Joe Dante's Showtime political-horror parable "Homecoming" showed war veteran zombies rising from the grave to vote against the president who sent them to die for a lie, while, according to Variety, "a Karl Rove-like presidential adviser and Ann Coulter-like pundit (the names have been changed, but just barely) manipulate a talk circuit where gaseous windbags presume to speak for the military’s fallen."

Scriptwriter Sam Hamm granted an interview with Corrente's Victor Shystee in which he discussed the influence of blogs on the development of the moive:

It does have sort of an "Atrios's Greatest Hits" quality, doesn't it? But that’s the air we breathe. We’re in the midst of one of the most genuinely grotesque administrations in American history, one that will be long remembered for its corruption, mendacity and malfeasance. In Washington D.C. you cannot swing a dead cat by the tail without hitting a crime or a scandal or a national disgrace. So it was no great feat for us to cram a bunch of hot-button issues into the margins of our story. The big trick was deciding what to ignore.

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For the last few years Joe Dante and I have been exchanging at least a dozen e-mails a day, mostly links to blog entries and news items we stumble across and insist on sharing with the poor hapless bastards on our e-mail lists. We probably both suffer from some newshound version of ADD, and because misery loves company we’re trying to spread it to everyone we know. So yeah, blogs clearly had some influence on the issue-a-minute machine-gun style of "Homecoming."

Hamm has some interesting insight into whether blogs actually play a constructive role in the politics of the nation:

As to whether blogs really make a difference, it's hard to say. Regular blog-hopping certainly puts you in touch with a lot of stories you’d never hear about if you had to depend upon what the editors of the local newspaper thought you should read. And of course blogs offer a sense of validation to readers who aren’t quite satisfied with the Official Story as told to, then by, the talking heads of cable news. If you hear Woodward's spin on Miller's spin on Luskin's spin on Rove's spin on Plamegate, and something about it strikes you as a wee bit fishy, you can visit Firedoglake, and chances are Jane Hamsher will already have posted a detailed analysis of the contradictions in all four stories. If you come across a dodgy quote on Abu Ghraib, and the name of the quotee sounds strangely familiar, you check Digby: Oh yeah, she's the one that runs the torture training camp in Arizona. The danger is that you'll become an outrage junkie--or conversely, that you'll develop outrage fatigue.

Blogs have obviously not supplanted newspapers or television or (alas) talk radio, but they do represent one more option on the menu. There are enormous amounts of information, research, and speculation (informed and otherwise) dangling just overhead, like ripe fruit; all we news consumers have to do is reach up and pluck it. But it's pretty amazing how many people are too lazy to do even that.

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