“Every movie since ['Roger & Me'] has been a piece of crap,“ Post says.

So when he read a story in the Wall Street Journal last October about a neophyte filmmaker’s documentary slamming Moore it caught his attention. Post, an investment adviser by trade, is renting a Los Angeles theater next week to generate fresh buzz around the film. “Shooting Michael Moore” will be screened at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 25 at the Westwood Crest Theatre in L.A.

Post hopes “the trades” will take an interest in the screening or “maybe someone from Hollywood will come see it and pick it up for distribution,“ he says.

Post knows it’s an uphill battle for several key reasons.

“It’s hard for any movie to get distribution [these days],” he says. “And Hollywood is one-sided in its thinking. I hope somebody who is brave sees that it’s valid and gives it wider distribution.”

“Shooting Michael Moore” exposes the hypocrisy behind some of Moore’s public antics. The film features people highlighted in Moore’s films who weren’t properly compensated for their time, reveals his posh lifestyle contrasts his Regular Joe persona and reveals tax returns indicating the director doesn’t practice what he preaches.

The film’s creator, Kevin Leffler, is a CPA and professor by trade. That gives the film’s tax sequences an added dose of gravitas. But it’s Leffler’s connection to the subject which may draw viewers in.

He grew up with Moore in Davison, Mich., attended the same Catholic Church and worked side by side at a hotline to help people in need. Leffler isn’t a conservative by any stretch, but he didn’t appreciate how the media built up Moore’s image on what he saw as false pretenses.

Some of the material in the film has been touched on before, in documentaries like “Michael Moore Hates America,” which was written and directed by Big Hollywood’s own Michael Wilson, and the book “Do As I Say (Not As I Do)” by Peter Schweizer. The most startling footage in “Shooting Michael Moore” comes during a sneak peek at the Cuban health care system.

Leffler and a small team entered the country armed with hidden cameras and took footage of what some Cuban hospitals really look like. It’s a far cry from the state of the art facilities highlighted in Moore’s film “Sicko.”

The story behind “Shooting Michael Moore,” Post says, is of an Everyman looking to set the record straight.

“’The right wing didn’t pay him to do this,” Post says of Leffler’s film. “Those are the kind of heroes I like, ordinary people who decide they have a calling.

After I made “Michael Moore Hates America,” I spent several years (and still occasionally) doing interviews for the press on movie stuff. They’d always call me, because, you know, I’m a crazy, angry right-wing nut job and I’d made the only “conservative” documentary any of them had ever heard of. Something controversial would happen in the world of cinema, my phone would ring for a few days and then I’d go back to my life. In one episode, I received a call from the CBC. They wanted to know if I could do a satellite interview with them on an evening news talk show. The topic was the about-to-be-released film “Death of a President” where President George W. Bush was digitally assassinated.

The producer asked me if I could go on and talk about how outrageous it was that the filmmakers would do this. I said, “Well, I’ll go on if you like, but you should know that I don’t find it at all outrageous.” There was a long pause. “You don’t?” she asked. “Nope,” I responded. “I’m a filmmaker. I’m an artist. I would never, ever tell another artist what they should or shouldn’t create. I mean, look, President Bush is still in office and it’s probably not a great idea to do it with a sitting president. But more importantly, he’s married and he has kids. And regardless of whether he’s loved or reviled, he’s still a human being and not a fictional character. So from that perspective, I think it’s kind of mean. But I’d never tell an artist to not create something for any reason.”

“Well,” said the producer, clearly disappointed, “we’re really looking for someone who’s outraged.”

“Good luck finding your outrage,” I said, before exchanging pleasantries and hanging up.

And that, dear readers is almost everything that’s wrong with the world.

Rather than inviting intelligent people to simply talk about stuff they know about and who have expertise they might be able to share with the audience, we live in a world where feigned outrage and an inability to say “I might be wrong and you might be right” has resulted in our loss of focus on what this, the greatest nation the world has ever known, was supposed to be… an arena of ideas.

I’m a hardcore libertarian. I read the Founders and feel like they’d be utterly stunned at the power the federal government has slowly and surely obtained. Some of my very close friends think that’s pure silliness, and we talk about it and hash it out and yell at each other. And after I win the debate, we all feel like we’ve learned something. But they’re right too. They just picked the wrong nation to want socialism in.

I also happen to have a deep respect for Glenn Beck, both for his talent and skill in fusing entertainment and enlightenment, for his deep concern for our nation and where we’re headed, but also because of something deeply personal that our mutual friend was nice enough to convey my thanks for. Not to be opaque, but suffice it to say that Glenn has talked about something that has had a profound impact on my life, beyond politics.

Should The Onion have wished death on Glenn Beck? Probably not, because no matter how much you might hate him, he’s still a guy with a family and feelings. By most accounts, Glenn’s a nice guy (though he admits to having been an asshole in the past, but so do I). I’ve never heard him trash an individual outside of discussing what they’ve said publicly (Van Jones comes to mind), which is certainly fair game in the business of politics. I’ve never heard him step outside of the political and attack a person’s family or religion (unless the context directly informs the politics… i.e. Jeremiah Wright). Yet people hate him with a white-hot passion for speaking truth to power, so much so that he has private security and receives real, honest-to-goodness death threats on a daily basis. That’s a terrible thing, whether the threats are against Glenn or Michael Moore.

But more important than whether the Onion was mean to Glenn is why Nolte asked me to write this piece in the first place, which is that he’s a smart enough guy to know I’m not outraged and that I look at things a little differently, especially when it comes to entertainment. He knew that rather than the sniping that might come from our side, it might be more fun to have a conversation. Glenn Beck probably isn’t outraged (as an entertainer, I bet he might even think it funny). And maybe you shouldn’t be either. We probably shouldn’t get fired up and angry over little things that have no real impact on our world. The Onion doesn’t matter because they can’t tax or enslave me, and if I don’t like their work, I can always choose to not click in their direction. We could also simply counter it with really funny shit that hammers their guys. But mostly, I think we should save our energy for the big fights that mean something, like our struggle to remain free in an increasingly oppressive and parental America.

Tomorrow, if he chooses, Glenn will climb behind that microphone and speak truth to power again. Because, after all, the answer to bad speech is more speech.

But then the multimillionaire and self-proclaimed champion of the little guy opens his foul, uneducated, lying mouth and I’m reminded why I made that movie and continue to write and talk about Moore. Someone somewhere has to tell the truth about this country and I guess it might as well be me. I guess fate has appointed me his much less wealthy, way less well-known, and much thinner (even though I’m fat) counterpart. I just read Moore’s latest diatribe and got Hulk-angry. HULK SMAAASHHH!

I am now thoroughly convinced that even though millions look to him as thought-leader, there’s really not much going on upstairs. Moore is quite simply an uneducated populist. He’s Mos Def with a bigger vocabulary. He has no interest in studying history, because if he did, he’d find his whole worldview to be antithetical to what this nation is defined as by the documents that do the defining. Michael Moore hates what America is.

It’s certainly clear that Michael Moore loves power. He loves crushing people. He loves destroying the lives of others. He’s done it over and over for his own benefit. So it’s probably no surprise that Moore thinks the firing of the CEO of a private company by a federal bureaucrat is a good thing. Especially when Moore can make hay and horde millions of dollars because of it (his next populist rant is about the evil Wall Street puppetmasters). If there were ever more of a mind-blowingly hypocritical person in the history of the world, I can’t think of it.

Moore actually wrote in his latest insane and unbalanced screed that Obama “has the massive will of the American people behind him — and he has been granted permission by us to do what he sees fit.”

No, you stupid motherfucker, he hasn’t. You see, the Constitution of the United States of America determines the power of the President, not the people. Specifically, it LIMITS that power. And the guys who wrote that document were scared shitless of guys like Obama. George Washington referred to the President as the “Chief Magistrate” and the Founders saw government as something that had to be limited to prevent it from committing the sorts of atrocities we’ve seen in the last couple of months. Government has no business firing anyone in the private sector. None. Zip. Nada.

But Moore cheers for Obama’s overturning of centuries of Constitutional and common law like a high school girl whose panties are a little moist at the site of the big, strong quarterback. He cheers him on because he loves the sight of OTHER rich guys squirming (DO NOT FORGET THAT MOORE IS A MULTIMILLIONAIRE WHO HAS A TRACK RECORD OF AVOIDING UNION FILM WORKERS BECAUSE THEY COST TOO MUCH!!!) because the almighty government is inflicting pain on them.

Moore has talked in the past about the “free” health care and dentistry provided to him by GM when he was a kid. He talks about how the “common man” could make a “living wage” when times were good for GM. He talks about how it was the line workers that made the company one of the greatest on earth and how the rich elite have always been bald, cat-stroking evil geniuses bent on pouring liquid waste on everyone they can before anally raping their mothers and firing them and burning their houses down and pissing on the ashes. In fact, his NEW MOVIE is about just that! Of course if you’ve seen one Michael Moore movie, you’ve seen them all.

Despite all that GM provided for Moore and his family (it wasn’t “free,” GM paid for it), Moore can’t help but demonize the company, writing about the “hundreds of thousands of workers over the past 25+ years who have been tossed into the trash heap by General Motors.” Despite the fact that the primary reason the company is failing is because it overpaid its workers and now pays retirees more in salary than when they actually worked there, Moore is happy that it’s time for a little revenge.

Moore thinks its good that government is now telling private companies who will run them, what products they will make, and how they will operate (regardless of whether it’s profitable). He thinks it’s great that government is using the IRS to target specific individuals Ex Post Facto to take away money they rightly earned. He loves that big daddy government is there to take care of us.

I can’t imagine how that must feel. It must be awful to be so weak and unable to care for yourself that you need a bureaucrat to do it for you. But then, Michael Moore knows that he’ll be okay. He knows that the ultra-wealthy like him don’t have to play by the same rules as everyone else. He’ll be able to go to a private doctor when we’re in line at the government hospital. He won’t have to beg the IRS to honor the warranty on his GM (yes, Obama’s promise to honor GMs warranties falls under Treasury) because he can just buy another car. He won’t have to worry about government seizure of his property (they own most of the mortgages now) because his multimillion-dollar penthouse in New York and giant vacation home in Michigan are paid for.

What I don’t understand about Moore is how just a few months ago he abhorred the power-grabbing Bush “regime” but now he’s cheering on the most overreaching President in the history of the United States. I guess as long as his guy is in charge, it’s okay for one man to have way too much power. If you want an almighty government, Mike, you’ve gotta be okay when it’s your liberty that’s under attack. Based on your sycophantic slobbering over Obama’s action, you’d better be happy when the next President tells you what your next project is going to be about.

They’ve already come for the capitalists. They’ll eventually get to the lying, scumbag communist propagandists and Moore will be fucked.

I appreciate the plug Mike gave me, but I need to lay some things out. You see, since that movie came out, I’ve become one of the people that you would think would agree with Moore. I’m about to divulge deeply personal information, but I think it’s relevant to the conversation… and a friend recently reminded me that, as Lenny Bruce said, the purpose of art is to stand on stage naked.  In the last 4 years, I haven’t made a dime from my movie, though it’s grossed a LOT of dough. I’ve been divorced. I’ve been audited by the IRS. I’ve lost my home and have no health care insurance. Life has generally been in the crapper. You’d think that I’d be joining the vast majority of people Moore cites who want to stick it to the rich and who are lining up to get free shit from the government. There’s one problem: I’m an American.

Americans don’t ask for handouts. We don’t hope for the demise of others (even the evil rich) so we can simply feel better about our unfortunate circumstances. We don’t want a charismatic leader to be our father-figure. In fact, when we fall, most of us simply want the liberty to pick ourselves up and try again without “help” from any government bureaucrat. We just want the chance to fight. To rage against the odds. And maybe, just maybe, a chance to become one of the evil rich. If we work really hard, maybe we can be filthy, evil and rich.

It’s been a struggle to put food on the table at times in the last year, and I mean that literally, not in the cliché way. Yet I have no doubt that this nation will afford me the opportunity to stand and fight as long as I can, as hard as I can, so that my two beautiful children can have the opportunities they deserve (and if Kylie gets a full-ride hockey scholarship, I’ll just give her the college fund when she graduates). I’m working as hard as I can to get back on my feet. I believe in myself, in my talent, and my resolve… and not the government.

Michael Moore has a fundamental misunderstanding of what the United States of America is supposed to be. These ideas are uncomplicated and unhidden. They are clearly laid out by the founders in the documents that are the foundation of this country (The Declaration of Independence and The Constitution). They’re written in plain English and make a lot of sense. The founders, like Adams and Jefferson were kind enough to supplement their formal ideas with letters, essays and the Federalist Papers. They envisioned a very different country than does Michael Moore, or indeed, President Obama.

The United States is a Republic… a representative democracy. One that is not governed by mob rule, but by the cool, slow workings of what were supposed to be citizen legislators (i.e. they would take a short break from their REAL jobs and head to Washington, address a few issues and head home). More importantly, the founders envisioned a nation that would provide a very limited government, believing that the more local the control, the better. They would shit themselves if they looked at the federal government today.

In his Huffington Post piece, Moore calls my film an “attack documentary.” Clearly, he hasn’t seen it (though my offer to watch it in the home theater I built in my basement still stands, microwave popcorn and all). It’s been lauded by folks like Roger Ebert and Richard Roeper (Two thumbs up), Robert Koehler of Variety, Chris Hewitt and Jeff Strickler. None of these guys are neo-cons. And you know why they liked the flick? Because it wasn’t an attack-job. It was a film as much about morality and ethics as it was about Moore himself. But Michael Moore is so wrapped up in being right, that he couldn’t stand to see a flick that DARED to question whether it’s okay to admit being wrong. He also says that I was part of the “Republican attack machine.” Which is just crazy, since I’m not a Republican (I’m an independent and a libertarian), and I was never part of any clandestine meetings in any smoke-filled rooms.

Moore goes on to say that the vast majority of Americans believe that (in bold, with my responses below):

The American public believes that health care is a right and not a commodity.
I don’t have healthcare insurance and it’s not my right. It’s my responsibility to provide healthcare to my children, so that’s a priority and they have it. I can’t afford to buy it for myself from the people who sell it, so it’s not mine. An easy way to remember what is a right and what isn’t is this: A right is something you don’t need someone else to give you. Therefore, since healthcare is a service, just like a fine dinner at a fine restaurant, isn’t it sort of wrong to force other people to give you money for it at the point of a gun? Trust me, the IRS doesn’t fuck around. If I needed to go to the doctor, should I demand money from each of my neighbors at gunpoint to pay for it? That’s what Universal Health Care looks like.

They want tougher environmental laws and believe that global warming is real, not a myth.
It’s getting dark right now in Minnesota. I am looking at the data from the last 4 minutes, and sure enough, it’s getting darker. At this rate, I won’t be able to see anything in about an hour and it’ll be a black void by tomorrow, continuing forever. That’s the kind of alarmist junk that’s passed for science in the global warming debate. It’s also been warming on Mars and Jupiter, but they don’t drive Ford Explorers there. Recently, sun activity has been slowing down and it’s been cooling for the last 8 years. There might be many explanations and they don’t all involve punishing capitalism. And if we are responsible, that may not be all bad. Have you ever been to my hometown of Minneapolis in the middle of winter? Sometimes I leave my truck running in the driveway all night in hopes that it’ll warm up to -37 degrees. Also, as a Minnesotan, I like the outdoors. Camping, fishing, etc. So I’ll do my part to keep the environment clean. And most other people will too. Without Big Daddy Government fucking with our mojo.

They believe that the rich should be taxed more.
So what? It’s morally wrong. It’s wrong to take money from people at the point of a gun (make no mistake, every tax dollar is collected by force) just because you think they can afford it. Nearly 80% of millionaires are self-made and worked hard to get there. How unfortunate would it be to find that you work really hard, get rich through your hard work and have it all taken away because other people think you should spend it on them? The Founders abhorred income tax and found it morally reprehensible. They also said explicitly that any taxes (if necessary) should be borne equally by all, so after cleaning their pants from seeing the size of government, they’d shit them again when they saw the “progressive” income tax tables.

Plus, Michael Moore is rich and Michael Wilson is poor. I have a feeling Moore doesn’t want to “spread the wealth around” to me. In Moore’s world (whether he realizes it or not), all movie revenues should be shared among filmmakers regardless of success. So since Michael Moore made millions on “Fahrenheit 9/11” and there were “over a half dozen attack documentaries” on him, I (and each of the other filmmakers) should get a check for… I don’t know, how about $3Million? Hell, I’d take $250k. Probably less. It’s a tough economy. But when I run out to the mailbox to get that big stack of bills, I have yet to see a check from Dog Eat Dog Films. And that’s okay. Michael Moore shouldn’t have to give me his money. He worked hard for it.

They want to go after the crooks on Wall Street who got us into this mess and the politicians who enabled them.
Yep. I’m all for going after the crooks on Wall Street and the politicians. But there’s a much better way to do it than dog and pony show Congressional hearings. In America, we allow crappy companies to fail. We also hold elections. Moore is calling for a witch hunt that makes people feel better, and doesn’t do ANYTHING to solve the problem. You want justice? Let the banks and Wall Street firms and Moore’s beloved GM fail. Smarter, better, more efficient, better managed companies will take their place in an effort to meet demand. And those politicians? Like Chris Dodd and Barney Frank? The guys in government mostly responsible for the mortgage crisis? Vote them out of office! Problem solved.

They want more money invested in education, science, technology and infrastructure — not in more tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.
Do they? Well, given that more and more money has been pumped into education without any results, and that there is not ONE study linking per-pupil expenditures to an increase in success, it seems like a pretty stupid investment. Science and technology should be private, unless it’s for a military function. Those things are sold to the public later in the form of wonderful drugs, cell phones with lots of cool functions and myriad other products. Why should we pay for product research for the big companies Moore so reviles? Infrastructure might make sense but I’m a nut and think roads and bridges should be private.

They believe that, whether Democrats or Republicans have been in power, wealthy corporations have been calling the shots for the past few decades and the American people’s voices have not been heard as their country has slowly been driven into the ground. Our politicians and our media have been bought and paid for by the highest bidders and we don’t trust them anymore.
This is just populist crap that really doesn’t mean anything. There are more media outlets and more opportunity for our voices to be heard than ever before. If a guy from Coon Rapids can make a movie that gets seen by hundreds of thousands of people, then mentioned by an Oscar-winner on a blog that’s read by millions of people… well, case in point.

Finally — they want us to get the hell out of Iraq and to investigate the criminals who sent us there for fictitious reasons.
There are a lot of people who think Moore is right, and as a strict constitutionalist, I actually tend to agree with him. I don’t like war. I don’t think anyone really does. But as a former Marine (not a good Marine, but a Marine nonetheless), I can also say that the people who fight believe in the fight, and know what they’re fighting for. It’s what they are trained to do, and they are the finest fighting force in the history of planet Earth. I hate when people like Moore show disdain for them.

Moore loves to stir the pot. And he has as much fun doing it as Rush Limbaugh. The part of me that loves the Big American Conversation respects that part of Moore. This is an arena of ideas. The problem is that Moore doesn’t study the Constitution or the Founders. He doesn’t believe in individuality and rugged determination, but sees individuality as greed. Individuals make this country work. Moore doesn’t believe in what America IS, he believes in how he wants it to be. And that isn’t America.

Moore is right about one thing. Many Americans are so terrified and weak that we’re begging for more government to help us. Don’t do this. Great nations are almost never destroyed from the outside, but decay from within… because they become weak and afraid and beg to become enslaved. We’re on the path.

I’m going to keep fighting. I have a small marketing business, TV stuff in development and a film on the way. I’m not going to ask for help. I don’t want a bailout. I’m going to bail myself out. It’s what we do. It’s what we’ve always done. Times are tough and we’ve taken some shots. But courage is not defined by those who fought and never fell, but by those who fought, fell, and rose again. It’s time for courage. From you, from me, and from the whole nation.