Moore's '9/11' getting far too little scrutiny.

A Political activist rang me up and told me I had to see the new documentary about the president. "It's chilling," he said. "It shows what a slimeball this guy is."

So I saw the movie, and it was--how to put this?--a crock. Watching it I thought: Whoever produced this slanderous mess deserves to be run out of polite society.

That was 10 years ago, and the documentary was a slapdash confection of lies and innuendo called "The Clinton Chronicles."

It accused Bill Clinton--slyly and indirectly--of drug running and worse. There was no evidence but lots of insinuation, meaningless coincidences presented in breathless tones so the weak-minded might connect dots that weren't there. Now the U.S. is being treated to the same kind of exercise, on a much grander scale, with Michael Moore's scabrous "Fahrenheit 9/11." And once again, weak-minded ideologues are lapping it up like hungry pups.

There's a big difference, though. The mainstream press recognized the producers of "The Clinton Chronicles" as the fools they were. After hawking the film, televangelist Jerry Falwell never recovered what little reputation he once had.

Now, however, the paranoid strain has so thoroughly saturated U.S. politics that Moore's cinematic slander can be feted and extolled-not only by mainstream movie reviewers but by the same Democratic Party establishment that Moore accuses of colluding with President Bush.

I saw the movie at an early showing on Saturday afternoon in a packed theater in my heavily liberal Washington suburb. As the film unspooled, the audience laughed, fell silent and tut-tutted to Moore's heavy-handed cues.

I, on the other hand, was unmoved. (Maybe you've noticed.) Shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Moore posted this on his Web site: "We, the United States of America, are culpable in committing so many acts of terror and bloodshed that we had better get a clue about the culture of violence in which we have been active participants."

So I wasn't surprised that Moore is, um, skeptical about U.S. motives for invading Iraq. To the extent he has an explicit thesis at all, it's that the invasion was a scheme to divert attention from the Bush family's involvement with the family of Osama bin Laden.

And having followed Moore's career, I wasn't surprised by his shadings of fact. When he says that "many studies" showed Al Gore won the vote in Florida, for example, he neglects to mention that many more, including recounts by the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post, found Gore did not.

What did surprise me was the crudity of Moore's method. Moore calls his movie an "op-ed," but it is written in Crayola, with a heavy grip. He mostly avoids straightforward factual assertions--which makes the movie harder to confront and argue with--in favor of ellipsis and misdirection. The music is alternately creepy (that's how you know he's being serious) and chipper (that's how you know he's being sarcastic).

Will anyone care that the movie, viewed as either art of journalism, is a mess? "Fahrenheit 9/11" has a Palme d'Or from the Cannes film festival--and now the implicit endorsement of the Democratic Party establishment.

This embrace of crackpottery is great news for Moore, very bad news for Democrats.

Andrew Ferguson is a columnist for Bloomberg News.