Michael over at Flight Pundit looks at an article from the Times Online (UK) which reports that a husband-wife Canadian filmwriter team have released their newest documentary Manufacturing Dissent in which they take Michael Moore to task for what they describe as “a disturbing pattern of fact-fudging and misrepresentation”.

What makes this charge different from the many attacks that Michael Moore has faced over the years, is that these film-makers, who have themselves have made various documentaries, are from the left side of the political divide

.“When we started this project we hoped to have done a documentary that celebrated Michael Moore. We were admirers and fans,” said Debbie Melnyk, who made the film with her husband, Rick Caine. “Then we found out certain facts about his documentaries that we hadn’t known before. We ended up very disappointed and disillusioned.”

When they studied Moore’s previous works, Caine and Melnyk discovered evidenced that in the making of Roger and Me, whose thesis was Moore’s inability to gain an interview with former GM CEO Roger Smith, Moore had elided two interviews with Mr. Smith that Moore in fact had recorded on camera.

And as they dug deeper in Moore’s practices, in an ironic echo of the treatment that Moore had alleged receiving from Smith in his film, Caine and Melnyk encountered increasing hostility from Moore, culminating in their being “bundled out of an event at Kent State University, where Moore’s sister, Anne, knocked aside Caine’s camera,”.

But my purpose here is not primarily to smugly bash Michael Moore. Various critics, of whom Caine and Melnyk are just the latest, have documented Mr. Moore’s professional failings, and his record is sufficient indictment.

Rather, I would focus the remainder of this post on this film-maker couple (to whom the title of this post is directed). The article quotes Debbie Melnyk as follows:

“If you have to sell out your values and principles to get at a greater truth, where does that leave you?” said Melnyk. “If we think it’s wrong for the government to lie and manipulate, how do we think that [left-wingers] doing it is the solution?”

In the current polarized political atmostphere, too often we are tempted to place party solidarity above truth, and consequently end up betraying our deepest principles by passively assenting to or even actively defending the indefensible (or the merely juvenile).

We have seen on the right this conflict exposed in the exchanges over Anne Coulter’s recent “f-word” bomb, and this conflict also plays out on the left too. Indeed, I’m sure that Caine and Melnyk have withstood withering attack (or soon will) from left zealots who would accuse them of “sell-out” or worse by challenging the status of the iconic Michael Moore.

To that end, their question “If you have to sell out your values and principles to get at a greater truth, where does that leave you?” is one that we all need to remember, especially in the heat of battle.

I’d also note their previous statement quoted in the article because there’s a critical lesson that Caine and Melnyk need to learn if they are going to find the kingdom:

Yet Caine and Melnyk insist they should not be confused with the right-wing hordes who want to damage Moore.

This is one of the most dangerous thinking traps that one can fall into: I’m not one of them. – a lesson we all have to learn. When dealing with extremists, whether of the right or the left (especially) or Islamists (in spades) the moderate “fellow-traveler” is the most despised and the first to end up on the gallows.

So Rick and Debbie, here’s my advice: don’t try to curry favor with the radical left by trying to position yourself as “I’m not one of them”. Stand for what you believe, and by their actions you will learn who your true friends and allies are. The weak-minded perish first.