DC Trawler

Leave Bill Maher alone, says Bill Maher

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The nice thing about being a staunch liberal who calls women “c***ts” and “tw***s” for disagreeing with you is that you’ll always have a place at the New York Times.

When the Limbaugh/Fluke thing started backfiring in Bill Maher’s direction, at first he tried to make a distinction between his misogyny and Limbaugh’s. That didn’t really work because Maher’s not smart enough to make the case, so now he’s trying to convincingly fake bipartisanship. In an NYT editorial yesterday, after making some lame jokes about Robert De Niro and Newt Gingrich, Maher tried to glib his way out of the mess he’s in:

When did we get it in our heads that we have the right to never hear anything we don’t like? In the last year, we’ve been shocked and appalled by the unbelievable insensitivity of Nike shoes, the Fighting Sioux, Hank Williams Jr., Cee Lo Green, Ashton Kutcher, Tracy Morgan, Don Imus, Kirk Cameron, Gilbert Gottfried, the Super Bowl halftime show and the ESPN guys who used the wrong cliché for Jeremy Lin after everyone else used all the others. Who can keep up? …

I have a better idea. Let’s have an amnesty — from the left and the right — on every made-up, fake, totally insincere, playacted hurt, insult, slight and affront. Let’s make this Sunday the National Day of No Outrage. One day a year when you will not find some tiny thing someone did or said and pretend you can barely continue functioning until they apologize.

If that doesn’t work, what about this: If you see or hear something you don’t like in the media, just go on with your life. Turn the page or flip the dial or pick up your roll of quarters and leave the booth.

Good idea, Bill. In fact, it’s such a good idea that America has been doing it for years. Just look at cable news ratings. Look at the circulation numbers for the major daily papers and weekly newsmagazines. And more to the point, look at HBO’s subscriber numbers. More and more people are going on with their lives, and those lives don’t include paying for the privilege of being insulted and lied to.

Maher has given up trying to claim he’s the victim of a false equivalence — funny how an equivalence is always false when it’s expected of you — and now he’s trying to claim the outrage against him is false. Who could possibly have any problem with a guy calling a mother of 5 a “c**t” because he disagrees with her politically? How could anyone genuinely find him repulsive? They must be playacting. Ah, the keen analytical mind of Bill Maher.

If you want to assign blame for your current troubles, Mr. Maher, look to the Obama White House and their co-conspirators at Media Matters. They’re the ones who opened up this can of worms. We’re just making sure everyone gets their fair share of wrigglers.

Eat up, Bill. We don’t really care if it’s cannibalism.