Dan Riehl writes:

Forget that his latest mockumentary Sicko was DOA, when a would be champion of Liberal and Far-Left causes like Michael Moore is reduced to a cat fight he loses with CNN and Wolf Blitzer because, well, they're obviously biased and in the pocket of the man, I think it's safe to say you have been, for all intents and purposes, politically marginalized.

It's worth flashing back to how quickly Moore obtained superstardom amongst the left, by recalling his status amongst liberals in general immediately after 9/11. Moore's ascension was documented by Mark Steyn in mid-2004 at the height of liberalism's Fahrenheit 9/11-mania:

In the autumn of 2001, Jacob Weisberg, now editor of Slate, wrote a column bemoaning what he regarded as a silly post-9/11 trend. The Weekly Standard, the New Republic and other publications had begun giving ‘Susan Sontag Awards’ and similarly facetious honours for notably stupid anti-war commentary. Early winners included Oliver Stone, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Michael Moore, etc. Weisberg thought this unworthy of serious news magazines: ‘Stone and Moore are well-known cranks, regarded with considerable distaste even on the Left,’ he wrote. The idea that ‘these comments represent a significant body of anti-war opinion’ was preposterous.... Put bluntly, there is no anti-war movement, intellectual or popular, in the United States. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying no one opposes the war. According to polls, 5 per cent of the country is against it. There are pacifists and Buddhists ...Those policing the debate are dropping the rhetorical equivalent of daisy cutters on a few malnourished left-wing stragglers.’

Well, something’s changed in the last couple of years, and those left-wing stragglers are a lot less malnourished. Last weekend Michael Moore, the ‘well-known crank’ regarded with ‘considerable distaste’, had the Number One movie in North America. Okay, its weekend gross was $21 million, which sounds big, until you realise that the week before a dumb comedy called Dodgeball took $30 million without anybody even noticing. On the other hand, the business of Congress wasn’t put on hold because so many Democratic bigshots were attending the premiere of Dodgeball. That did happen with the premiere of Fahrenheit 9/11, and when the movie was over it was all five-star raves. Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa urged all Americans to see the film. Terry McAuliffe, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, praised the film for raising ‘a lot of issues that Americans are talking about’ - i.e., is Bush in league with the bin Laden family?

As Glenn Reynolds writes, "Let's see if Moore is welcome at the 2008 Democratic Convention before concluding that he's marginalized himself."