Bill Maher: Post-Racial Racist?

Editor's Note: The following originally appeared at Andrew Breitbart's Big Hollywood.

Bill Maher a racist?  Who’da thunk it?  Actually, anyone who pays even remote attention to the far-left comedic mouth piece could have figured that out pretty quickly. Yes, Bill, I am calling you a racist.  This accusation which he so glibly levels at anyone slightly to the right of Che Guevera  may come as a shock to him.  But he is too busy heaping his moral superiority upon those lynch mob troglodytes who inhabit “fly-over country” to ever bother  to take a look at himself.  If he did, he might come to realize that being truly colorblind or, to borrow a Hopey McChange slogan, “post racial” means more than fist-bumping Will.I.Am at a Golden Globe after after party.  It means truly seeing the world through the prism of individual not racial identity politics. 

Granted there are still times when a racially inflammatory comment is so blatant that it must be called out for what it is, even if spoken in jest.  As such I was impressed when just this week Maher was genuinely offended when a comedian offered this joke about Obama’s handling of the Gulf oil spill: 

“I want a real Black president. I want him in a meeting with the BP CEOs, you know, where he lifts up his shirt so they can see the gun in his pants!” 

That’s a pretty vicious stereotyping of the typical Black man as gun-toting criminal don’t you think?  Oh, wait…that was Maher’s joke? Oops.

Of course, being the darling of the far-left, Maher will get the obligatory free pass from the Thought Police in the mainstream media and Soros-funded blogospheres.  But let’s try a little exercise.  Please close your eyes and imagine the category five tempest of liberal outrage that would have erupted had a conservative comic like Dennis Miller or, even worse, a media commentator like Rush Limbaugh uttered these words.  Ah, yes.  In the mind’s eye one sees so clearly the unfortunate gaffer’s crucifixion in absentia at the hands of a Real Time panel stacked with race pseudo-fascists like Al Sharpton, Jay-Z and the rest. But when a far-left bobble-head like Bill Maher paints a picture of a “real Black man” as a thug with a pistol tucked in his BVDs, oh well, whatterya gonna do?  Anyway, how about them racist Tea Partiers huh?  

Maher’s post-racial racism, if I may coin a phrase, is nothing new.  I was first struck by his hypocrisy regarding race relations last year on a Real Time episode that featured Michael Eric Dyson and our friend Andrew Breitbart (as the conservative piñata on the panel).  Maher linked a shortage of ammunition facing Oklahoma’s gun shops in the wake of the 2008 election with Oklahomans fearing that “Obama and his negro army are going to come and get you.”   Right on brutha Bill …werd up! 

Of course what the post-racial comic failed to mention was that a similar run on ammo in that state occurred after Bill Clinton’s election. This tells one not melanin-obsessed that what these gun owners really feared wasn’t a band of “Negroes” but rather a band of liberal lawmakers traditionally hostile to the 2nd Amendment.  But when you are a serial racist and self-loathing White male like Maher everything must have a racial overtone to it no matter how far fetched.  There can never be another explanation.  (And let’s just forget about the fact that Oklahomans of the 90% white Congressional 4th district re-elected Representative J.C. Watts four times in a row.)  

Being one of those toothless white-robed and cross-burning Neanderthals whom Maher believes populate any area of the country not within sight of an ocean, I’m confused about Bill’s most recent comment.  Perhaps one of Maher’s usual post-racial racist suspects can enlighten me on what exactly makes one a “real Black man”—aside from Maher’s gang bangin’ persona, that is.

Professor Dyson on Real Time offered up in subtle tones one definition, while at the same time providing a revealing glimpse as to just how unreceptive to diversity of ideas is the far left today. In the progressive intelligentsia world (of which Maher believes he is a part), a “real Black man” is one who thinks just like they do.  He believes that government activism and grievance politics are the only path to right past social wrongs.  Furthermore, if you deviate from their line,  if you instead believe that personal responsibility rather than a patrician welfare state is the key to your future, although your skin may be dark, you are not a real Black man.  

Yes, you may say, but Clarence Thomas is certainly a Black man, and yet he has political views that are often quite the opposite as left-wingers like Dyson, Sharpton, Van Jones, and others.  Still, as they are liberals, which is synonymous with open-mindedness, they surely must respect all views and this includes Thomas’ as those of a fellow Black man.  Think again.  As far as Dyson is concerned, Clarence Thomas—a Black man who grew up fatherless and dirt poor in the deep South at the height of Jim Crowe and yet rose to become an associate Supreme Court justice—is nothing more than, in Dyson’s Real Time observations  “a Black person articulating some very powerful notions against Black people.”  (In other words he has the audacity to take issue with affirmative action programs he considers harmful to Black interests and condescending).  He goes on to vilify Thomas as a“ventriloquist as a black skinned person saying ideas that are corruptive of a Black response.”  In short, though Thomas and other Black conservatives may have Black skin, their political views preclude them from being “real” Black men.  They are just shills for “the man.”  So much for diversity.  

White-guilt ridden Maher, (aka. Beverly Hills’ Most Wanted) offers his predictable cow-towing to Dyson to earn street cred. by calling Thomas a “Black man who doesn’t represent 95% of Black people.”  So be warned Black men of independent thought.  In Maher’s world, you must toe the liberal line or be castigated as a traitor to your race.  Could it be that, in Maher’s post-racial racist world,  Thomas and other conservative Black men are, well, “uppity?” And after all who better to judge one’s blackness than a white comedian from a lily white neighborhood?  

In his autobiography, My Grandfather’s Son, Thomas states:

“I’d grown up fearing the lynch mobs of the Ku Klux Klan; as an adult I was starting to wonder if I’d been afraid of the wrong white people all along — where I was being pursued not by bigots in white robes, but by left-wing zealots draped in flowing sanctimony…They certainly don’t see themselves as being like the bigots in the South. Well, I’ve lived both experiences. And I really don’t see that they’re any different from them.” 

It was as if he was watching Real Time when he wrote these words.  Perhaps if at the next SCOTUS orals Justice Thomas lifts his robe to reveal a Tec-9 stuffed in his waistband, Maher might be satisfied enough to bestow upon him “real” Black man bona fides.  Only a true racist, even a post-racial one like Maher, would even think in such a way in the first place.