Somebody can Agree with Your Political Views and Still be an Asshole

This column by Leonard Pitts Jr. is titled Why I Don't Like Bill Maher. I personally don't have any opinion one way or the other on Bill Maher.  I don't get HBO so I only see occasional YouTube links to some of his jokes from Real Time With Bill Maher.  I loved Politically Incorrect when it was on Comedy Central and later got moved to one of the main networks.  But I can picture him being a “smarmy, self-satisfied, condescending and just plain nasty” person, as Leonard Pitts Jr. describes him.

I can be somewhat opinionated politically, as some of my previous posts on this blog would indicate.  But I don't hold other people's opinions against them, or assume somebody must be a F#%$$!&%# just because he/she voted for _____________ instead of ____________.

About thirty-odd years ago I worked for a nonprofit health reform organization.  Great cause and all that, but most of my coworkers and supervisors were assholes.  We could have sat around all day discussing politics and not disagreed on anything.  But I've never seen as much backstabbing, infighting, self-righteousness and just plain meanness as I did during the year I spent with that organization.

In contrast, my previous job had been as a telemarketer with a sleazy organization working for an even sleazier cause.  But most of the supervisors and other telemarketers were nice, likeable people.  Workplace morale was very high.

I live downtown in a town of about 20,000 people, and a lot of local/downtown issues completely transcend any sort of political labels.  I often agree with people — whom I know to be conservative — on certain local issues, and vice versa.

And this brings me to the first person I thought of as I was reading Leonard Pitts' column:  a local progressive/liberal city councilman who turned out to be one of the biggest douchebags I've ever met.  I knew him personally; he seemed pretty likeable and we agreed on practically every local and national political issue.

As he was nearing the end of his single term on the city council (more on that later), he e-mailed everyone he knew to announce that his wife — also liberal/progressive — was running for a local office.  He assumed that everyone he knew would jump on the progressive bandwagon and start marching in lockstep behind his wife's candidacy.  Anyone who didn't — I'm in that category — instantly became The Enemy.  A Traitor to the Progressive Cause!  One of Them!

Anyway, his wife got defeated in her election campaign.  Immediately after that  — before his term was up — the city councilman resigned from office, had several embarrassing (or at least they should have been) public tantrums, and the two of them fled to Oregon.

The disgraced has-been city councilman started a blog about a year ago (sorry, no names or links provided) with the sole purpose of condemning and libeling the town that hadn't appreciated him or his wife.  Needless to say, he hides behind a screen name, but there's no question who it is.  I don't know whether anything on his blog is technically libel or not, but he continuously spews out the kind of shit you'd never say to anyone face-to-face unless you wanted your internal organs rearranged.

Every post at this person's blog has 30, 40, 50, maybe 80 comments — all Anonymous — all congratulating him on yet another brilliant post.  “LOL.”  “Hey, thank you for what you're doing.”  “Another courageous post.  Keep up the good work.”  And on and on and on...

Trouble is, this person has alienated virtually everyone he ever knew in this area.  The only explanation I can think of is, the jillions of comments at his posts are all from him.  “The calls are coming from inside the house!”

Kind of sad — once a charismatic politician on the rise, now reduced to sitting at home spewing on his blog, blubbering back and forth with his imaginary friends.  Guided by the voices in his head.

Anyway, to steal the same quote again from Leonard Pitts Jr., this disgraced former city councilman is “smarmy, self-satisfied, condescending and just plain nasty,” in addition to being more slippery than a road covered with wet leaves.

“Why Aren't Tea Party Numbskulls Complaining About Militarized Police Forces?”

Good question.  This is what Bill Maher was asking a few days ago.

Prohibiting health insurance companies from canceling a patient's coverage after he/she had the nerve to get sick?  Government Tyranny!  Enforcing clean air regulations?  Socialist Power Grab!  New banking regulations which will hopefully prevent another financial meltdown?  Worse than Nazi Germany!!!

The militarization and SWAT-Team-ization of America's police forces?  ***crickets***

Bill Maher said:

“This is the massive expansion of government power that you numbskulls in the Tea Party should be freaking out about.  You’re always screaming about the loss of liberty, and how tyranny is coming. Yeah, it’s coming right through the door with a battering ram, no warrant, and a stun grenade. Or to put it in a way you can understand, I’m scared of the cops, and I’m white.”

Describing the video footage of a CHP officer beating up a woman for trying to walk onto a freeway, he joked:

“Even worse, that’s their training video.”

These police brutality incidents have become such a regular occurrence, we're all numbed.  Another day, another person choked to death for selling untaxed cigarettes; another SWAT team barging into someone's home for a crime that earlier would have just involved a routine police visit.

Shouldn't the Teatards have something to say about this?

Bill Maher Hammers Republicans over Zombie Lies

Last night on Real Time, Bill Maher took on Republican sleazebags (excuse the redundancy) for their non-stop spewing of Zombie Lies (so named because these lies never die).

“Remember ‘fracking doesn’t cause earthquakes?’ Zombie lie, so stop saying it.  ‘Voter fraud’? We studied it. It’s not an actual problem. Stop zombie-lying about it. Their entire economic philosophy — cut taxes for the rich and it trickles down — is a zombie lie. And all these zombie lies are still out there, roaming the countryside, neither alive nor dead — like Dick Cheney. Hungry for brains — like Dick Cheney...”

“They said Obamacare would use death panels. It doesn’t.  They said it was a government takeover, and the insurance industry is making record profits. They said it covered illegals. It doesn’t. They said it was a job killer. It hasn’t been.”

Republicans keep spitting out these zombie lies over and over, even after the lies have been disproved.  Bill Maher compared these zombie lies to President Obama's lie about being able to keep your doctor after you've signed up for Obamacare:

“He stepped up and said, ‘You’re right, my bad,’ because he understood there’s this thing called ‘observable reality.’”

Personally I think the same truth-in-advertising standard — whatever that standard would be — should apply to all political speeches and all advertising, whether it's commercial or political.  When a consumer falls for a deceitful commercial and buys a shoddy product, the company gets sued and suffers a PR disaster.  Millions of voters are conned into voting against their own interests, and nothing happens; nobody is held accountable.

Lewis Black already ranted about this a few years ago, and it rings true now more than ever.

Sarah Silverman: Fetuses are “Goo”

America's fetus-worshipers are having a mass seizure after Sarah Silverman referred to their favorite False Idol as goo.

A few months ago, Sarah Silverman had a YouTube video where she said Jesus Christ visited her and told her “Fertilized eggs aren't people. People are people.”

And last Friday, in an interview with Bill Maher, she gave fetus-humpers one more reason to pull their hair out.  She said she wants to show anti-abortion fanatics “a human face to this side that they only know as 'people who want to murder babies.' And meanwhile, it's goo. It's goo that they’re so worried about. And they're born, and it's 'you're on your own, slut.'”

Zing!

She also said:

“And the truth is, and I don’t like to admit this ... I’ve never had an abortion and I don’t know if I would. But it doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t fight to the death for women to make their own choices for their own human bodies.”

Bill Maher replied with:

“Thank you for being brave enough to admit you’ve never had an abortion.”

And then Fox News fell all over the interview with the headline:  “Sarah Silverman Is Embarrassed to Admit She Never Had an Abortion.”

[sigh]

As the saying goes, the joke isn't funny if you have to explain it.

Republicans Win by Cheating and Lying, but Democrats Enable Them

Bill Maher chastised both parties last night on Real Time.  Republicans can only win by rigging elections, preventing non-white non-property owners from voting, and repeating the same slanderous lies over and over and over.  But Democrats are making themselves a target by getting too carried away with idealism and political correctness.

First, the GOP:

“Gerrymandering the districts, voter ID laws, purging the voter rolls, shortening the voting period, preventing anyone who’s been to prison from voting, eliminating same-day registration, putting up billboards in poor Black neighborhoods that say, ‘Don’t vote, there’s ghosts in there.’  What Republicans have done is tap into the deep, rich vein of cultural resentment that runs through America’s heartland like an artery clogged with hate butter.”

And here's how Democrats enable the Republicans' slippery tactics:

“They mean well, but sometimes when I’m at Whole Foods, I don’t want to sign petitions and give to charity.  I just want to go in and get a $15 lentil sandwich that’ll make me fart for a week. I also, for example, think it’s ridiculous that Facebook has now decided we have to choose in our profile from 56 different genders, including transgender, cis-gender, and of course, Bruce jender.”

Sorry, but I have to agree, to a point.  Last weekend I attended a meeting of our local Democratic Party where they were putting the party platform together.   There wasn't anything I disagreed with, but they spent several hours dreaming up every wonderful thing that we should all be entitled to.  It sounded less like a party platform than a high school student's starry-eyed description of Utopia.  Not that I'd know, but the local Republicans' meeting was probably more like “Freedom!  Personal responsibility!  Limited government!  OK, we're done!”

He also had some tough love for his fellow atheists and their constant lawsuits about displaying crosses on public property:

“For fuck’s sakes, we’re atheists, not vampires.  You can’t handle seeing a cross now and then, you picked the wrong country.”

And he said Democrats are alienating a lot of swing/independent voters by “nagging about what we can name our football teams or how big our soda can be.” 

He summed up with:

“One of the Republicans’ strongest voting blocs is low-income whites who didn’t go to college. These are people who desperately need a minimum wage hike. Need unions. They need healthcare. But not if it’s got Obama’s name on it.  Remember, for every liberal with a cause who makes you go ‘Oh, just shoot me,’ there’s a conservative with a gun who will.”

Bill Maher to Democrats: “'Stand Your Ground' on Obamacare”

Democratic strategists have been saying this for the last few months:  Don't hide under your desk and pretend the Obamacare rollout wasn't a disaster and that there aren't millions of Americans who are pissed off and worried about their future health care.  The Affordable Care Act — i.e. Obamacare — will be the dominant political issue between now and November.  Whichever party does a better job of getting out in front of this issue and framing the debate will be the party that prevails in November.  (And no, it's not a done deal that the Senate will go Republican.)

Bill Maher has this advice for Democrats:

“Stand your ground.  When a Tea Partier says, ‘Obamacare is a government takeover,’ say, ‘I wish — because that would mean Medicare for all.’”

He pointed out that most Americans are in favor of expanding Medicare and Medicaid, and agree that insurance companies should NOT be allowed to turn people down because of a pre-existing condition; and that Democrats haven't capitalized on this:

“No wonder the Republicans have such an easy time selling their argument about Obamacare — which is basically, ‘Hey, we tried it, it was a big failure.’  How about volleying that one back with, ‘What? We’re still signing people up for Christ’s sakes, how can we even know if it’s a failure? What we do know is that Sarah Palin and Rick Santorum think it will kill their children. No, you guys are thinking of assault rifles.’”

He also had some good things to say about Jimmy Carter, whose “failed presidency” is still talked about by the Far Right:

“Failed by whose standards?  We may not have had a great economy in the ’70s, but I’ll tell you something else we didn’t have — a war.  Obama’s supposed to be an environmentalist — he should be inspired by the president who put solar panels on the White House roof, not the president who came after him and tore them down because he thought the Sun was interfering with Nancy’s astrology.”

Art Pope: the Biggest Douchebag You’ve Never Heard Of

Art Pope is sort of a one-man Koch Brothers.  He’s been using his inherited wealth to single-handedly take North Carolina from the 21st century back to the early 1800s.

Here’s some more information on Art Pope.

I’ve done several posts about North Carolina’s lurch to the Far Right, but I hadn’t realized the whole process was being financed by one person.  As Bill Maher said:  “North Carolina is going apeshit in a way no state ever has.  Take every crazy angry idea your drunk right-wing uncle mumbles at Thanksgiving, turn it into a law, and that’s North Carolina today.”

In an interview with the Raleigh News & Observer, Bill Maher talked about North Carolina’s backward mutation as an example of the devastating impact of Citizens United:

“It certainly had a huge impact the last election when you saw the kind of money spent — just by me!  But Obama won, so the people who were supposed to steal the election didn’t because the Democrats scared up enough of their own PAC money to scrape by.  But not at the local level, like in North Carolina. Look at Art Pope, one man was basically able to take over the entire state. And the sad thing is it wasn’t even all that expensive. It should have cost more than it did.”

Maher’s description of Art Pope:

“He’s super-rich, super-anti-union, anti-tax, anti-big government, thinks government should have absolutely no role in helping the less fortunate, who should earn their money the same way he did — by inheriting it from their dad.”

North Carolina’s legislature has been controlled by Republicans for awhile, but until this year the state had a Democratic governor who kept vetoing the nonstop tide of Tea Klux Klan legislation.  Now that North Carolina has a Republican governor — Patrick McCrory — well, as Bill Maher said, the state “is going apeshit in a way no state ever has.”

Are Republicans Guilty of Treason?

On “Real Time with Bill Maher” this past Friday, Bill Maher referred to the House GOP’s thirty-seventh vote to repeal Obamacare:

“And what about trying to repeal it for the 37th time?  Is that a wise use of our time and resources? At some point, obstruction becomes, um, I dunno, treason.”

On the same program one of the guests — Michael Moore — described the GOP as “a squealing dinosaur whose time has come.”

Let’s hope.

Bill Maher also talked about how the implementation of Obamacare is causing some of the top health insurance companies to lower their rates:

“They did a test and they put, you know, what insurance would cost if you were a 40-year-old, non-smoker and instantly, the two highest priced insurers went down.  This is the heart of Obama.  This is the heart of capitalism. I’m wondering why the people who love the free market so much are not for this.”

Maher also referred to the GOP’s blocking of almost everybody nominated by Obama.  The head of the EPA, a chief circuit court judge and dozens of other nominees.  And best of all — if you’re a rightwing oligarch or one of their useful idiots — bringing the Labor Relations Board to a screeching halt.  Right now the Labor Relations Board doesn’t have enough members to even have quorum.  And Republicans are determined to block any and all nominees to serve on the board, just so they can keep the Labor Relations Board dysfunctional and unable to enforce the laws that protect millions of working people.

Bill Maher said:  “At some point it becomes more about hating Obama than loving our country.”

Michael Moore added:

“No, they hate America.  I think that’s really what it is.  Conservatives and right-wingers, as much as they profess to love this country, they hate it. They hate the government, they hate the people.”

Unfortunately I think Bill Maher and Michael Moore are both right.

The World According to CPAC

At this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) gathering, we learned five things the Liberal Media will never tell us.  Did you know:

The Catholic Church has been infiltrated by — infested with — Marxists, homosexuals and New Age devil worshipers.  This dire warning was brought to us by Cliff Kincaid, founder of America’s Survival.  Just one chilling example:  Catholic bishops “made a deal with the devil to get Obamacare passed.”

Gay marriage is even more hazardous to America than you ever suspected.  The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Prosperity warned CPAC attendees of the “10 Reasons Why Homosexual ‘Marriage’ is Harmful and Must be Opposed.”  Just ten???  Now hold on — the Ruth Institute has a brochure stating the “77 Non-Religious Reasons to Support Man/Woman Marriage.”

Thanks to the American Jobs Alliance, we now know that the United Nations is planning to impose Sharia Law on America, and “a quarter of the entire U.S. land area will fall under UN court jurisdiction.”

ProEnglish — gee, I wonder what their mission could be — is warning us that Puerto Rico’s statehood referendum was rigged.  It’s part of a diabolical plot to dilute English — the cornerstone of American culture — with that swarthy Hispanic language.

And finally:  George Soros controls EVERYTHING!!!  Oh come on, we already knew that.

Bill Maher talked about the fact that such a tiny number of rightwing wackjobs can wield such a disproportional amount of power over the Republican Party and the national dialogue.  He called it “shit-kicker inflation, which is the problem of all things conservative being portrayed as way bigger than they really are.”

For example — Bill Donahoe’s Catholic League.  “It’s just one guy with a fax machine.”

Same with One Million Moms.  I don’t know how many “moms” this group has, but they have fewer than 3,000 followers on Twitter.

The linked article describes CPAC as “where the looniest and most far-flung reaches of the far right are given a microphone and a chance to court the next generation of Republicans.”

Or as Bill Maher put it:  “They’re just so loud, they haven’t noticed America has moved on without them.”

Being Governed by Republicans is “Like Rooming with a Meth Addict”

Bill Maher nails the GOP. Again.

Imagine having a roommate who’s a meth addict. The rent is overdue, but your roommate, “instead of rent, is worrying that police have bugged the air conditioner.”

And so it is with the GOP. They got themselves elected by shrieking “Jobs!” — but now that they’re in power, all we’re getting is a bunch of “useless distractions that make up the Republican Party agenda.”

They haven’t created a single new job, but their biggest worries are “public unions, Sharia law, anchor babies, the Ground Zero mosque, NPR, and the war on Christmas.”

He also ridiculed the Republican obsession with ACORN: “Republicans are obsessed with people cooking up wild, nonexistent schemes to vote, ignoring one important truth: this is America. No one wants to vote. What's next, jury duty fraud?"

And about the GOP fixation on the New Black Panthers: “Every black person scares you.”

The real issues that Bill Maher wants politicians to worry about: “Climate change, loose nukes, debt, infrastructure, the wealth gap, our addiction to oil from weird, distant places run by monsters that want us dead, like Alaska.”

In other news: James O’Keefe — Chickenhawk.

As everyone knows, a chickenhawk is somebody who constantly clamors and screams for war, but doesn’t want to take part in the fighting him/herself.

James O’Keefe has achieved his “fame” — if you’ve even heard of him — by secretly videotaping people, editing the tapes and then publicizing them. Two days ago, James O’Keefe gave a speech to about a hundred fellow teabaggers. He insisted that nobody be allowed to film or record his speech.

Chickenhawk Bitch.

Advice to Democrats from Michael Moore and Bill Maher

Michael Moore said:

“Democrats are in for an ass-whipping of biblical proportions in November if they don't get off the dime and do the job they were sent there to do. Don't they see that?

“When the Republicans come into town, they get in the hummer, and they drive down Pennsylvania Avenue and mow down anybody in sight. They walk into Congress with both guns blazing, and they say 'we were sent here to do a job,' and then they do the job.

“Democrats come in, and go, 'Oh, hi, hi. I guess we don't need universal health care for everybody. We can, we can, no we can compromise. It's okay.' They used to at least sing 'Kumbaya.' Now they go in like frightened animals. I don't understand it.

“Americans don't really see themselves as Democrats or Republicans. They want somebody in there who believes in something, who's going to go for it.”

In case that wasn’t blunt enough, Bill Maher reprimanded Obama with:

“I think the biggest mistake that he has made in his first year was to put bipartisanship ahead of fixing the country.”

Obama should have “come in with all the energy from the election and saying, you know what, we're in a crisis mode, I won this election by a sizable mandate — here's what we're going to do; if you don't like it, Republicans, you can suck on it.”

If only…

But it’s never too late. Or is it???

This last quote isn’t relevant to this particular subject, but last summer Bill Maher said: “We don't have a left and a right party anymore because Democrats have moved to the right, and the right has moved into a mental hospital.”