair piece. As author Evan Wright abundantly illustrates, Dollard's mission has been frequently interrupted by drug binges and other detours into depravity. Wright reports that while in Iraq, Dollard stole liquid Valium from a pharmacy and got some of the troops high, and that he may have provoked an attack on U.S. troops when he stole a banner from a mosque. (The article about Dollard isn't just extraordinary for its content but its size: If the typical Vanity Fair piece is a Mini Cooper, this one is equivalent to a block-long caravan of Humvees.)
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