Mr. Moore’s boorish Oscar night yelling, far from relegating him to obscurity, seems to have enhanced not only his movie’s box office but his own magnitude of stardom. While Hollywood and its acolytes may believe that Mr. Moore was (in that now terminally overused word) “inappropriate,” there may well be plenty of other Americans who find it more mischievous than scandalous to break etiquette at a glitzy awards show. Upending a ceremony at which the high priest is Steve Martin is not, after all, an act of sacrilege quite on a par with disrupting high mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

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His next film, titled “Fahrenheit 911,” is scheduled for release in the two months before Election Day. It tells “in part the story of twin errant sons of different oilmen,” he says, and will stir together the pre-9/11 intersection of Bush and bin Laden family business interests when both had ties to the Carlyle Group.

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You can already fantasize how Mr. Moore, once he is turned away from the White House, might travel to Kennebunkport to pursue the first President Bush in retirement much as he did Charlton Heston in “Bowling for Columbine.”

This may sound unfair, but is it any more so than the rhetorical grenades that right-wing performers like Bill O’Reilly and Ann Coulter lob at liberal targets? In America, at least, all is fair not only in love and war but also in entertainment. If Mr. Moore forgets his pact with the audience and makes a habit of preaching as he did on Oscar night, he might as well seal his own mouth with duct tape. But if he ambushes America with humor 16 months from now, he may be more of a factor in the next election cycle than all the other, more glamorous Oscar attendees now lining up at fund-raisers for Howard Dean.

All manner of televised talkfests, including “Today,” welcome Ms. Coulter’s pirate sensibilities back aboard whenever she has something to peddle, in part because seeing hate-speech pop out of a blonde who knows her way around a black cocktail dress makes for compelling viewing.

Without the total package, Ms. Coulter would be just one more nut living in Mom’s basement. You can accuse her of cynicism all you want, but the fact that she is one of the leading political writers of our age says something about the rest of us.