"Real Time" Update

Bill Maher led off the show with a comedy bit (though I’m sure some won’t find it amusing) called “Dr. Feldman’s House of Abortions,” under the premise that, with two Supreme Court nominees coming from Bush, you’d better get your abortions now before Roe v. Wade is overturned (the jury is still out on that for me, but consider this…Roberts said, “I’m no ideologue.” Yeah, and Dubya once said he was a “compassionate conservative,” also. I didn’t trust Dubya, and I don’t trust Roberts either.).

Maher’s monologue was funny, I thought. He said to the audience, “ I know you’re exhausted from our national day of prayer. Well, just think about John Roberts for a minute. He observed an entire week of silence.” He also congratulated new mother Britney Spears, saying that, “her water broke, and it took FEMA three days to respond.”

Sen. Charles Schumer from New York appeared remotely and had a good time with everything, though admitting frustration that he couldn’t get Roberts to say much also. He said he got to the point where all he could ask Roberts about was his favorite movie, though Schumer said, “I’m glad Roberts didn’t say it was ‘The Manchurian Candidate’.” When the subject of the reconstruction of New Orleans after Katrina came up, Maher chided Schumer and the Senate for only taking an hour to screen Mike Brown’s qualifications, which is a good point, and Schumer said the Senate will screen the next FEMA head more carefully (let’s hope so). Schumer also asked a question which has always been on my mind about Bush and many of the Repugs, and that is this; why do they get into government if they profess to hate it? Maher criticized Bush for suspending prevailing wage laws in the New Orleans construction also (gee, you don’t think that was Cheney’s idea, do you?).

The panelists were Joy Behar from “The View,” former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, and conservative writer P.J. O’Rourke. When asked about the Bush’s speech about the New Orleans reconstruction, Behar said she “didn’t believe a word of it,” and Bush “sounded like an abusive husband…’I’ll change honey, I promise’.” Maher also had fun showing a video clip of Bush apologizing (or as close as he actually comes to that sort of thing) at a press conference, acting like he was trying to explain his way out of being grounded for the weekend. O’Rourke immediately chimed in with, “oh, I guess no disasters ever happened under a Democrat, huh?” and the group immediately responded that we would not have had the same nonsense with FEMA under Clinton as we did with Bush because a good person was actually running it.

At this point, I should back up and say what I think of the panelists. Thankfully, I am too busy working to actually take time to watch “The View” (what exactly is Starr Jones anyway?) so I wasn’t familiar with Behar, but she was brassy and funny, I thought, in a way that was definitely needed. I actually don’t think Willie Brown added a lot to the show, though he is an engaging presence, but he covered a lot of ground along the lines of “black people being victimized by Katrina” which had already been covered.

As for O’Rourke, it was obvious that he was just trying to needle Brown and Behar (mainly Behar), but his remarks were just plain dumb (“FEMA is an idiot construct from Jimmy Carter, I don’t know why you’re blaming Bush for Katrina because I never blamed Clinton for the weather, Democratic programs kept blacks in poverty,” etc.). However, there wasn’t the same degree of open hostility between O’Rourke and everyone else as there was between George Carlin and Jim Glassman the week before (speaking of hostility, appearing on the show next week will be British MP George Galloway and Christopher Hitchens, and this will actually be a rematch of an earlier slugfest). All the same, as I watched O’Rourke (who, in another time, wrote some truly hilarious stuff for National Lampoon), I just wanted to tell him to take his Oxford shirt, suspenders, and blue bow tie and go find his Saab and drive back to the country club for some brie and Bordeaux or something and regale his rich friends with the evil and narrow mindedness of liberals to get some sympathy, because to me, his comments indicated that he was just trying to be erudite and wasn’t ostensibly living in the real world anyway.

Maher, though, did make an interesting point about the town in New Orleans that stopped some of Katrina’s refugees from crossing a bridge into their neighborhood, and Maher asked Willie Brown primarily what liberals would of they saw the same crowd coming towards them, and Brown laughed and said, “they’d run like hell, but probably without guns.”

(note to anonymous commenters: I’m about to throw around some names concerning the next person who appeared on the show. If this offends you, then stop reading, because as far as I’m concerned, what I’m about to say is perfectly appropriate.)

Maher next introduced this pusillanimous, beady-eyed little toad named Dan Cenar via satellite who once served the Bush Administration and now propagandizes for Fox, and Cenar’s appearance, in five minutes, ranked almost as high as Kellyanne Conway’s on the first show of the season for the most obnoxious bit of partisan flatulence that I have had to put up with to date. Gosh, what a cornucopia of crap…he started with asking Maher, “Don’t you feel the president is now vindicated by the Iraqi elections?” and then proceeded to go into a monologue where he, as a Bush sympathizer, yet again, ties Iraq to the “war on terrorism,” and then says that they hope “Iraqi democracy will be a model for the region, since it won’t be an incubator for terrorism,” and says that, “the American people aren’t getting the entire story.” At this point, I was yelling at the T.V. and Maher, trying to get him to call this guy on all of this.

Maher, to his credit, actually did ask two good questions. The first was, “under a Gore administration, how do you think we would have gone about this, assuming 9/11 would have even happened?,” and Cenar said Gore would have gone into Afghanistan (which I agree with), but not Iraq (also correct), and thus, wouldn’t have gone “far enough” (prick). Cenar also said “we’ve ignored dictators for three decades,” though actually, Rummy didn’t ignore Hussein when we were supporting him in the 80s against Iran. Maher also asked, “What happened to the $9 billion in aid to Iraq,” and Cenar said something like it wasn’t completely accounted for because of what was going on with the war, or some such insulting nonsense, though of course Bushco made damn sure that oil ministry was secured when they first went it, so there was no confusion there.

As I watched this loathsome human being communicate this spin that fewer and fewer people believe any more, especially this BS about creating a democracy in Iraq, I thought to myself, “I’d stick a Jackson in this guy’s hand if he ever actually had the guts to say this garbage in front of Cindy Sheehan and a bunch of other moms who’d lost their kids over there, because I’d like to see them rip him apart,” One of Cenar’s statements was that, “twenty five percent of the Iraqi ruling council are women,” a conservative talking point I’d heard before, though I didn’t hear Cenar explain what would happen to women’s rights in Iraq if strict Shia law is implemented throughout the country. When Cenar signed off, Behar just sighed and said, “That was baloney,” which nailed it, I thought.

Right after Behar said that, O’Rourke immediately said, “Is that the stock Democratic answer to everything?”,” and I forget how Behar responded, but I thought, yeah, P.J., it is sometimes. And do you know why? It is because you and your conservative friends don’t actually want to have a serious dialogue on the issues but instead throw Republican-certified talking points at us from every direction, further perpetuating this “liberal vs. conservative” nonsense (and I know I play into that with the title of this site, but it’s strictly tongue in cheek, and I may communicate the whole story about it one day).

And as long as I’m back on O’Rourke, I wanted to mention something else. Why is it that every conservative always has to tell us when they became a conservative and the reason/event/circumstance that made that happen (O’Rourke did that, but I don’t recall exactly what he said). I don’t know about you, but I don’t care (Update: I know Arianna Huffington tells that story of getting put off by Pat Buchanan's speech at the '92 Repug Convention, but that's the only time I remember a liberal stating what originated their point of view). I don’t remember what caused me to be a liberal (I’m sure Molly Ivins had something to do with it), putting aside the fact that, sometimes, those are really dumb “catchall” classifications. To illustrate, let me say this; I think that if a law-abiding citizen already owns a gun, nobody has the right to take it away from them because it is their property. Does that still make me a liberal? Also, I have yet to hear a good explanation for what the Microsoft trial in the ’90s was all about (aww…Microsoft is a ruthless, predatory company that sometimes engages in unfair trade practices. How does that make them different from EVERY OTHER SUCCESSFUL CORPORATION??!!). Does that attitude make me a conservative? See what I mean?

The group discussed the fourth anniversary of September 11th, and Bill Maher (correctly, I think) pointed out that, “nothing changed,” and transitioned to this: “this crowd of prigs that doesn’t get enough sex is always trying to put it to those who do.” Joy Behar wittily chimed in with, “Who do we go after in this country, Ahmed Chalabi or Miss October?” Also, Maher found a photo of John Roberts having dinner with a friend years ago, and they were both relaxed and smiling in a casual setting in front of an entrée served to them by a waiter, and Maher said, “I think we may be about to confirm the first openly gay Supreme Court justice, because real men don’t pose with food.” Maher also discussed soon-to-be mothers in New York who were inviting guests to the delivery of the baby, to which Behar wondered, “what wine is being served with the placenta?” (eeewwww!).

In the “New Rules” segment, Maher mentioned a bald eagle that, sadly, is dying of mercury poisoning (oddly appropriate to me, given the relaxation of rules on mercury by the Repugs), and Maher said the conservatives immediately questioned the eagle’s lifestyle choices. Also, when Maher got into the sudden popularity about devil movies again, such as “The Exorcism of Emily Rose” or something like that, he said, “if you think preventing the gays from marrying is more important than the polar ice caps melting, then the boogeyman is YOU.” Well said.