Well, at least he’s spared the local cineplex.

Michael Moore didn’t really bother trying to influence this election with another documentary — his new film, Slacker Uprising, is online-only and merely a travelogue of his 2004 anti-Bush tour — so instead he’s tossed off a book, Mike’s Election Guide. With Fahrenheit 9/11 in 2004, Moore at least tried to make a case for voting against Bush, even if it was all conspiratorial nonsense. This time around, Moore’s just been lazy. He’s actually published a book straight-up telling people how to vote.

Given that Moore is a leftist radical given to astounding acts of greed-driven hypocrisy, it’s pretty presumptuous (even for him) to publish an election guide. Let’s face it: Asking Michael Moore to tell you how to vote is like asking Stevie Wonder to drive you to the airport — no good can come of it and ultimately you’re to blame.

Now let’s get something out of the way — Mike’s Election Guide is a lame bit of cultural detritus that every living thing can and should safely ignore. In the last half of the book, Mike looks at 12 Senate and 30 House candidates you should vote for. I’ll save you the trouble — they’re all Democrats.

The first half of the book is where he gets into the presidential race and the political issues. As usual, his facts are frequently wrong, he contradicts himself page to page, and it’s largely an exercise in pointless bile. But what Mike’s election guide makes abundantly clear is that Moore is guilty of hating the values of ordinary Americans. This is a frankly tiresome charge lobbed at nearly every major figure on the Left, but Moore is an abnormal case: Most leftist icons arrive at their distaste for American values because they’re insulated by wealth or some form of provincialism — they’re from New York, San Francisco, or Los Angeles, or have spent their entire lives in academia and thus don’t know anyone who owns a gun or reads the Bible. By contrast, Moore has always traded on his blue-collar roots in Flint, Mich., and portrays himself as a man of the people. Yet he writes things like this:

They say we Americans don’t want to elect someone smarter than we are. . . . They say we’d rather elect someone who is sh-tfaced and dumb. Why? So we can feel superior? So we can laugh at the idiot? Is that a nice thing to do? Do you think it was fair to put so much responsibility in W.’s hands when he clearly wasn’t able to touch his nose with his finger or count backwards from 10? Looking back on it all now, it seems quite cruel of us, doesn’t it?

You’ve got to love how Moore refers to “we” and “us” when talking about electing George W. Bush. Surely Moore didn’t vote for him, so he’s just really expressing his contempt for those who did and accusing them of being personally flawed for doing so. And he’s wrong to boot — it’s understandable he would argue Bush was a bad president, but saying that this is because he is of limited intelligence is, well, dumb. Perhaps Moore would care to explain how Bush’s grades at Yale were so similar to Kerry’s?

But Moore can do this because he has a Ph.D. in cognitive dissonance. Even though the American people voted for Bush, they secretly agree with Michael Moore:

For years now, polls have shown that the American people are right in sync with the platform of the Democratic party. They are pro-environment, pro-women’s rights, pro-choice, they don’t like war, they want the minimum wage raised, and they want a single payer health care system. The American public agrees with the Republican party on only one major issue: they support the death penalty.

You’d think he wouldn’t be so brazen about using such obvious canards — is it in the Republican platform that the GOP “likes war”? Are they anti-environment and anti-women? You can make the case that a slim majority of Americans are “pro-choice” in some sense; however, huge majorities favor restrictions on taxpayer funding, mandatory parental notification, and limits on late-term abortions. All things Democrats and Barack Obama oppose.

And yes, except for taxes, national security, gay marriage, education, immigration, guns, domestic energy exploration, etc. — the American people only agree with Republicans on the death penalty. That the American people favor the Democrats on some issues and Republicans on others is so obvious that you have to be dangerously self-absorbed and ignorant, i.e. Michael Moore, to suggest otherwise.

But those are political issues. Many Americans disagree politically and yet still share underlying values and patriotic impulses. It’s pretty demonstrable that Moore is outside the mainstream by a country mile. He thinks Christians should shut up about abortion: “There’s not one single word in the gospels where Jesus bothers himself with abortion.”

Of course, anything that is explicitly said in the Bible shouldn’t matter either: “If you fail to understand that these Bible stories are just that — stories – then there’s little sense in going to church, because you are going to be continually confused. Have you heard the one about the guy who set up house in a whale’s stomach? Or the one where the woman looked back to say goodbye to her town — and she turned into a friggin’ pillar of salt?”

Thanks for clearing that up, Mike. Over 2,000 years of Christian apologetics — it’s maybe the most studied subject in human history — and your witty rejoinders have made a mockery of it all. The world’s two billion Christians will be smacking their forehead for believing in this silly stuff.

Moving on, here’s Moore on gay marriage. He feels the need to include not one but two pictures of girls playing tonsil hockey, and comments: “Had the anti-gay marriage forces run ads with scenes like the one above, none of those gay marriage bans would have passed. I’m told that no one is opposed to watching two women kiss. Men love it, women love it, and the women love doing it — something for everybody!”

And here’s what Moore thinks about veterans: “We go to bed each night with the belief that enough of the poor in need of a job have signed up to defend us.”

On John McCain’s service:

Sadly, McCain’s sacrifice had nothing to do with protecting the United States . . . Lest we all forget, the Vietnam war represented a mass slaughter by the United States government on a scale that sought to rival our genocide of the Native Americans. The U.S. Armed Forces killed more than two million civilians in Vietnam . . . John McCain is already using the Vietnam war in his political ads. In doing so, it makes not just what happened to him in Vietnam fair game for discussion, but also what he did to the Vietnamese . . . I would like to see one brave reporter ask this simple question of John McCain: “Is it morally right to drop bombs and missiles in a heavily populated area where hundreds if not thousands will perish?”

It hardly needs to be said that Moore’s statistic here is wildly disputable, and that Moore should in fairness note estimates that the North Vietnamese Communist regime killed more than one million of its citizens for political crimes outside of the war.

As for the despicable suggestion that McCain through the course of his service is somehow responsible for committing atrocities against the Vietnamese (but Democratic vets such as John Kerry aren’t!), my father, a retired Marine Col. who did three tours of duty in Vietnam himself, has empowered me to deliver a message on behalf of America’s Vietnam veterans. Unfortunately, it’s unprintable.

Naturally, Moore has no good grasp on what fighting for freedom is all about to begin with. Here he is explaining why we shouldn’t invade Iran and why it was a bad idea to invade Iraq: “The Iranian people want to be free and they will take care of their freedom by themselves. Just like we did in 1776. Just like the French did a few years later. Just like Nelson Mandela did. Just like the Sandinistas . . . Freedom isn’t something you dispense like a Happy Meal — it has to be wanted by those being oppressed — and then they have to fight for it themselves.”

Thus in Moore’s view, Iraqis didn’t want their freedom: “The Iraqis (as we see from the daily bombings and killings) clearly had it in them to wreak havoc on Saddam — but didn’t. That was their choice.”

Now of all the reasons to oppose interventionism, an admittedly controversial foreign policy, this is bar none the dumbest and most morally indefensible. Saddam clearly committed genocide against the Kurds and tortured and killed vast swaths of the rest of the country, and yet it’s their own fault for not overthrowing him? It’s like saying the holocaust is the Jews’ fault. Also, the Sandinistas rose up and seized “freedom”? The Sandinista regime was a bastion of freedom, provided you gave up your land to the government, never spoke publicly against Ortega, didn’t believe in elections, and weren’t one of the tens of thousands of Moskito Indians slaughtered as a matter of official policy.

But stupidity is easy to forgive — Moore’s nasty thoughts are quite another matter. He can’t believe the Democratic congressional leadership’s low approval rating, so he frames it thusly: “How disgusting do you have to be to sink lower in the public’s eyes than a man who can’t even successfully choke himself on a pretzel?”

For someone who’s acquired a reputation as a humorist, he sure seems immune to irony. Otherwise, Moore could see that it’s he who has set the standard for disgusting.

— Mark Hemingway is an NRO staff reporter.