Satirist Michael Moore, who comically exposed corporate evasiveness in the film Roger & Me and the TV series The Awful Truth, seems to have turned the joke on himself online.
"Years From Now They'll Call it 'Payback Tuesday'," Moore wrote in a hyperbolic letter urging his fans to vote in the U.S. elections Nov. 5. The full letter, posted to michaelmoore.com two days before the vote, predicted, "We will deny Bush control of the Congress next week ... Expect a wake-up call from me at your bedside 6 a.m. Tuesday!"
After Republicans handily won majorities in both the House and Senate, the essay disappeared from Moore's site.
The irony of Moore –- who ambushes executives and politicians on film with their own statements -- apparently trying to erase his own words was too rich even for some of his fans.
Taking a lesson from Moore himself, bloggers dug up cached copies of the page and posted both text and screenshots to their journals. Others pasted it into Moore's own message board.
"Hey -- anyone can be wrong; there's no shame in that -- and to be brave means taking the risk of being wrong -- but also to face up to it," one poster wrote.
Conservative political writers, often at loggerheads with Moore's progressive screeds, had a field day linking to what they called proof of Moore's hypocrisy.
"Well, it is vaguely reminiscent of the shredding at Enron, isn't it?" Instapundit editor Glenn Reynolds wrote in an e-mail. "Removing evidence of bad predictions about future success."
It's unknown if Moore, whose most recent film, Bowling for Columbine, is a critical success, actually ordered the essay taken down. His personal assistant in London, where Moore is performing a one-man show, confirmed delivery of phone and e-mail queries to him. But Moore had ignored the queries for three consecutive days.
Advances in Web page caching, most notably from Google, have made taking down a page into a more controversial act, since the original can be revived and passed around as evidence of tampering with online records.
On Wednesday, cached copies of a satire involving the recent Moscow hostage crisis circulated the Net after the original disappeared from The Onion's website.
One blogger who hosted a copy of Moore's essay defended his right to delete old postings, but summed up the ruckus over "Payback Tuesday" in an e-mail: "I believe he has a responsibility to be honest with (his fans). He makes documentaries about exposing the truth, after all."
