Bill Maher: Over the edge!
: Bill Maher has on Ward Churchill tonight and it is an unbelievable performance. Unbelievable terrible, insensitive, numbnutty, offensive, wrong-headed, anti-American, rude….
Maher sits Churchill down and says, “Some things we have in common, some things we don’t… I know to a degree what you’ve been going through, some things taken out of context… You’ve been Dixie-Chicked….” He says they disagree but: “I think you deserve to be heard.”
Maher then leads the apparently inarticulate Churchill down his path. He asks Churchill to talk about “the blood that America has on its hands.” Churchill can’t get a paragraph out. Maher keeps leading: “Just tell the folks what you think…” Churchill mutters how the attack on the World Trade Center was not senseless because “anything that was that well-planned wasn’t senseless.” Anything this poorly expressed in senseless. Even Maher can’t take it…. because Churchill isn’t making the point Maher wants him to make: the blood-on-our-hands point.
So Maher says, “Let me do it for you… There was the bringing over of the slaves… Then we’re talking about the Indians in America, your people, you’re part Indian…” Churchill nods. And they add up numbers. Maher continues: “So we have a lot of blood on our hands… So then you talk about the first Iraq war. How many died there?…. And then the sanctions… I know we don’t want to hear this but the country of America has blood on its hands…. Not to mention in Germany and Japan when we were close to winning the war we obliterated Dresden….”
Good God, man! But it continues.
Churchill says that, “First of all the government doesn’t kill anybody.” He says that Americans do it.
Maher asks him whether fighting Hitler was wrong. Churchill says, “I wouldn’t say that opposing Hitler was wrong but some of the ways he was opposed were wrong.”
Maher: “Even if America committed these crimes I don’t understand what you’re saying. I don’t understand how the average American can be as guilty as you say they should be.”
Churchill babbles about the “technological elite” in the buildings. He says that janitors weren’t guilty.
Maher: “You said they were not innocent.”
Churchill says that if you were “performing a technical function… you were not innocent. You were performing a function” like Eichmann.
And the torture continues. Maher brings out a 9/11 family member, Michael Faughnan, who lost his brother at Cantor Fitzgerald. He says the brother disagrees with Churchill but supports him.
We couldn’t find anyone who doesn’t support Churchill, Bill? We had to exploit a family member?
Now Maher wimpily questions Churchill but still attacks America: “I don’t understand how you can compare the passive aggressive… We’re lazy and arrogant and greedy and myopic, and all those things cause some misery around the world. But Eichmann was proactively killing people.”
When did genocide become the subject of MBAspeak: “technical function,” “proactive”…. It’s murder, men!
Churchill says that by displacing profits and “moving labor to sweatshops in Maylasia you’re doing things comparable to what Eichmann did.”
The brother says that Eichmann was evil and his brother was not.
Maher, doing his very bad imitation of an afternoon talk-show host, asks the brother, “Do you think he owes you an apology?” The brother does. Churchill grunts and offers none and Maher doesn’t even push him or wait a second. He lets him off the hook.
Instead, Churchill says that, OK, this poor man’s brother wasn’t guilty but then he says, “Would you make the counter argument that there was no one who fit the description… that there was immaculate genocide?”
Immaculate genocide? What the F does that mean?
Maher can’t leave bad enough alone. He says that “I’ve gotten in trouble for many things” and one of them was proposing that at the World Trade Center site, we should build a “Why They Hate Us Pavilion.”
He has the nerve, the incredible insensitivity to ask the brother whether he agrees. “I don’t think that’s an appropriate place,” the man says, all too politely.
Maher continues: “Don’t you think there are reasons why they hate us and they’re valid….?”
The audience applauds at this.
Don’t you think there are reasons why people hate you, Bill? And you, Ward?
: I will bet that another Maher storm and Churchill storm will follow.
I’m not a Maher hater. I’ve quoted his good lines often enough. I’ve also been agog and aghast at his ludicrous lines. But this is over the edge.
: It’s almost as if Maher is making an argument of academic freedom when he says that Churchill deserves to be heard.
Well, he was heard. Having him on TV means that you want him heard again, Bill.
This isn’t about academic freedom or freedom of speech; it’s not about left or right. It’s about judgment: the bad judgment having Churchill on to spew again.
: LATER: There’s an entire blog devoted to Churchill’s offensiveness. And another.
: What Roger L. Simon thinks of Maher.
: LATER: Crooks & Liars has video. So does Ian.
: SATURDAY UPDATE: Democracy guy says:
As a Democrat, I move that we put Bill Maher on a plane and send him to Martha Stewart’s ranch as a stable boy so he can shovel actual horse shit for a living. He should be fired for this show. Period.
As for Churchill, when you see him on Maher’s show, you begin to wonder if anyone ever embodied the stereotypical head up his ass, anti-social, blinking, twitching, insane homeless blogger better than this guy. Not bloody likely.
Maher ends by suggesting we have a “Why they hate us” display at ground zero. I have a better idea. This video should be placed in the DNC lobby, running on a continuous loop 24 hours a day, under the banner “Why voters hate us”.
