LET GEORGE W. RUN A WAR? ABSURD.

Byline: Robert Brennan Local View

IMAGINE if someone like Michael Moore had been at Valley Forge in the winter of 1777.

He probably would have already printed several pamphlets about the racist, sexist and speciesist system devised by such radical right-wing white men as Patrick Henry and Thomas Paine. At Valley Forge, he would have had a field day talking to shoeless soldiers suffering in the snow and asking them what they thought of their commander-in-chief.

And who was the ``front man'' for all this? Who was the man who had brought the alleged Continental Army to the brink of destruction as it wintered in Valley Forge just a little more than a year after the signing of the Declaration of Independence?

To our historical Michael Moore, this would be just another George W. He would probably tell the readers of his pamphlet that this particular G.W.'s only prior claim to fame was being in the moral equivalent of the British National Guard as an officer whose solitary achievement was bungling into capture by the enemy in the French and Indian War.

Our Moore could have informed the more disgruntled elements among the Colonials that this G.W. was born with a silver plantation owner's whip in his toothless mouth, and he probably got the general's gig in the Revolution only because he could afford the cool-looking uniform. And besides the lottery-winning accident of his birth, this G.W. augmented his status and position in the elite society by marrying one of the richest women in the Colonies.

Our 18th century Michael Moore and other less stalwart members of the fledgling Continental Congress would have demanded to know why George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin hadn't predicted the British were going to send the largest expeditionary force in their history up to this time to stop the Revolution.

Who was in charge here?

New York, lost to the British. Philadelphia, lost to the British.

What do the battles of Bunker Hill, Germantown and Brandywine, as well as the siege of Quebec, all have in common? They were all victories for the British Army.

When this first G.W. did take the rare opportunity to put up a fight, he lost more times than he won. If CNN and MSNBC has been around then, it is easy to imagine a retired light colonel from the French and Indian War giving his commentary about the foolishness of Washington dividing his already-weak army in two while he faced complete annihilation by the forces of General William Howe.

The Colonial Michael Moore could have moved on beyond Valley Forge and written many more pamphlets about the collateral damage at Yorktown and the poor leadership skills of the first G.W., which included appointing Benedict Arnold to command the most important fortress on the Hudson River.

If only there already had been a Congress in place at that time with the power to create a select subcommittee that could have held hearings about how the British were allowed to take Philadelphia without firing a shot. Why didn't the first G.W. know what the British were going to do?

And what about all those Tories who were allowed to leave the Colonies without being adequately vetted by the Green Mountain Boys? The Michael Moore pamphlet on that episode would certainly have called into question the first G.W.'s cozy relationship with powerful Canadian interests that probably controlled him like puppet-masters.

Speaking of foreign powers interfering with the affairs of other countries, the 18th century Michael Moore would certainly have had to expose the role played by a certain superpower of the era that acted in a very unilateral and not a coalition-building manner. I know it's hard to believe, but without French ships, French troops and French canon, things might have turned out quite different. Of course, this would have raised the ire of our 18th century Michael Moore, as the French did what they did without asking for one iota of approval from the Dutch, the Russians, the Prussians - or anybody else, for that matter.

If Molly Pitcher had held a microphone rather than a pail of water at the Battle of Monmouth, she might even have asked why the Colonists were no closer to victory in 1778 than they were in 1776. The war would continue from disaster to near disaster to rare victory for many years to come. It wouldn't be until 1781 that G.W. and the French had defeated the main British Army at Yorktown, and two more years would pass before hostilities were formally ended with the Treaty of Paris.

The American Revolution: what a disaster.