Few recent books and movies have been subjected to as high a degree of public scrutiny as the works of Michael Moore. As a fallible human being producing fact-dense works, often citing equally fallible reporters and researchers, his work has an error ratio that is probably comparable to that of everyone else's in print or film media, but everyone else is not the world's most visible and provocative critic of our government's policies, hence their work does not receive a line-by-line, shot-by-shot analysis, animated by a feverishly determined purpose to discredit.

The forthcoming documentary "Fahrenheit 911" is likely to set records in that regard. The stakes could not be higher. Moore's foes get it. Moore gets it, too, and he has retained the services of Bill Clinton's rapid response team from the 1992 election to refute attacks.

The only ones who may not get it: Liberals. When the conservative right and its corporate media handmaidens have throw down dubious "factual challenges" to Moore's high-profile works, many on the left have proven willing to go along.

The classic case in point: Seemingly within hours of the release of Moore's "Bowling for Columbine" in October 2002, the alleged deceptions of Michael Moore were circulating through the zeitgeist at a markedly stepped-up pitch. They coalesced into a hit list printed in Forbes' December 9, 2002, issue, becoming a trumpet call for right-wing bloggers. Then Moore's dour critics in the groves of liberal academe took up the cudgel, with Dissent publishing "The Perils of Michael Moore" in its Spring 2003 issue, solemnly including the litany of Moore's alleged "Columbine" transgressions.

The classic life-cycle of a manufactured political smear is not difficult to detect as it travels across the public spectrum. The goal is to build up enough critical mass that ordinary folks on the street get wind of the target's alleged mendacity and deceit and simply accept it. Many of those normally astute enough to consider the source when a campaign of vilification is based on obvious political disagreement do not make such allowances when presented with what looks like simple mendacity. Pointing out "errors" and acts of deceit seems value-free. Target isolated, credibility compromised, mission accomplished.

But manufactured charges tend to fall apart on examination. Chief among the "Columbine" charges was the "free gun" scene in the bank that gives away guns to new customers.

Here's how it went in Forbes' authoritative-looking bullet points:

"BANK: Moore says North Country Bank & Trust in Traverse City, Mich., offered a deal where, 'if you opened an account, the bank would give you a gun.' He walks into a branch and walks out with a gun. ACTUALLY: Moore didn't just walk in off the street and get a gun. The transaction was staged for cameras. You have to buy a long-term CD, then go to a gun shop to pick up the weapon after a background check."

Compare this to Moore's account of what happened, as posted on the "Bowling for Columbine" website:

"North Country Bank (with branches throughout Northern Michigan) offers you a wide choice of guns when you open up a certificate of deposit account.... The bank is also an authorized federal arms dealer so they can do the quick background check right there at the bank. I put $1,000 in a long-term account, they did the background check, and, within an hour, walked out with my new Weatherby-just as you see it in the film. (I did have a choice of getting a pair of golf clubs or a grandfather clock, but they didn't have either of those hanging on the wall like they did those three rifles)."

Tellingly, the differences in these opposing accounts are not a matter of blunt contradiction but of details omitted and included, respectively. The omissions necessary to trump up the "Moore staged it" story become visible in the light cast by the details included in his personal account:

He would've had to open a long-term CD! (...and he did.)

You have to get a background check! (...which he did, on the spot.)

Even more tellingly, that Forbes piece claimed that "Bowling for Columbine" also perpetrated the following "falsehood:"

"WELFARE: Moore places blame for a shooting by a child in Michigan on the work-to-welfare [sic] program that prevented the boy's mother from spending time with him. ACTUALLY: Moore doesn't mention that mom had sent the boy to live in a house where her brother and a friend kept drugs and guns. "

Anyone who even casually followed Moore's commentary during the 2000 presidential campaign, two years before "Columbine," knows that among the top 5 charges he leveled against the career of Al Gore was Clinton-Gore's championship of welfare "reform," the draconian measures Moore held responsible for forcing that woman to get on a bus to make an 80-mile daily commute to two minimum-wage jobs, thereby also forcing her to leave the son she could no longer care for -- day care or baby-sitters not an option -- in the hands of her brother and in the vicinity of those drugs and guns, as Moore related in painful, vivid detail. Forbes made his point for him.

Last year, an enterprising Alternet freelancer interviewed North County Bank's marketing director, who confessed that "she worked with Forbes magazine to put out an article discrediting the movie."

"Dissent" fell for it -- eagerly -- and was not alone among liberal deep-thinkers who frown on Moore's barnstorming tactics. Needless to say, those on the left who repeat the smears of ersatz "debunkers" and parrot their conclusions without running down the source or performing a reality check do the work of the opposition. The attack-&-discredit strategy of right-wing media organizations, think tanks and PR consultants is as old as the created image of the beastly, nun-roasting, baby-bayoneting Hun, concocted to draw the U.S. into the First World War.

It never gets old, because the credulity of the target audience stays forever young.

Andrew Christie (achris63@hotmail.com) is an environmental activist in San Luis Obispo, CA

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