OK, now Bill Maher is starting to piss me off.

[Maven]

I know this has been said before in response to his newly minted Iraq-will-spread-freedom stance, but I've reserved judgment about it because I figured he was just throwing a bone to conservatives so they'd keep coming on his show. That is, until, last Friday's show, when he said that President Dumb**** was a "forward thinker" not only with Iraq (which he said will protect us for decades to come :puke:) but with Social Security.

And I've had just about enough of his telling the liberals who applaud in the audience to shut up. He actually apologized to the schmuckbag Lt. Gov. (R - of course) for "putting up with the partisanship." Newsflash Bill--stop trying to attract a conservative audience. Your show is taped in L.A., for ****'s sake. You don't have to give "equal time" to people you know are LYING so badly that the audience LAUGHS at them.

</rant>

[TreasonousBastard]

1. Maher is NOT a liberal...

he's an entertainer with various points of view, some we don't agree with.

And, to make things worse, he's hinted that he's been screwing Coulter.

Anyway, nothing much to do about it, so just decide whether the glass is half full or half empty and enjoy the fun parts of his show.

Or turn it off.

[Mugweed]

4. ARRRG!

I just shoved a sharp pencil into my mind's eye. I had to remove that vision of the troll Maher screwing the transgender Coulter.

[blondeatlast]

22. Not transgender, not both or neither gender--OTHER.

That amalgamation of DNA is in a class by itself.

[Geo55]

6. "he's an entertainer ".....Zackly !

All together now, lockstep, lockstep, lockstep.

Everybody grab your pitchforks...he's not one of "us"

[BlueJazz]

2. Yeah..Right Bill...George did the "Right Thing"....

Our Country is saddled with Incredible, Massive Debt...Our (Good) jobs are flying out the window faster than a caged Eagle...The Stock market is stagnate worse than a 6 day old piss-pot...more and more Americans are looking for shitty jobs...plus our "Health Care system" is the laughing stock of the world....plus most folks are depressed as hell because they know damn well that (under this current Administration) it's just not going to get any better..

Yeah Bill..Rave on..you dumb Ass...

[Cha]

9. I cancelled my hbo..but the things

I've been reading about maher only confirm why I did.

Let him have the conservative audience..they need one more gawdamn liar.

[maveric]

3. I stopped watching this show that I once loved.

Bill is morphing into Dennis Miller and quite frankly, it sickens me to see him siding with and praising bu$h/neocons.
All we have left is Olberman and Jon Stewart on TV.

Bye Bye Bill and HBO!

[Maven]

5. You think so?

I don't think he'll get that bad. I just think he's misguided in his attempt to "widen the net." He better watch it though--the only reason he figures he can tell the libs in the audience to shut up is because their undying support is a given. A dangerous assumption for him to make, especially since his latest attempts to engineer special "conservative" episodes have been dismal failures.

[applegrove]

7. I think that encouraging democracy in the ME has been an old

liberal policy. I think Bill is trying to not let us be danced outside of ourselves by staring too blindly into Cheney's eyes.

We are the ones for democracy in the ME. They are the ones who were for the elites in the ME. Remember all the elite wealth of the Saudis has warped American finances for decades.

Carter tried to get the Shaw to tone down the torture and the like when he was in power. A revolution against the elite happened instead.. and spread Islamism in the ME.

Would have been nice for Israel too if democracy had been encouraged all the way along. People (the vast majority of Muslims are not radical in any way) would be busy living their lives and sharing in good education and the like and the rich elites would not have spend billions encouraging tribalism in their own countries to keep the poor busy. The poor are the suicide bombers. The educated and the majority of the poor are not.

This right wing American policy has created the crisis in the ME. Liberals have always been for encouraging democracy and not topple-ling leftist leaders .. as long as they are democratic. That trust that is built between people when the go to vote in elections and trust that they do not always get exactly what they want in a democracy but that they get what they need.. that trust takes decades to build up.

I am for that. I have always been for that. It is the Bushites & neocons of the past that have been against it. Kirkpatrick was the one that came up with the idea that the ME couldn't govern themselves.. which encouraged Regan and all the neocons to work against democracy.

Bush is not forward looking. He is fixing the neocon & right wing faulty policy of the last 25 years.

As to Iraq? I think the neocons always had "you broke it you fix it in mind". Because they broke Iraq by supporting Saddam in the 1980s. And Saddam ended up supporting suicide bombers with all the oil money.

Bush & his ilk are looking back at their horrid mistakes when they try and rework the ME. They will try hard to impose a myth on the ME that they are the freers and democracy leaders. But nobody will buy it.

There is value in the neocons being forced onto Bill's show. Even if he is a polite host. It shows them to be the fools that they are. They don't have all the answers and now.. they have a record they have to defend. If they don't go on Bills show..nobody asks them the questions or discusses their answers.

[KharmaTrain]

8. Mahrer Just Doesn't Get It

I used to enjoy this show and PI a lot, but always thought Mahrer wasn't the brightest tool in the shed when it came to reality. His support of this regime's latest follies, after being a critic of the invasion (which is he now??) demonstrates how confused and uniformed he is.

Democracy has never been imposed on people, it comes from within. What part of self-determination doesn't he understand? This regime isn't spreading democracy...it's ham-handed policies have done a lot to hurt it and alienate the very masses that democracy needs. Mahrer doesn't see that when he drives Wilshire Blvd.

When he told the audience to shut up, what the hell does he think he's gonna get. Not only did the audience turn on that crank Lt. Gov. from Md, but on Mahrer as well. Kudos to Martin Short. While I think his characters are obnoxious, he spoke loud and proud and like a man who has a lot of intelligence and compassion. The real star was the "black lady" (damn I hate using that term)...a writer and very animated, passionate and turned Steele and Mahrer into putty.

I think Mahrer "got a memo" that his shows were skewing too far left for corporate tastes...especially since HBO is a pay network and they want red subscriptions as much as blue ones, so he got the word to "balance" things out. The show still offers more liberal and progressive opinion than most others, and I can tolerate a host that I can agree with 5 out 10 times rather than the puppets I detest on the other channels.

If Mahrer wants a Conservative audience, why not move it to Lubbock, Texas. But then Mahrer couldn't get the killer weed and the hot babes he does hanging in the Hollywood Hills.

[Cha]

10. And you can't "balance out" unless

you buy into the lies!

Good analysis on bm..we should all send him a ticket to a red enclave if he loves it so much.

[KharmaTrain]

12. Thank You

You only buy into the lies when it buys something for you. Mahrer's gotta remember he's not on ABC anymore...he's on pay cable and most of the people who can afford cable and would watch his show would be "liberal" to left.

There's plenty of "balance" on the other channels. Alan Colmes sure seems to balance that Hannity feller very well. Mahrer should've realized he had a tiger by the tail as there wasn't any real "liberal" red meat show and his was as close as we got to really calling these assholes on their bs. Oh well, guess we'll have to find another "great right hope".

Cheers!

[Selatius]

11. Maher is a right-libertarian. What did you expect?

Sure, he doesn't see the sense in voting "moral values" and sacrificing everything else to that, but on the same token, his economic stance is either center or rightist in nature.

[Hosnon]

13. I don't see why someone has to agree 100% with the rest of

the liberal community! That, to me, has always been the foundation of being a liberal - but perhaps hatred of the Right has bred intolerance. Like Michael Moore said, the spectrum of political ideology CANNOT be represented by TWO ideologies.

Yes, 100 years from now the Middle East may be a better place because of Bush. I think he's a dumbass and was totally against the war but perhaps, like Bill says, his ignorance allowed him to not have to deal with issues that seemed to make a solution impossible.

The rest of his policies are appalling too but perhaps, just perhaps, he fell into a little bit of historical luck.

I won't give him credit but I also won't deny any good that may come.

[Pepperbelly]

14. no good flows from it at all ...

The most lasting effect will be the continued healthy life of radical Islamic fundamentalism in reaction to our invasion of the Muslim world.

Billy Boy is as dumb as a post.

[Hosnon]

16. No good, really? That determination can only be accurately

made in hindsight. Major world events spawn an indefinite number of consequences, most of which we cannot see.

I can't be honest with myself and say I know no good will come from this.

[Pepperbelly]

17. in order for any good whatsoever to accrue ...

past the rudimentary putting right what we broke in the first place, it would have to be the biggest elephant EVER SEEN, sitting unseen right in the middle of the living room, to net out positive against the baby terrorists bred from George's reach-around to the neo-cons.

Maybe you're right but I think unlikely at this point. Certainly, what is observable doesn't come close to netting out as even, much less good.

[Hosnon]

18. So perhaps Bill thinks he sees something (right or wrong)...why

does he get demonized here for not being so close-minded?

[Pepperbelly]

19. Perhaps because some people perceive him as ...

brainwashed rather than open-minded. Or perhaps just plain wrong. He has some history in that regard. I have never cared for him myself, finding his comments inane, his comedy inferior, his delivery subpar and his material occasionally just stupid.

But everyone's a critic, eh?

[Hosnon]

20. Well no problem with thinking he is wrong about Iraq...but

that is different than from what people are doing, and that is extrapolating from his opinion and assuming he has turned and is attached to Bush's ass now.

I like him, I'm relatively young and he began my interest in politics with PI - so yea I'm a bit biased but he does say a lot of dumb things that I don't agree with and I call him on it (like the odd conspiracy theory he has about the fast food industry and the drug industry). But because he can admit he was wrong doesn't make him a wingnut to me, by any stretch of the imagination.

So many libs seem to want a zombie-like army similar to that on the Right.

I prefer his stand up because it is better developed but I like to get my small fix every Friday night.

[Maven]

24. You're taking the intention of my post too far.

No one here wants a "zombie-like" army of liberals. In fact, that's sort of a contradiction in terms. Autocratic efficiency and unilateralism are RW trademarks.

My remark was only to express annoyance with Maher for falling for the "even-handed" imperative and trying to appease the conservatives on his show by insulting liberals and telling everyone to give bald-faced lies a fair shake.

He used to be different--I remember in one of his standup routines he said that we don't have to pretend that some ways of thinking aren't in fact better and not just "different." Now he's over-correcting for his own perceived bias and it's laming up his show.

[Maven]

23. It's not just about the ME. It's also about US.

That's where Maher misses the point and allows the flawed Bush logic (God, what an oxymoron) to stand unopposed.

I agree with you that there may very well be some positive changes that arise in Iraq after however many decades it takes for everything to shake out, despite how badly the invasion was planned and executed. But that's not the whole picture. The damage done was not just in the Middle East, it was to our own process--i.e., the precedent that was set for unilateral, executive-branch war-making based on total untruths. We can't all of a sudden become end-justifies-the-means people because an election was held that installed the same U.S.-friendly leaders BushCo would've hand-picked themselves. Bush/Cheney would love nothing more than to wave all of these "positives" in our face as a distraction--after all, those WMD lies are so yesterday. That's what pisses me off about Maher's position--it's basically just "yes, they did evil things to get us here, but just get over it."

Well, I don't think we should ever just get over it. Frankly, I care more about the democratic process in America than that in Iraq. I'm guessing most Americans would agree.

[lala_rawraw]

15. Just now? He pissed me off a long time ago, now he just

annoys me about the same as a zit does and the two do have a great deal in common, the zit and Maher that is.

[Hamlette]

21. I can't tell you how many times I've given up on Maher....

don't you all remember the 2000 election? He was a jack ass. And before that, I can't remember all the reasons but I've quit Maher as many times as I've quit smoking. Endless.

I only watch him now when people here say its a good show.

Sad part, my 81 year old mom finally broke down and got hbo so she could watch Maher. She's already wondering why.