Monday, May 7, 2012

Bill Maher Proves He Is a Pandering Coward

We all know Bill Maher contributed a cool million to the President's SuperPAC. He never lets us forget it, although it hasn't stopped him snarking occasionally and gratuitously at the President, and it certainly hasn't prompted him to start treating the President with respect in according him his title when referencing him.

On Friday's show, which was really pretty interesting, he sat down with talk show host Arsenio Hall for his first interview, at the end of which, he opined that the President simply must win a second term, because without re-election as a worry, he could pursue a more liberal agenda than the first four years. (Well, he could if he gets the Congress which is amenable to that proposal).

Here's the end of the interview, where Maher makes an astounding remark:-



Once again, Maher harps back to the President's race:-

If the first black president only has one term, America reads that as a failure. This is what the right wing hopes and prays for more than anything else. America looks at this one-term president and goes, ‘We tried a black guy, but it just didn’t work.

This would make perfect sense if Maher didn't take advantage of the public's (especially his audience's) collective loss of short-term memory. No one fundit has done more to undermine the President's performance and his agenda during the past four years than Bill Maher, who - in 2009 - touted proudly that he was the first person in the Leftwing media to criticize the President openly. He has also referred to him in racist terms. This was a singularly puke-inducing moment, and I'm disappointed that Arsenio Hall was too well-mannered to call Bill on his bullshit and remind him of the damage he'd done.

And that brings me to another bit of pandering, as well as a show of ignorance.

Later in the panel, the subject of political contributions was broached again. It's broached every week, in order to give Bill the opportunity of reminding people about the heroic contribution he made to the President's campaign. He's reinforcing this in order to get those of us who know what he did for the past few years to STFU, but also it's a guilt appeasement trip for his Catholic conscience, as well as a craven play for attention in hopes that someone at the White House might book the President for a satellite interview with Bill - I mean, the President's visited Jimmy Kimmel's show, after all.

When Ed Shultz attempted to explain why the President was forced to go the SuperPAC way, Bill remarked that he'd contributed and wanted to know why Schultz had not ... which was stupid.



If this were Bill's attempt to look like a rose against Schultz's stinkweed, he scored an epic fail. Of course, Schultz cannot contribute to a political campaign. He's part of a national network which, however much its shows are suppose to lean openly Left or Right, the hosts of those programs cannot openly contribute to the party or candidates of their choice - as Keith Olbermann and Joe Scarborough found out.

And at the beginning of the show, although Bill rounded on the Republicans for whingeing about the President using the killling of bin Laden as a campaign tool, he failed to single out the biggest mouth of the week who described the President's "politicization" of the bin Laden killing as "despicable:" Bill's sugarmommy, Arianna Huffington.

If you're going to play the game, Bill, learn the rules.

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