BANGOR (AP) – Michael Moore’s blistering attack on President Bush during last year’s Academy Awards presentation raised Jason Clarke’s hackles and spurred him into action.

Within a week, the 25-year-old Bangor Web designer had launched his www.moorelies.com site and initiated an online dialogue among critics of the creator of “Fahrenheit 9/11.”

His ensuing cyber-discussions with Arizona lawyer David Hardy led the two to collaborate on “Michael Moore is a Big Fat Stupid White Man,” which made the Top 10 of the New York Times Best-Seller List.

To Clarke and Hardy, Moore is a monstrous fraud perpetrated on a gullible public by an all-too-willing liberal mass media. Clarke says Moore’s books, “Dude, Where’s My Country?” and “Stupid White Men,” and movies such as “Roger and Me” and “Bowling for Columbine” offer conclusions based on questionable logic.

Clarke, who grew up in Corinna, attended colleges in New Hampshire and Boston before dropping out in 2002 and returning to Maine to marry his high school sweetheart.

He had time on his hands when he watched Moore denounce Bush and the war in Iraq while accepting his Oscar for “Bowling for Columbine.”

The resulting Web site produces some income from conservative advertisers, but Clarke insists he is no GOP extremist.

“I’m not a party-line, hard-core Republican or a right-winger,” said Clarke, a former presidential campaign worker for Arizona Sen. John McCain. “A lot of my beliefs aren’t even welcome in the Republican Party.”

Clarke said he and Hardy had hoped for an August release of their book to gain a little more writing time. But their publisher, ReganBooks, wisely pushed for an early summer deadline that put it on the market within four days of the release of the provocative “Fahrenheit 9/11.”

“It turned out to be the biggest stroke of luck that we could have asked for,” he said.

Clarke and Hardy portray the darling of progressive Democrats as a hypocritical, pseudo-intellectual “grandstanding, blathering, leftist idiot.”

Clarke said he is most incensed by Moore’s willingness to recklessly disregard facts, appeal to the worst instincts of his audiences and attempt to pass himself off as a blue-collar product of America’s rust-belt in Flint, Mich.

In reality, Clarke says, Moore was born in the comfy, white-bread community of Davison, Mich. Clarke said that while still claiming Flint as his home, Moore rarely acknowledges that he lives in a $1.9 million Manhattan apartment and owns a $1.2 million summer home on Torch Lake in Michigan.

“When the entire crux of your persona rests on the fact that the working class and the government is conspiring against the people, it certainly helps to adopt as much of working-class posture as you can,” Clarke said. “That’s probably the chief hypocrisy of Moore’s public persona: The false and empty perception of the people he claims to represent.”

Moore and his arch-rival writing team share the same publisher: ReganBooks printed “Stupid White Men” as well as “Michael Moore is a Big Fat Stupid White Man.”

But unlike Moore, publishing has brought Clarke only a little fame and precious little fortune. He and his family still reside in the same Bangor apartment where he watched Moore deliver his Oscar diatribe last year.

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