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LaBash is a wonderful writer and follower of the Moore lies. He wrote a long, detailed story of Moore's adventures in the June 8, 1998 Weekly Standard, called "Michael Moore, One Trick Poney." Just a small sample I was going to post after hearing Mark Levin read it yeterday on Sean's show:

"But even vaster than Moore's ego is his hypocrisy. For when he bemoans "people today working longer...for less...with no job security" and says "people are frightened," he could be describing what it's like to work for Michael Moore. This is hardly news to Mooreologists. Vicious take-outs featuring Moore's ex-employees have appeared in the New York Post, Salon, and New York magazine.

War stories include everything from Moore's discouraging union membership to his not adequately paying or crediting his subordinates. To mine such material once more might seem a gratuitous rehash. Then again, so is most of Moore's work.

It is striking how many former associates--all predisposed to side with Moore--bitterly revile him. Randy Cohen, a former Letterman writer and co-executive producer of TV Nation who was fired by Moore (though he remained contractually obligated to fork over ideas), offers a typical compliment: "I despise Mike and regard him as a vile and dishonorable man, but I think Roger & Me was terrific!"

Conversations with some dozen former employees turn up such descriptions of Moore as "mercurial," "demanding," "paranoid," and a "fork-tongued manipulator" who is "totally disingenuous" and "feeds on people's insecurities." Former TV Nation staffers compare their working conditions to "a sweatshop," a "repressive police state," "indentured servitude," and a "concentration camp."

One former staffer says, "Most people hated Michael, not because he was a perfectionist, but because he was an a ---hole." A former producer, casting about for a despot appropriately "large, with gluttonous appetites--not just ruthless, but sadistic," finally compares a stint with Moore to "working for Idi Amin--without the laughs." Another staffer simply states, "My parents want him dead."

Former employees tell tales of random firings, of no health benefits, of having to crank out daily story-idea quotas that often went unread. Like a surly bear, Moore required gentle care and regular feeding. He often ate in front of staffers held hostage well into the night, their stomachs rumbling as he gorged on chocolate confections and Chinese takeout.

They tell stories of Moore's fighting "tooth and nail to try to avoid paying writers in the Writers Guild"; of his threatening to fire the assistant who sent a yellow cab instead of a limo to retrieve him from the airport; of his pouting in his office for hours in the middle of shoots and making assistants cover the windows with tape so he couldn't be seen.

Haskell Wexler, one of the world's foremost cinematographers, worked with Moore on Canadian Bacon. Wexler says that Moore, who "didn't know s--t from shinola" about making feature films, chose to "maintain his adversarial view toward...everything and everybody around him." Moore seemed intent, he says, on proving his bona fides by "abusing himself gastronomically" with regular McDonald's hamburger work stoppages that allowed Moore to feel "closer to the Real People."

Wexler himself not only has won Academy Awards for films like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but also has had a distinguished career shooting left-wing documentaries, working with everyone from Jane Fonda to the Weathermen. Of Moore, Wexler says, "He's not unlike a lot of people I used to know in the left-wing movement. They love humanity and hate people."

Finding anyone not currently employed by Moore to offer unvarnished praise proves a challenge. One former staffer asks if I want the number of someone who likes him. "Sure," I say gamely. "I'm sorry," she backpedals, "I can't think of anyone." "You won't find a range of opinions," Randy Cohen confirms. "You'll find everyone has a range of anecdotes to illustrate the same opinion." Or almost. In a typically inane passage of Downsize This!, Moore's slapdash satire of the political landscape, he pens a chapter proclaiming "O.J. Is Innocent." O.J. Simpson, it would stand to reason, might be the one exception to Cohen's claim...."