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Is Michael Moore a courageous political documentarist who unmasks the chicanery all around us -- or just a charlatan in a clown suit? Is he an entertainment genius or a dangerous ideologue? The answer, of course, is all of the above. The problem is that you never know which of the four is doing the talking in Moore's movies and books. The end result is that the writer-filmmaker spreads a fog of misbegotten notions about America, politics, business, and international affairs among his youthful, left-leaning following at home and, indeed, around the world. Uninformed readers and viewers tend to believe everything he says.

In his latest book, Dude, Where's My Country?, for example, Moore peddles the absurd notion that terrorists are not really out to get us -- they're practically figments of our imaginations. Except, he adds, the terrorists who are right here at home, in our corporate and political midst. They are the "leaders seeking to terrorize us" and the "corporate mujahadeen" that run America, he writes. Furthermore, globalization -- tee shirts from China? data processing from India? -- is the main cause of terrorism.

These are just a few of the wacky ideas that spring from the fevered mind of Moore. Mixed with truisms, half-truths, and occasional truths, Moore's fulminations are a frothy brew of alarmist conspiracy theories and anti-American rhetoric. They are part of a new entertainment form pioneered by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, refined by such imitators as Ann Coulter and Bill O'Reilly, then carried to comedic proportions by left-leaning Al Franken.

But what makes Moore different, and worth seriously critiquing, is his global reach. With his multimedia machine of books, movies, international speech-making, and the occasional television show, Moore is a worldwide force with outsized influence among the young, the naive, and the distant -- especially among our friends in Europe. Moore's previous book, Stupid White Men, sold 3 million copies, almost one million of them in Germany alone. The predisposition abroad to loathe President Bush translates into uncritically loving Michael Moore. But Moore's effect is like that of Oliver Stone with his 1991 movie, JFK; while the political cognoscenti immediately denounced the movie's (clever) twisting of history, the historically untutored -- lots of people born after November 22, 1963 -- loved and believed the movie's conspiratorial take that Lyndon B. Johnson wanted to have John F. Kennedy killed.

Likewise, large swaths of the American and European intelligentsia seem to believe Moore's claims, in Dude for example, that the Dark Side is taking over with a form of insidious domestic terrorism and a culture of fear. Moore's answer is to create a culture of conspiracy theories in which the real terrorists are not outside forces like al Qaeda but the boardroom denizens who rule America. The war on terror should, in Moore's view, not focus on the external enemy but, rather, "be a war on our own darkest impulses."

And there you have the essential Moore -- a worldview of America as a failed project and an abiding danger to the planet. No wonder they so love Moore abroad: His is a 1960s vision, hardened in the pre-NAFTA plant closings of the 1980s, of a nation hijacked by the suits, the very guys who for decades gave Moore's father a good job at General Motors. It's from this posture that all the Moorean invective flows.

While Moore and Franken are the two leftist voices in the shout-and-denounce game, the differences between them are stark. Franken is a comedian who's bending his craft to political ends. Moore is a televangelist in leftie preacher's clothes -- jeans, cap, sneakers -- who tarts up a serious ideological point of view with entertainment values. Also, Franken is partisan while Moore wishes a pox on every house in sight. Franken smites the Republican foe with clear factual ripostes, saving his humor mainly for putting himself down. Moore is more ecumenical: He targets both big parties (he supported Ralph Nader in 2000 and still faults President Clinton for bombing Serbia). He attacks U.S. capitalism, and, indeed, American society and culture generally. And Moore's humor is an over-the-top milange that plays fast and loose with the facts. The bad guys (conservatives) are winning, warns Moore, despite the fact that America is really "a liberal-majority nation" -- scores of polls to the contrary notwithstanding. America has, among other things, a "love affair with homosexuality," he writes -- another example of Moore's specious reasoning. By positing the opposite of what all the evidence suggests, he seeks to discredit the evidence. His writing sometimes comes close to the method known as the Big Lie.

Yet the secret of Moore's success -- besides the widespread receptivity to an anti-American message in leftish circles at home and abroad -- is he's also half right. In Bowling for Columbine, his 2002 hit movie, he rightly highlighted America's love affair with guns and violence with serious questions (why do Canadians, who also own lots of guns, kill each other less?). He approached the subject with disarming but scathing irony (obtaining a free rifle from a Michigan bank vault by simply opening a checking account). He's right to make us think about the Columbine High School massacre, the Timothy McVeigh terrorist bombing, the loose gunplay in our urban slums, and the atmosphere in which they could happen. But, like all Moore's movies, Columbine is a tendentious quasi-documentary. It has its brilliant moments -- and puts Moore's sometimes perfect comic pitch on display -- but is undermined by idiotic slices of foreign policy rhetoric and painfully gratuitous scenes like the hectoring interview of Charlton Heston at the end. For this he was lionized at last year's Cannes film festival and given an Oscar at the Academy Awards (where he outraged his hosts by delivering a vintage Moorean rant against the Iraq war).

Moore has carved out a role for himself in American culture akin to that of both the early and the late Ralph Nader -- who is ever with us. Moore is a media star among provocateurs. He stumbled onto a good thing early in his career by exposing, in the eccentric and egocentric Roger and Me (1989), the insensitivity of General Motors to the havoc the company wreaked with its abrupt plant closings in Flint, Mich., a cradle of the United Auto Workers union. Moore also developed a gimmick, the picaresque search for an elusive solution and an elusive person, the chairman of GM, whom he fashioned into a shadowy bugaboo. As theater, it worked.

But then Moore parlayed that gig into an ideological jihad that led him into the archetypal anti-American crusade that has characterized his subsequent films and books. In Dude, and in other works, Moore -- having discovered the marketability of his slob persona just as Nader traded on his ascetic gestalt -- lurches around grabbing factoids off the front pages and holding them up as interrogative cudgels. These are the cheap shots of an agenda-driven debate. Like moviemaker Stone, Moore can paste together conspiracy theories with the best of them, and deliver them in a fog of innuendo and accusation.

Finally, like Nader, Moore falls back on that 1960s demon -- the perfidious corporation -- and its handmaiden, the inherently nefarious government, as the root of all evil. In Dude, he shows his hand transparently with a screeching attack on the hobgoblin he calls "Bush/Cheney/Ashcroft/Wall Street/Fortune 500" which, he claims, has "a feverish desire to rule the world." This cabal's chosen weapon, fear, is based on the threat of terrorism. But, says Moore, "there is no terrorist threat." In case we didn't get that, he says it again: "THERE ... IS ... NO ... TERRORIST ... THREAT!"

Moore's claim is more than just silly; it's the first step onto the slippery slope of blaming America first: Americans Are The Real Terrorists! First, Moore tries to dismiss the importance of 9/11 by playing the numbers game: Three thousand killed is a tiny amount in the greater scheme of life, when far more people die every year in homicides and car accidents. Second, he tells us that terror is nothing but a noun. "How exactly do you conduct a war on a noun? Wars are fought against countries, religions, and peoples. They are not fought against nouns or problems. ..."

Thanks for that foreign policy lesson, dude.

Moore's other favorite targets are free trade and globalization -- hot topics in an election year. His arch-villains, naturally, are the "corporate terrorists [who] take people's jobs away whenever the mood hits them." This is the kind of fact-free drivel that Moore brings to a serious debate, a print version of the shouted message of masked anarchists at the 1999 Seattle meeting of the World Trade Organization. Moore also claims that globalization will boost terrorism by making overseas workers angry at America for providing jobs that don't quite measure up to OSHA and UAW standards.

Clearly, the author's imaginative powers far outstrip his reporting or analytical skills. Consider, for example, his riff that bounds from showing a Bush family business connection with the bin Laden family (true) to the suggestion that 9/11 was not merely the work of 15 Saudi Arabian terrorists and four others, but the work of the Saudi Arabian Air Force (not true). Moore asks Bush:

"Who attacked the United States on September 11 -- a guy on dialysis from a cave in Afghanistan, or your friends, Saudi Arabia? ... You do not get this skilled at learning how to fly jumbo jets by being taught on a video game machine at some dipshit flight training school in Arizona. You learn to do this in the air force. Someone's air force. The Saudi Air Force? What if these weren't wacko terrorists, but military pilots who signed on to a suicide mission? What if they were doing this at the behest of either the Saudi government or certain disgruntled members of the Saudi royal family? ... Why do you refuse to say, 'Saudi Arabia attacked the United States!'?"

When Moore has his facts right -- on, say, the troubled state of U.S. public education -- he still undermines his message by presenting it in a shock-jock tone, like the Howard Stern of print. "A nation that not only churns out illiterate students BUT GOES OUT OF ITS WAY TO REMAIN IGNORANT AND STUPID should not be running the world ...," shouts Moore in Stupid White Men.

Yet Moore has become a cultural icon, a player in the marketplace of political extremism as entertainment. No matter what the subject of the book or movie, the main product is always Michael, Big Mike, always out front, the Michelin tire man of politics. Though Moore is now a multimillionaire living mostly in New York, it's part of his schtick to present himself as the threadbare leftie, the scourge of the boardroom, the long-suffering Everyman jousting against the corporate meanies. "Believe me, they'd like me out that door as soon as possible," he confides, just between us, in a folksy picnic bench chat on his Bowling for Columbine: Special Edition DVD, distributed by MGM ("they").

But Mike's not going away. He's in for another film called Fahrenheit 911. It's reportedly on the Bush-bin Laden connection and is already in production. It'll be fun, it'll be a hit, and it will probably be partly true. But which parts?

Peter Ross Range is editor of BLUEPRINT. Research assistance provided by Eben Gilfenbaum.