“But don’t waste your breath telling that to the leaders of my party today,” the Democrat added. Miller, a former Marine, was reviled by the same media trolls who had called Michael Moore’s Oscar rant a year earlier “courageous”.

But there was nothing courageous in a lefty activist bashing Bush to an audience of fellow lefties. Jimmy Carter had furiously written to Miller, “By your historically unprecedented disloyalty, you have betrayed our trust.” But Zell Miller had chosen loyalty to country, over loyalty to Carter.Miller had crossed party lines on conscience. Moore was safely barricaded behind his party line. He took no hits for what he said, except for the booing from the upper floors where the technical personnel, To Kill a Mockingbird style, tend to sit.

Instead he added more mansions and homes to his collection. But that didn’t stop Moore from pretending that he had taken a great risk and was the victim. Moore hired nine bodyguards, who he claimed were former Navy SEALS wearing “night-vision goggles and other special equipment that I’m convinced few people outside CIA headquarters have ever seen.” He began retelling incidents in which his round-the-clock bodyguards stepped in to save his life that police had no record of. He claimed that a man rushed him with a knife on the stage in Nashville. “Someone had to mop up the blood after the Seals took him away.”

The Nashville police had no record of it. In New York, a SEAL took a “graphite pencil” to the hand meant for Moore. In Fort Lauderdale, a SEAL took a cup of hot coffee to the face for Moore, suffering second-degree burns. The police had no record of it. As a coward, Moore needed to cultivate a heoic image by surrounding himself with former men of action and telling stories about how they had saved his life. In his own perverse way, Moore was validating Miller’s speech.