Seriously, Bill Maher babbles incessantly about politics and religion as if he knows the so-called “truth”. The man simply and fraudelantly makes up stuff and passes it off as fact. For him to say on Larry King the other night, that Obama is genuine and a “man of the people” is laughable. Regardless of what I think of the Obama, the man is an elitist, and has never spent a day in his life facing the hardships that most Americans have endured. He has always had the best schools, the best surroundings and the best opportunities. Obama is many things, but he is NOT a man of the people. Having said this, Bill Maher cannot seriously think he is an informed person. But regardless the problem I have with Bill Maher is that he passes as fact… his personal opinions. And in doing so, he poisons the ill-informed masses who cannot discern reality and truth for themselves. The political elitist pin-heads from Hollyweird are becoming more dangerous than Bin Laden. They are poisoning our children with bogus facts and complete nonsense. They just say things… without regard to facts or reality. It is just appalling and sickening. While I believe in everyone’s right to free speech, I don’t agree that people can simply say anything and not be challenged. These people are dangerous because they know not what they are talking. I pray that somehow some way the lies and egregious distortions can be challenged and shown for what they are: personal opinions completely devoid of fact. And Bill Maher would be my first target to challenge his so-called command of facts on politics and religion. The man is a “train wreck full of absurdity”.
Chuck Tyson's Texas Tea 
I suggest you add something about John Stewart, I’ve had to fight 6 years to keep that man from becoming a fact-sayer to my girlfriend, and she’s a magna cum laude graduate in graduate school. They all tend to think Seth McFarlane, Bill Maher, and John Stewart (nevermind Michael Moore) are somehow not just guys saying funny things they find amusing–they think they are telling truths. What a war I’ve fought to keep her from sinking into that realm.
John Stewart is another one who says things without regard to facts. And I understand these people are entertainers, but the problem is that too many people are either incapable or unwilling to separate “fact from fiction”. Our educational systems have pumped out millions of uneducated illiterates. Couple that with colleges who are pumping out seemingly brilliant people who cannot even debate an issue without resorting to yelling or cheap shots… and there is no longer serious public discourse on issues. You can’t have discourse without facts… opinions are nice, but we are dealing with cataclysmic issues in this country and the likes of Jon Stewart and Bill Maher are shaping the future. Well… I fight the good fight whenever the opportunity presents, but I am growing weary. I guess the good news is that my 2 sons can see bias when they see it. If I pass nothing else along to them, I have passed the ability to listen with a discerning ear for bias passed on as facts.
I will give Maher this: he comes out of his comedian world long enough to sometimes make a salient point or rational observation, but the end point is that if he was willing to think he might be wrong, like he says, he surely isn’t showing it. He may ‘doubt things’ and that may be good to ‘doubt things’ but I’ve never ever seen him doubt himself. Not a star in the sky ever shows these types thinking they don’t have it all figured out, that it is funny how stupid people who aren’t so smart as them are, and the endgame on that is that kids believe it (I did once) so much that they think these people have the light and the way. No, idiots, they are just fairly smart people who made a career out of mocking things. They never made anything themselves.
Indeed, I often have coined a phrase I believe I came up with myself “the definition of a good person is someone who is willing to admit his is fallible and wants to do better”. We are all capable of error. There comes a time, always, when you must rely on yourself and what you know. At any point now, the world of our less demonizing and innocent people, from our wives to our sons, is always filled with conjecture of things that just are not true. Read my angry blogs I just put up. I am not one to believe anybody including myself without a substantial amount of looking at things. Nevertheless, I’ll admit I’m wrong unless it is about a gun pointed at my head. That one I will always say is a gun pointed at my head. Cheers.
Bill gets to the heart of the matter quickly and usually finds a way to make us all laugh about it. His political humor is all about finding the hypocrit in us all. It’s in there, but a few of us deny it like we are a Diety. Some of us are more of a DDD than a God. That’s right, that’s Carlos Mencia not Bill Maher. It’s funny because I know I’m a hypocrit. I love Sarah Palin because she thinks she’s a Diety. I hate Rush Limbaugh because he knows he is incapable of failure. Bill Maher has failed so many times it’s hard to find him on television anywhere but Larry King Live. What will happen if Larry King goes off the air? Where are the good comics like Mencia, Chappelle, and Lamponelli? Is telling the truth the fastest way to get kicked off the air?
I can accept that Maher might be challenging us to think and look within our own personal biases for hypocrisy, but my problem is that Maher challenges are based on falsehoods and fantasy rather than truth and wisdom. Once I decide someone is uninformed, I tend to disregard much of what comes thereafter. From my vantage point Mencia and the others you mention do a far better job of making us “look in the mirror” at ourselves and see the hypocrisy. Maher just says dumb stuff and then when he runs out of dumb stuff, he resorts to name calling and insults. Mencia uses humor in an intelligent way to help us see our weaknesses. As to Limbaugh, I have to give him credit for opening my eyes and giving me the ability to discern media bias from reporting. I can spot bias from 20,000 feet. I hear and see so-called “reporters” do segments on various topics and if one listens closely, you realize the story is largely twisting of facts to support their opinion. Regrettably, the overwhelming majority of American’s cannot discern fact from opinion…
You get passionate about this stuff, like I do, and misspell things. Who cares about a misspelling. I am sure you know how to spell. I watched religulous all the way through and again at a few points Maher acted somewhat good, but he is too much of a smart ass to not think he didnt know exactly what he was setting up. Sure, I question religion. No, I don’t question faith and hope. Sure I question exactly what one is hoping for. If it is hope for someone else to do the dirty work, or hope for Robin Hood to come in the guise of a President of the USA, or if it is hope for JEEESUS to save your ass (whomever figuratively) from the evil crap you have done, so that you might fry some more chickens, and such, well I’ve been to a gospel church several times. All they do there is rant and rave and eat fried chicken in huge amounts afterwards. I enjoyed that chicken too. It does not a church make. Making fun of religion is as easy as knocking down block towers of children. Maher is smart enough to do better, but he is also smart enough to know he is doing just fine where he is. You want someone who would screw themselves over for a good reason, ask Glenn Beck.
The difference between say Rush Limbaugh and Bill Maher is not much one of intelligence (I believe they are on about the same level of raw intelligence) but one of honesty. They are both arrogant and smart-assed, and both will stop to be kind at certain points when they realize someone actually prey to being helped out by them, they both will show humanity towards other people. The difference is, Rush Limbaugh says he is just talking about things and who knows if he is right, Bill Maher sincerely believes he knows better. Rush, if you listen to him, routinely says everything he talks about is his opinion. He encourages people to find out themselves and points them towards real resources. Maher does not, he acts like he is a resource in and of himself. Other than that, they are very similar things.
let’s put it this way: I watched Religulous with an open mind, my girlfriend did not live up to her watching ‘An American Carol’. Apparently it would be too harsh for her to handle. Well I’m about tired of watching everything bad about what I think and having ‘progressive’ and ‘open-minded’ liberal people refuse to listen to anything whatsoever I think. I had one once refuse a copy of the Jefferson Bible because it said Bible in it, and when I asked them why they would refuse a hard fought out copy of Thomas Jefferson’s version of the bible, they asked me who the hell Thomas Jefferson was. Another grad student. “Oh, the guy who signed the declaration of the incompetence of being a slave owner.” dear god. dear bloody god. No, Thomas Jefferson. Thankfully I did not ask them about John Locke. That might have been “oh that idiot who thought all men were created equal, well that evil bastard forgot about us women.”
yeah, that is how they think.
My thoughts and observations parallel your’s in many ways my friend. My concern is that slowly, but surely we as a society are losing touch with our past and the greatness of our heritage. Sure we have made mistakes along the way, but at least we had noble intentions… and in the end, we resolved many of the injustices due to the inintended consequences of our intentions. Further, there is no other country on this Earth that has done more to liberate people from the bonds of tyrants than the Unithed States, yet… I hear people talk as if America is a “bad country”… a country that has forced our way of life on others. If American is so bad, why is it… that given the opportunity almost every person on this planet would uproot their families and move here? Seriously!!! In any event, I just am appalled at the lack of historical perspective that so-called educated people possess… from my vantage point, most American’s historical perspectives begin the day they are born… Anything prior to their birth is irrelevant. It’s sad, but we our losing our identity and our culture in part because we have forgotten our past. My ancestors came here in 1790 from Ireland… I was born here and i have lived almost 50 years, and in my 50 years I cannot say I have felt more out of touch with most people I interact with than today… it seems most American’s have no perspective or understanding of basics of economics, government… you name it. I hope I am just an anomaly in my observations, but I fear I am not.
Indeed. Trust me though, even in our institutions of higher learning, I have regrettable found history to be the purvey of whatever the teacher wants it to be. I had a drag down honest disusssion with two of my history professors before i got one of them to tell me the truth. That truth was “while students may think they pay us, we are paid by the government to do research, not teach. teaching is not what we do.”
oops. I just had to piss him off enough to say that. mark that one down, from a history professor to say that teaching is not what he is paid to do. The arrogance is unparalleled, but they all think that way in the end. They think the money they get is from the government, literally. Not out of my father’s wallet or my tax money. It’s ‘from the government’ to research. I point again to the university of virginia, where Thomas Jefferson said the greatest blessing of any man was to be able to share his knowledge. Bastards that they are, they think they can take money from my wallet and have no responsibility to be the person I hired to help me. They generally, with few exceptions, even realize that the general population considers them to be teachers, and if the general population thought them to be researchers sometimes bothered by other people’s children, that they would no longer be employed.
I must add although history is a main focal point of my interests and learning, I have to this point of my life blackballed the two main history professors at my university, so much so that I can’t really take a history class. You know how I did it? I told them they were wrong, and prooved it. What someone’s personal opinion is in a unveristy is so seldom relevant unless you are the guy with the paper, then apparently you become twisted up into thinking you know things you don’t, and your job is to contradict facts so that you can become the guy who contradicted things we supposedly already knew. Like constantly pointing out where America screwed up. They can easily say how the phillipines were a marked bad point in American history, but they just forget the heck out of ever mentioning anything good. If I point that out, they hatchet my ass. I wrote a paper on hiroshima and nagisaki and the part where I said the estimates Truman reviewed said more people by far would die by a mainland invasion so he reluctantly ordered the bombs dropped, well that part was red penned all over with the words “Truman was a facist.” That’s ironic. Good day.
On a positive note, their seems to be a coming backlash on this. I suspect with Obama, they will push too far and too hard and the rather normally decent and tolerant people will not put up with it. As a nation, we are generally tolerant people and generally mind our own business. They might just push too far into ours, that’s always historically when the American people get pissed off. Every single time, when they push too hard, their will be a backlash. Our heritage has always been one of being left alone and coming together to mind our mutual matters. It has never been one of sticking our nose into other people’s business if it isn’t affecting us. If they choose to use the power given to them to line their pockets with billions of dollars, so that our money is worth less but they have endless amounts, then they will find a rather irritated bunch of nice people. Historically, they are headed (the democrats) for a rather sad ending in 2 years if they keep up at what they are doing and their president (excuse me, my president, although I didn not vote for him) keeps being so arrogant as to constantly be caught mocking people.
I am irritated at Mencia as well, given that he tends to perform acts that cover all things one way or another, that is okay, he isn’t too unfair. He is highly regarded as having done something rather smarmy though, and as a writer I consider anyone who steals another person’s artwork to display at their own highly suspect. He does tend to be fair in his equal mocking of everyone, so he’s good enough and I know he’s not an intellectual, but at some point I hated Maher and at some point I realized he was just a jackass.
all these people are just comedians. Believing them is no more insane than thinking Harrison Ford is going to pop out of the woods with a fedora and a whip and save your ass from drowning.
i have ranted on your blog too long, it is refreshing to hears I am not alone…being 29 years old, I am generally the object of derision by my peers for my views. Arrogant, selfish, warmonger, whatnot. How dare I vote against Obama (odd thing is most of them didn’t vote at all, they were too busy to think about that with whatever) How dare I disagree. The frustration comes when I point to my awards for ‘being generally a genius’ in one form or another. That doesn’t help either. I do tend to say “I am right and you are wrong. This open mindedness you have is silly if you can’t think that might be true.” America is the one last place the world might ever see where we aren’t based on a race of people, as Reagan said “the shining city on the hill”. The absurd desire to tear it apart by its own citizenry is frightening, frankly. The fact I have to basically psychologically slap my girlfriend out of her weird desire to run off to visit Lithuania by herself without me or any other type of person who can protect her from the fact she would be target #1 is also dissapointing. Everyone hates us to some degree, about the only real place you can go and not worry is rural England or perhaps New Zealand. Even then, if you get marked as an American, they will shadow you. And who is it exactly that is so unkind to foreigners? Apparently us. They know not what they say.