A Nobody Talks About Somebody

There is no way I can explain why I am no fan of Bill Maher's, the sardonic host of HBO's Real Time. Perhaps I am jealous of his Cornell degree in English, or that he dated Ann Coulter (but that she allegedly dated him and Bob Guccione, Jr., the Penthouse heir-apparent, gives me sudden pause). Perhaps it's because he is popular and I am on the very fringes of pop-culture (please note that my new sidebar link to Technorati shows that, among blogs, mine is ranked 274,404th, proving that I must be a household name in at least one home; sadly, it is not my home). [Addendum, 7 June 06: There is more on Ann Coulter here. And it should be announced that Contratimes is now ranked at 107, 095 out of 43.3 million blogs, or in the top .2 percent of blogs tracked by Technorati. But I am still a nobody.]

Recently Bill Maher was feted, so to speak, in a very gracious article by Katrina Rollins published at Frontpagemag.com. The article's title speaks loudly: "Bill Maher: Patriot." In Ms. Rollins' piece, she lauds Mr. Maher for clearly understanding politically-correct anxieties, particularly as they inhibit security screening techniques such as "profiling;" and that such political-correctness makes all Americans vulnerable to terrorism. According to Rollins, Maher "gets" what the enemy is, its nature; as he also "gets" America's inability to protect itself with the absurd and ineffective security measures employed throughout the country. (Ms. Rollins' piece, I should point out, focuses on Maher's book, When You Ride Alone, You Ride With Bin Laden.)

I am, however, surprised that Mr. Maher would be deemed a "patriot," particularly when he is generally so overtly critical of most, if not all, things conservative. I have no doubt he is a patriot, a lover of his fatherland. But I am surprised that he would win this appellation from Frontpagemag.com. Perhaps there is something I do not know about the conservatism endorsed by Frontpagemag.com.

Here is a quote from Maher's Tuesday interview on MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews (bold added for emphasis):

Look, you know, Chris, you don't have to sell me on Dick Cheney being a bad guy, and just to go back to what you mentioned before, about the connection between Iraq and 9-11 -- to me, that was always a much bigger lie than the one that most people focused on, which is weapons of mass destruction. Weapons of mass destruction, we know they cherry-picked the intelligence, yada-yada-yada. But we also know that the Clintons and a lot of other Democrats, a lot of people on the other side of the aisle always thought that maybe Saddam had weapons.

To me, that was not the most egregious lie. But a connection between Iraq and the people who did that to us? That was the bigger lie, and that‘s the one that Cheney kept pushing. I don't have the quotes before me, but I remember they were very carefully crafted, so the beginning of the sentence started out talking about 9-11 and the terrorists, and the end of the sentence was always, and if we could strike them at the very geographical base where they come from. So he conflated the two (events) and the truth is, that if Saddam Hussein, as bad as he is, was in power right now, he would be a bulwark against terrorism, just the way we put rotten dictators in the communist era on the throne, so that they would be bulwarks against communism. Saddam would never have allowed a rival power base like Zarqawi in his country.

One wonders how Frontpagemag.com now feels about their accolade of Maher, considering that Ms. Rollins' piece pre-dated Maher's Hardball interview. That Maher believes Hussein would be a "bulwark," a bastion of resistance, against terrorism, is sad, suggesting that Hussein would be a force of good, against terrorism, if we had simply let him be. Let us ignore that Maher's beloved Bill Clinton signed into law the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998 calling for regime change, a law inherited by Mr. Bush. Let us ignore that it was Osama bin Laden in his 1998 fatwa against the West who made Iraq a central part of his later attacks on America. Let us ignore that it was Democrat Senator Jay Rockefeller who told us, from the Senate floor, that Hussein was an imminent threat; let us ignore all these things and ask ourselves a question: Does anyone really believe that Cheney is responsible for allegedly misleading us about Iraq?

Yes, of course, Bill Maher does, and one can only conclude that Mr. Maher was not listening,† was not paying attention. That's usually the case with the smart ass in class: he's too busy straining to make a wisecrack for him to listen to what is actually being said. Of course, he's a millionaire wise guy with his own show, along with several fairly popular books. He, I admit, is somebody, a patriot par excellence.

©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.

†Compare Maher's Hardball quote with this from Rollins' article: Maher also recognizes the absurdity of the “American abuse of power” charges: “No country with comparable power ever trod so gently on the rest of the world, something foreigners [and many Americans, he should add] often pretend they don’t know…. Name another nation that could conquer the world, but chose not to.”