FAIR & BALANCED ESSAY ON MICHAEL MOORE: Via Matt Welch: Kay S. Hymowitz in City Journal extracts the kernel of Moore's genius:

Yet for all his fame and achievement, the most important fact about Michael Moore—and the foundation of a populist philosophy that verges on the reactionary—remains his birthplace. Moore is from Flint the way Odysseus was from Ithaca; his home haunts his every thought and feeling. “This was Flint as I remembered it, where every day was a great day,” he says in a voiceover in Roger and Me, a movie in which he sets out to track down Roger Smith, the General Motors CEO who ordered the factory closings that turned Flint into a rust-belt disaster in the 1980s. The movie is a paean to his beloved birthplace, an evocation of the populist’s lost golden age, an industrial counterpart to the agrarian Brigadoon, where life was whole, people were genuine, and everything felt secure. Moore has a wistful vision of Flint as the birthplace of the modern labor movement with the famous 1937 strike that culminated in the founding of the UAW, which he presents as a progressive union that integrated the assembly lines and secured its members health-care benefits and enough money to buy homes and cars of their own. He evokes a vanished time, when laborers and corporate elites joined in a mutual spirit of loyalty and honest exertion. “My dad didn’t live with this kind of fear,” he has said of contemporary job instability. “The social contract then was, if you worked hard and the company did well, he did well.”

Moore’s image of Flint makes him the ideal poet of the Naderite Left. The city symbolizes the sadness and populist outrage over a world lost to the New Economy and its voracious global corporation. In Roger and Me, the camera lingers on block after block of boarded-up houses, and Moore interviews desperate people, some being evicted from their homes. The fallen landscape is for Moore a symbol of a lost world, in which people like the laboring men of Flint made real stuff—steel, cars, trucks—before being swept away by the flabby and artificial post-industrial economy.

And here's something I just didn't know:

In an appearance on Comedy Central’s Daily Show in March 2002, Moore announced that during the period that planes were grounded for two days after the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration allowed a Saudi jet to whisk away bin Ladin family members over FBI objections. As Snopes.com, an Internet site devoted to tracking down urban legends, points out, the planes did pick up bin Ladin family members—on September 18 and 19, days after commercial flights had already begun flying again, and they did so only after the FBI had questioned the departing Saudis.

Huh. I will still hate on the Saudis, as long as they get to sleep with more and better hookers than I could ever afford--and here I am subsidizing them at the pump like a schmuck. That's a good book, by the way, though it doesn't go much beyond the author's Atlantic essay; Baer just throws in some personal anecdotes here and there. I read while drinking my coffee at the Barnes and Noble. Up yours, corporate booksellers! I got something for nothing, so double dumbass on you.