Moore's ingenuous schlub in a baseball cap routine is pretty well-worn (some might even say suspect) by now, and the guy has certainly taken his lumps from critics who accuse him of being a self-promoter and thin-skinned, but those are peripheral quibbles. More to the point is that, with two films and a series to his credit, you'd think he'd know when to edit a piece before its sharpness disintegrates into mere prank-pulling, and before it erodes the dignity of the Joe Average victim of corporate avarice he's ostensibly trying to help.

In one of the April 11 stories, Moore took up the cause of Chris Donahue, a Florida man with complications from diabetes whose HMO, Humana, denied coverage for the pancreas transplant he needed to stay alive. The footage of Moore and Donahue staging a mock funeral (complete with bagpipes and mourners) in front of Humana headquarters, and running up against the brick wall of corporate indifference in the form of an unyielding public relations flack, deftly brought together guerrilla theater, muckraking journalism and political satire. But why did Moore have to identify Donahue as "husband, father, dying guy" in his narration, and let the camera linger jarringly on Donahue's tears? (For the record, Humana reversed its decision after Moore's visit and paid for Donahue's transplant.)

Moore is on much more solid ground when the well-being of "the little guy" is an abstract concept he's fighting to uphold by going nose-to-nose with some politician or corporate big-wig as a representative of "The People's Democratic Republic of Television" (as he proclaims in "The Awful Truth"). The opening piece on the April 11 show, "A Cheaper Witch Hunt," was a well-crafted and extremely funny dismantling of Ken Starr's $50 million investigation of the president, and of the House impeachment debate.

For just $560, Moore announces, he hired a troupe of actors to dress as Puritans and join him on a "real witch hunt" for "adulterers, fornicators and sinners" in Washington. As a scary-looking Puritan preacher read from "the book of Starr," young women in white bonnets and black frocks followed Moore through the corridors of the Capitol, pointing their fingers and crying "Sinner!" at the backs of retreating congressmen, falling down in swoons at the mere sight of Newt Gingrich's office door. Ah, there were some satisfying moments here, like the long silence that ensued when Moore, in a casual guy-to-guy tone, asked Republican Bob Barr, one of President Clinton's harshest critics on the House Judiciary Committee, about "the whipped cream incident in 1992, where you licked whipped cream off the breasts of a young woman." On other episodes of "The Awful Truth," Moore accompanies gay men through Southern states that still have sodomy laws on the books, traveling in a Winnebago bearing the legend, "Buggery on Board"; he also takes a choir of former smokers who've lost their voice boxes to cancer a-caroling on the doorsteps of cigarette company executives, and sets up a Times Square sex shop,just to get on Mayor Rudy Giuliani's nerves.

Yes, Moore walks a fine line when it comes to taste and judgment, and sometimes, he falls off with an embarrassing thud. But his boldness (and sense of mischief) is invigorating when you consider the rest of what passes for political humor on TV these days. There's a dull sameness to the "today's top story" approach of snarky boys Dennis Miller (HBO's "Dennis Miller Live"), Jon Stewart (Comedy Central's "The Daily Show"), Craig Kilborn (CBS's "Late, Late Show") and Colin Quinn, who hosts the granddaddy of mock newscasts, the "Weekend Update" segment of "Saturday Night Live." Kilborn's empty mean-spiritedness is especially depressing. On a recent "In the News" segment of his show, he followed a joke about fleeing ethnic Albanians being moved to refugee camps on American military bases in Cuba ("Refugees are looking forward to living in much warmer filth") with this knee-slapper of a transition: "In other ethnic cleansing news, severe flooding in recent days has left much of Bolivia under water."

As for Maher's "Politically Incorrect," his nightly gathering of mismatched celebrities and public figures is not aging well. As the show drags through its second year on ABC (after four years on Comedy Central), Maher seems less and less engaged in the topical "debates" he presides over -- unless the issue is sex. Then he's like human Viagra, awake, up and on the prowl for the racy punchline that'll take him into the next commercial with a bang. "Only 40 percent of college students believe in casual sex. This is so disheartening to me," Maher lamented on a recent show. Maher's idolization of Hugh Hefner and his free-lovin' free-for-all talk show "Playboy After Dark" is well known; as "Politically Incorrect" heads into its dotage, it's only a matter of time before Maher starts hosting the show in silk pajamas with a blond massaging each shoulder. (Actually, Kilborn beat Maher to the punch, recently donning a smoking jacket to conduct a worshipful interview with Hef.)

Maher, Kilborn, Stewart, Quinn and even Miller, who's arguably the most cerebral and best-informed of the bunch (he's like Kate Jackson on "Charlie's Angels"), all seem to confuse contrariness with commentary and equal-opportunity offensiveness with taking a stand. But maybe it's not their fault. Maybe their vague glibness is just a reflection of the vague glibness of politics in the '90s, and the way it's packaged by the mainstream media. Political discourse has devolved into laughably partisan name-calling; "political debate" now means screeching gasbags on MSNBC; issues are portion-controlled sound bites. Nobody wants to risk losing voters, or viewers, by actually saying something. So if Michael Moore has the nerve to walk up to Rep. Asa Hutchinson, one of the Republican members of the House impeachment panel, and ask, "Are you a fornicator, Congressman?" -- I say more power to him.