Stephanie Zacharek's musing that perhaps his dream "all along" was self promotion, is way off base.

He has done immeasurable good in exposing facts that the main stream media has willingly shoved under the carpet for this administration and its greedy corporate friends.

"Sicko", for instance, if Michael Moore could get past the blinkered eyes of middle America and smug critics like Zacharek, would expose exactly how pathetically this nation values the well-being of its citizens. And more than that, it exposes the terrible truth that we are way behind our global peers in putting people first. And he debunks the belief that has been drummed into our heads...we can't afford health care. When clearly, its all about profits.

While not everyone may like Michael Moore, the fact is, all those college kids weren't coerced into cheering for him. They "get it". And by creatively going after them in their ivy-covered cocoons, Moore demonstrated that he "gets them".

So he gets a little sun, himself. So what. The sunlight he has shed on the dark policies and denegrating priorities of the Bush administration is the big picture here.

Maybe these crowds acted that way because they do love him. I know I do. Whenever I see him on TV or one of his movies I say, out loud, "Thank God for Michael Moore." When you are living in the depths of a red state with no end to the horror of this administration in sight, his voice can offer hope - or at least the confirmation that other people out there see through the bullshit and are brave enough to speak out about it.

Stephanie - would you mind sharing with us some examples of "Moore's dud logic?"

he comes across this way to some people. I was driving in from far East Texas one day into Houston and listening to some articulate speaker on the radio eviscerating the Bush Cabal. I was shocked to find out it was MM himself. He is very intelligent and clever when he wants to be.

Alas his movies do not show this side of him, probably because he looks down on most of the sheep in this society as not really being smart enough to understand the depths this country has fallen into-- an observation I would agree with.

I think most people still live very blinkered Disney lives, believing there are two distinct parties, that someone is on the side of America in our government, that government woul tell us the truth about anything, and that elites are ultimately doing things for the good of the planet's population. I guess us proles, not having any real choice or power over our self selected overlords, need to believe in SOME fantasy to keep from going bonkers.

"I missed the only screening of Jacques Rivette's "The Duchess of Langeais," which I sorely wanted to see"

Now isn't this the true reason this article is written in such a negative tone? Zacharek had to miss an artsy movie to go to one that was more newsworthy than artistic.

It seems that Ms. Zacharek has penned an ode to her cleverness which possibly has been her dream all along.

I read her review in my office, when I should have been working. I arrived very early, fearing the thing might capture my imagination, or at least my attention -- but I was unpleasently surprised. I could almost hear tumbleweeds blowing through Ms. Zacharek's empty rhetoric; that could be partly because her politics are more obvious than her ability, or could it be that her dud logic and relentless self-congratulation are finally starting to grind down even those who would normally slog through her reviews just to get to the end.

This is Zacharek's review of Moore's record of his Slacker Uprising Tour, a project he undertook just before the 2004 election. She remembers seeing news reports about it at the time, probably between seeing really serious things, like French New Wave movies. It seemed to her like a clever and amusing little stunt, the sort of thing that certainly couldn't hurt the Democrats' cause and maybe even could help, just a little. Could this opinion have swayed her review of the movie? Would she realize it if it had? So many questions, so little depth....

The review of "Captain Mike Across America" is a shameless act of self-promotion even for a shameless self-promoter like Zacharek. Although I do agree with one of her more salient points: Just who the hell does Baez think she is singing in Finnish, for God's sake? If she's going to do something multilingual, (and, as an American, why the hell should she?), couldn't she at least pick a real language? And, Eddie Vedder - I mean, really, flannel earnestness and Cat Stevens? My God, what have we come to?

I'm thrilled Ms. Zacharek maintained her feeling of being somewhat, if not genuinely, virtuous for enduring Michael Moore at the expense of the latest in French New Wave. I too feel somewhat virtuous, just for making it through Zacharek's review, although I confess to a certain review regret. I could have viewed The View. I know the gentle reader will understand, even if they're too thick to remember Rushdie or to give a flying rat's ass about Rivette, whose completely unpretentious more recent pictures don't match the majesty or playfulness of earlier ones like "La Belle Noiseuse" and "Celine and Julie Go Boating", but, I digress. Quel fromage.

And I can certainly relate to Ms. Zacharek's delight in seeing noisy, annoyingly imperfect humans lined up. I get that same wonderful and energizing feeling every time I renew my driver's license.

Au Revoir, Stephanie, er, Scarlett, and yes, no matter what you missed today, there's always tomorrow.

Yikes! The last time I saw this much of a hatchet piece was when Jack Nicholson tried to chop up his family in Kubrick's "The Shining."

I mean, “to fluff his kingly robes”? Geez... Really? I can see not liking and critiquing Moore's style, but this piece drips with so much venom Salon's sponsor today should be a company that makes snake bite kits. I mean, c'mon: "...dud logic and relentless self-congratulation?" "...the laziest potential voters among the student population"? “...you'd think he was the Virgin Mary shimmering in a grotto"? Uh... "tumbleweeds"?

All I can figure is Stephanie either used to date Moore and it ended really, really badly or she's auditioning for a slot on Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal editorial page.

Though while we're on the subject of dud logic, the weird attempt to smear Moore and his audience because they like a Cat Stevens song Eddie Vedder sang is not only the kind of smarmy "Guilt by Association" logical fallacy they warn you about in Freshman Comp classes-- let alone in professional journalism-- but it also leaves out a lot of info about Stevens, like that he insists he was taken out of context on the whole "fatwa" thing, that he's harshly condemned extremism and terrorist attacks, declaring "The Qur'an equates the murder of one innocent person with the murder of the whole of humanity," and that he reportedly donated half the sales of his box set to the victims of September 11.

If leaving out context and potentially conflicting info are one reason why we're supposed to see Moore as offering "dud logic," then shouldn't his critics be far above doing the same thing?