In case you hadn’t noticed, Bill Maher thinks he’s smarter than you are. He wrote today on the Huffington Post:
New Rule: Just because a country elects a smart president doesn’t make it a smart country. A few weeks ago I was asked by Wolf Blitzer if I thought Sarah Palin could get elected president, and I said I hope not, but I wouldn’t put anything past this stupid country. It was amazing – in the minute or so between my calling America stupid and the end of the Cialis commercial, CNN was flooded with furious emails and the twits hit the fan. And you could tell that these people were really mad because they wrote entirely in CAPITAL LETTERS!!! It’s how they get the blood circulating when the Cialis wears off. Worst of all, Bill O’Reilly refuted my contention that this is a stupid country by calling me a pinhead, which A) proves my point, and B) is really funny coming from a doody-face like him.
Wow. Very sophisticated – and such elegant writing. Reminds me a bit of P. G. Wodehouse. Interestingly, I read this “highly intellectual” screed just after reading this report about medical professionals opposing the healthcare bill. I wonder if Maher thinks these doctors – who reject his “smart” president’s medical reforms – are stupid too. I mean Maher should know. He has a BA in English and History from Cornell. I wonder how those intellectual bona fides stack up with Dr. William Parker, the chief medical officer at the Houston hospital where the meeting was held. [Did Maher pass chemistry?-ed. Chemistry? I think he took "rocks" for his science requirement.]
But I digress. Here’s the witty Mr. Maher administering the cognitive coup de grace on healthcare opponents:
Or take the health care debate we’re presently having: members of Congress have recessed now so they can go home and “listen to their constituents.” An urge they should resist because their constituents don’t know anything. At a recent town-hall meeting in South Carolina, a man stood up and told his Congressman to “keep your government hands off my Medicare,” which is kind of like driving cross country to protest highways.
“Kind of like,” indeed. Last I heard the government works for us. Maher as a self-described libertarian [What?!-ed. Yeah, I know.] should know or sympathize with that. What he doesn’t seem to know is the elementary: When you go around and accuse people of being stupid, the chances are others will be accusing you of projection.
[Didn't Maher study logical positivism at Cornell?-ed. I told you he majored in English and History.]
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21 Comments
1. EdSki:I was trying to remember who Bill Maher was, didn’t have some “C” movie about 20 years ago?
Kidding of course, I haven’t wasted any precious time of my life paying attention to for the last 15 years or so. Then Mr. Simon mentions he graduated from Cornell, which happens to be a couple of hours from here (considering the obligatory pub stops on the way) and that goes a long way towards explaining his “dickishness.”
Aug 7, 2009 - 1:17 pm 2. Alan Kellogg:You should hear Orac (Respectful Insolence) on the man. Maher’s attachment to woo and woo flingers is infamous.
My favorite Maher moment occurred on the long gone Politically Incorrect on ABC (American version). He had Russel Means and Vine Deloria Jr. on as special guests, and they were having none of his politically correct crap. At one point I think it was Means who pointed out that before the white man came along American Indians didn’t think of themselves as a people. Both Means and Deloria agreed that insofar as their people didn’t have a name for themselves, that “Indian” would do as well as any.
The composition and tone of that show made a radical shift after that episode.
Aug 7, 2009 - 1:57 pm 3. kaffirgal:A couple of weeks ago I caught a late night rerun of an episode of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” which featured various semi-famous comics, including Maher, as contestants(playing for charities). Needless to say, these people were not rocket scientists. However, of the group I believe Maher and perhaps one other never made it into the Big Chair—they couldn’t get past the easy qualifying round question. Not only didn’t Maher answer any of the qualifying questions more quickly then anyone else, he got them wrong, everytime. It was pathetic–I actually felt sorry for the pompous little weasel.
Aug 7, 2009 - 1:58 pm 4. james:P.J. O’rourke once said “the beauty of our system is not that we can elect the smartest person to office, but any nit wit we want to.” Bill it’s called We the People
Aug 7, 2009 - 3:12 pm 5. Victor Erimita:It’s the era of smug. Maher, Tina Fey, Maureen Dowd, Maureen Down writing about Tina Fey, Tina Brown, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert. These are our sages, our deep thinking philosophers. These are the Cool Kids from middle school. Their coolness consists exclusively of their put downs of others.
Bill Maher is wiser about religion than all the great sages throughout thousands of years. The Buddha, Christ, St. Teresa, Abraham, Ramana Maharshi, Dogen Zenji. Maher knows more about religion than them all. He probably read a book about it at Cornell. And since he can ridicule, he is wiser than everyone he ridicules. I went to college near where Maher went, and I knew a million little wisenheimers from New York City, all of whom knew everything about everything and could put on the air of the know-it-all. They are totally fungible, totally predictable, totally parochial minds wrapped in their shield of smug.
These people are the perfect representatives of a political philosophy on its last decadent legs of degeneracy. The question is how many Americans will follow them down the hole of sociological and spiritual decline and narcissism.
Aug 7, 2009 - 8:42 pm 6. Gaffe Prices:The sad fact is that Joe Biden is turning out to be the smartest member of the entire 0bama administration
Aug 7, 2009 - 9:49 pm 7. Gaffe Prices:I do however, retain fond memories of Maher’s early work, when he was a member of the Monkees.
Aug 7, 2009 - 9:52 pm 8. Are Americans Stupid? | Outside the Beltway | Online Journal of Politics and Foreign Affairs:[...] This rant is so powerful it’s united Dennis the Peasant (aka Kenton E. Kelly, CPA) and Roger L. Simon! [...]
Aug 8, 2009 - 5:18 am 9. Barry Dauphin:Maher’s wonderful piece of self-delusion was his belief that Politically Incorrect got cancelled because of his post 9/11 comments. Of course, those comments probably spiked ratings briefly, all that ABC would care about. In actuality his show got cancelled for the most mundane of reasons– people stopped watching it, because it wasn’t funny (a notable sin for something that billed itself as a comedy show).
Aug 8, 2009 - 5:25 am 10. SP:So those numbers he cited, those are just made up?
Aug 8, 2009 - 9:40 am 11. anitahope:When Bill Maher continues to give “coke” as his corner stone to intelligence, we as adults and parents and grandparent’s need to look at him as a major
Aug 8, 2009 - 9:44 am 12. Alex Bensky:contributor to decay in our society. The fact that he continually calsl our country “stupid” of late, only relates what drugs eventually do to the brain, it has truly deminished his ability to say rational & true facts. # 5 has it right in his last line, we need to curtail negative rantings by those who continue on their path, by educating our younger generations. Those who ridicule usually do so because of their own ignorance and really low self esteem, and these are the same people that use drugs to hide this insecurity, Bill Maher has bragged about his using for years, this say’s it all.
The movie is “Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death,” Ed, and it’s actually pretty funny and good of its kind. Maher does a fine turn as the white hunter who escorts Shannon Tweed into the avocado jungle.
Other than that, I assume we hardly need this screed form Maher to recognize that the left’s support of and sympathy for average Americans doesn’t go as far as considering them intelligent and rational people capable of making their own decisions.
Bullying other people isn’t a bug in leftism, it’s an operating feature.
Aug 8, 2009 - 9:44 am 13. The Ivy league of the extraordinarily un-gentlemanly « Finding Ponies…:[...] with Trackbacks/links to similar comments from Dennis the Peasant and Roger L. Simon, [...]
Aug 8, 2009 - 10:40 pm 14. ray_g:The original Politically Incorrect show on the old Comedy Channel fairly equally ridiculed both right and left, was quite funny, as was Bill Maher, and I watched it religiously (sorry Bill). When it moved to ABC he and the show went down hill fast. I don’t know exactly what happened or why, but success certainly ruined that show and him.
Oh, and “Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death” is pretty funny, it is actually a not bad satire of both Apocalypse Now type movies and feminism. Favorite line “..this isn’t the Disney jungle adventure ride!” Full disclosure — I have the DVD.
Aug 10, 2009 - 9:46 am 15. alanstorm:Wait, I’m still back at square one – who’s this smart president he’s refering to? The current one hasn’t impressed me with his brilliance. I suppose it’s certainly possible that Obama appears smart to him, but in that case, why should we listen to Bill Maher’s opinion?
Aug 10, 2009 - 12:19 pm 16. Steve:“keep your government hands off my Medicare,” which is kind of like driving cross country to protest highways.”
Are you not familiar with the concept of irony?Or, did you leave out the next line, which said in effect, Medicare IS the government.
I think you’re an example of what Maher was referring to…
Aug 10, 2009 - 9:54 pm 17. SCap21:When will we stop even paying attention to celebrities’ comments on real issues? Maher is no more qualified to comment on health care then I am on writing comedy. What I don’t understand is how people still watch him, when he has lumped everyone into this ’stupid country’.
Aug 11, 2009 - 9:17 am 18. router:Doctors opposing healthcare reform=vested interets and conflict of interest…ever heard of those?
What steams me is the hypocrisy and cynicism surrounding the healthcare debate…applying the same conservative standards that would lead these folks to label Obama a “socialist” to George W. Bush (with his profligate spending and corporate welfare) we’d reach the conclusion he was an uber-socialist. Where were these high-minded critics when we needed them? My conclusion is they’re either too dumb to see the hypocrisy, or too cynical to admit that in the last election they LOST so they want to throw a wrnech in the whole thing so they can say “I told you so.” Talk about unpatriotic.
Aug 11, 2009 - 7:08 pm 19. pst314:Is Bill Maher really a libertarian, or is he merely a libertine?
Aug 12, 2009 - 10:50 am 20. Moe Badderman:Roger wrote:
# “In case you hadn’t noticed, Bill Maher
# thinks he’s smarter than you are.”
Indeed I hadn’t noticed, perhaps because he doesn’t. If you find it necessary to call him a “boy reactionary” (whatever the Hell that is) and to cite his degrees in English and History as evidence that he is *not* smart, then you may be shovelling sand against the tide.
Aug 14, 2009 - 3:46 pm 21. limbo:My relative graduated from Cornell too. Then, he bankrupted the family business, destroying his family in the process. I haven’t thought much of Cornell since.
Aug 15, 2009 - 7:21 pm