The Monkey
By Mitch Berg
I was going to respond to Bill Maher’s “I’m Sorry You Overreacted To What I Said” op-ed, dutifully re-run by pretty much every left-of-center paper in America yesterday…
…until I asked myself “why?”
It’s what he wants. Maher is like a trained zoo monkey, paid well to throw poop at people and then sit on top of his cage and giggle at all the rubes who are angry at having poop on them.
And if I were in his position, I might do it too. Let’s take a walk back in history.
In the mid-nineties, Maher had a show on Comedy Central. I forget the name. Who cares.
It got picked up by ABC for the late-night line-up, one of many attempts to put something, anything, up against the Tonight Show and Letterman.
It bombed.
No, bigger than that. Seriously.
And it became clear to Bill Maher that it was neither his personality nor his comedic chops that was going to keep him in hookers and blow. (Cue outrage that I’d so insult a public figure. Go ahead. Be outraged. It’s the Maher way).
He’d have to supplement that with periodic bouts of publicity-mongering “controversy”. He, like that monkey, will have to throw just a little more poop next time, and giggle just a little harder at those poo-coated rubes.
And he’ll get away with it, until most of us realize that Bill Maher is nothing but a monkey with a hand full of poop.
I hope I’ve settled that for everyone.
March 23rd, 2012 at 9:01 am
Ironically, it was called “Politically Incorrect”. Like everything else about Maher, the title was a lie.
March 23rd, 2012 at 9:10 am
You know I read that op-ed today (its in the back of the A section of the Red Star today) and I read the entire piece without bothering to look at who wrote it… until the end. I honestly think its probably some of the smartest and most coherent stuff he has ever said/written (of course that probably means he didn’t actually write it). If you had told me I’d like an op-ed by that man I’d say you were insane, he must have some libertarian strains left in him or something because that piece was not something someone from the hard left would normally ever write.
March 23rd, 2012 at 9:29 am
Ben,
The bitch of it is that Maher is NOT a dumb guy. Back before he started his MSNBC career, he painted himself – slightly fraudulently, but only slightly – as a “libertarian”, and he got in *everyone’s* face.
Like Fast Eddie Schultz, I think he did what he needed to to get the bigger meal ticket.
March 23rd, 2012 at 9:54 am
Really? I honestly had no idea, man if the Left becomes too left for Maher that would be something. He was right about our faux outrage over stuff like the DiNiero quote. I mean who gives a crap what some overpaid (but still good) actor says during a fundraiser?
March 23rd, 2012 at 10:27 am
I think what Maher is beginning to understand is that media Matters would gladly see him banned from the public airwaves for life if in return they could get Limbaugh kicked out of a major market.
Like, say, Davenport.
March 23rd, 2012 at 11:52 am
T.S. Eliot also said something memorable about controversy: “In our time, controversy seems to me, on really funda-
mental matters, to be futile. It can only usefully be prac-
tised where there is common understanding. It requires
common assumptions; and perhaps the assumptions that
are only felt are more important than those that can be
formulated. The acrimony which accompanies much de-
bate is a symptom of differences so large that there is
nothing to argue about. We exp’erience such profound
differences with some of our contemporaries, that the
nearest parallel is the difference between the mentality of
one epoch and another. In a society like ours, worm-
eaten with Liberalism, the only thing possible for a person
with strong convictions is to state a point of view and
leave it at that.” (After Strange Gods)
March 23rd, 2012 at 9:38 pm
I had a stay in a hotel room last weekend. Turned on the TV and there was Bill Mahr. He had this long segment on the south. It was extremely bizarre. He was talking about the American South like it was still 1925. It was weird to hear this man talk about the area that includes Atlanta, Charlotte, and other American premier cities in goofy characters. Is he really that ignorant? Or is it that his followers are that ignorant.
March 23rd, 2012 at 9:53 pm
Don’t forget, Chuck, the Left hates their fellow Americans more than anyone else in the world. Remeber the response of liberals to the anti-American hatred of the Taliban was too insist that America’s real problem was religious conservatives in the South and suburbia.