Jason Apuzzo of Libertas writes that while their best-known product has served as rallying points for very divergent ideologies, Mel Gibson and Michael Moore are actually buddies on some level, linking to this 2005 quote from The New York Times:

Mr. Moore and Mel Gibson … are fans of each other’s work. Asked if he had seen Mr. Gibson’s film, Mr. Moore lighted up.

“I saw it twice,” Mr. Moore said. “It’s a very powerful film. I’m a practicing Catholic. My film might have been called ‘The Compassion of the Christ,’ though. The great thing about this country is the diversity of voices. When we limit the voices, we cease being a free society.”

When Mr. Gibson walked to the press room lectern, he and Mr. Moore seemed delighted to meet each other.

“I feel a strange kinship with Michael,” Mr. Gibson said. “They’re trying to pit us against each other in the press, but it’s a hologram. They really have got nothing to do with one another. It’s just some kind of device, some left-right. He makes some salient points. There was some very expert, elliptical editing going on. However, what the hell are we doing in Iraq? No one can explain to me in a reasonable manner that I can accept why we’re there, why we went there, and why we’re still there.”

Meanwhile, there's another kinship the two Hollywood elites share. Clive Davis highlights this passage from Jesse Larner, the leftwing author of Forgive Us Our Spins, who knew Michael Moore way back when Moore was editing Mother Jones:

He also showed signs of what people who observed him in later years would call manic depression. A senior staffer who worked closely with Moore told me:

"We had a staff picnic in August. Now, if you're the editor of a magazine that has a staff picnic, you go to the picnic and you lead; you have fun. Moore went to this picnic and he found a table in the picnic area off to the side and sat there by himself, staring into space for five hours with this really morose look on his face. He wouldn't talk to anybody. It was the weirdest thing, really bizarre. People were wondering, 'What the hell? This is our editor? Our leader?' It was at that point that most people realized, 'This guy can't run this magazine; he can't lead us.' Some of this stuff would even be excusable if he was coming in on Monday with thirty great ideas, twenty great writers, but that wasn't happening at all. As a matter of fact, he was blowing us away with how stupid he was at running the magazine."

And as Mickey Kaus noted a few days ago, Gibson suffers from the same affliction, pointing out this sentence in a 2004 piece in Daily Catholic:

He has made it known that from an early age he suffered from being manic depressive, but through his strong faith and appropriate medicines he has been able to overcome these shortcomings to attain the heights of stardom.

Jason adds:

These quotes, along with Gibson’s remarks about Bush’s ‘fearmongering’ have been out there for a while, but conservatives haven’t wanted to talk about it because they’re apparently in thrall to the cult of celebrity around Gibson. And this, perhaps is the most vital point I have to make to fellow conservatives: get over this guy.

Fair enough.