During the season premier of his HBO show “Real Time,” comedian Bill Maher on Friday sharply criticized Tea Party members for their admiration of the founding fathers.
“Now that they’ve finished reading the Constitution out loud,” Maher said to chuckles from the audience, “the tea baggers must call out that group of elitist liberals whose values are so antithetical to theirs. I’m talking of course about the founding fathers.”
Maher said that “tea baggers” mistakenly believe that the founding fathers were every-day citizens like themselves.
Contrasting the two groups, Maher said, “one is a group of exclusively white men who live in a bygone century, have bad teeth, and think of blacks as three-fifths of a person. And the other are the founding fathers.”
Moving on from implying that Tea Partiers are racist, Maher said, “I think it’s pretty clear that the founding fathers would have hated your guts and what’s more, you would have hated them.”
“They were everything you despise,” said Maher. “They studied science, read Plato, hung out in Paris, and thought the Bible was mostly bullshit.”
Perhaps expectedly, Maher singled out Fox News host Glenn Beck and former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin for pointed punch lines.
“Super-religious guy Glenn Beck likes to play dress-up as Thomas Paine. Thomas Paine, an atheist who said churches were human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind,” Maher said to applause.
Palin, he said, would believe that the six languages that Thomas Jefferson spoke comprise “all of them.”
Maher said that Tea Party members are crude and poorly educated, people who the founding fathers would have wanted to keep far from political influence.
“The one thing they never argued about was that political power must stay in the hands of the smartest people,” said Maher, “and out of the hands of the dumbest loudmouths slowing down the checkout line at Home Depot.”
WATCH: Bill Maher criticizes Tea Party admiration of the founding fathers: