Why is the left always being put in a position to defend Michael Moore? His work obviously contains a few factual errors, but his main points still retain their validity. As Kevin Mattson pointed out in an article about “The Perils of Michael Moore” :

These complaints about Moore’s work often have more to do with politics than a commitment to factual accuracy. It was Forbes magazine that documented the errors of Bowling for Columbine, and I doubt its editors show a similar interest in, say, the errors of Republican Party spokespeople. Besides, Moore’s critics fail to recognize how much he gets right. In Bowling for Columbine, for instance, he depicts local news shows overplaying random acts of violence and thus sparking unwarranted fear. He shows the underbelly of welfare reform in which poorer workers are moving off the rolls into low-wage jobs. TV Nation documented depressed towns desperately recruiting new prisons as a means of economic revitalization and, in another episode, went after a wealthy Connecticut town that barred nonresidents from its beaches. In The Awful Truth, he portrayed fundamentalist protestors holding signs promising that “fags” will “burn in hell.” Nothing factually wrong here.

As Mattson says later in the article, the problems many people have with Moore are with his technique of “confrontation as a means to get the attention of the powerful”, not his politics. So what should the left do about the fact that our most vocal proponent has an admittedly sloppy and crude style? Many on the left are ready to write him off completely. Dr. Frank makes an interesting point :

Yet sincere leftists, I believe, would be ill-advised to take the devil’s bargain which Mattson (none too seriously) hints at: accept Moore, warts and all, as your dumbed-down, massively popular, entertainment industry-certified mascot, in return for a shot at the hearts and minds of his legions of fans. “Sure,” these earnest, non-dumbed-down leftists might say, “Moore’s an inane, embarrassing, untrustworthy, cartoonish buffoon, but at least he’s our inane, embarrassing, untrustworthy, cartoonish buffoon.” There’s not much of a future there, I’d say.

That may be true, but nobody elected Michael Moore as the unofficial leader of the left. Just because he’s the most visible leftist in the mainstream doesn’t mean he epitomizes liberals any more than Ann Coulter does conservatives. He’s popular with the mainstream for the same reasons Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh are popular : He’s an entertaining pain in the ass.

But where’s the mainstream outrage about O’Reilly and Limbaugh? They also distort facts and present their biased opinions in a confrontational (and often unchallenged) forum. Where O’Reilly and Limbaugh (and Hannity and Savage…) have had hundreds of hours to present their opinions in the last year, Michael Moore has had two. Nobody on the left has been given the luxury of having a forum to present their views in this way. The closest we’ve had was Phil Donahue, but MSNBC made sure to cancel him before the war started (despite the fact that his show was the highest rated on the network).

The reason conservatives aren’t constantly jumping to the defense of O’Reilly and Limbaugh is that they realize their time is better spent denouncing liberals. Unlike the left, the right realizes that infighting is only going to weaken their cause.

Whenever confronted with a complaint about Michael Moore, liberals would gain a lot more ground if they accepted and shrugged off his weaknesses while reiterating and strengthening his points. For example, there’s been plenty of complaints that Michael Moore staged the bank scene at the beginning of “Bowling for Columbine” (a charge he denies), that people seem to forget how absurd it is that we live in a country so obsessed with guns that banks are giving them away! Regardless of where the gun is handed to a customer, it’s still crazy.