Real Time

It wasn't us who said this. Instead, it's one of their own - an outspoken openly liberal talk show with a cynical view of the mainstream media.

On the June 11 Web portion of HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher" called "Overtime," Newsweek editor Jon Meacham offered the argument there is not a pro-Israel bias in the media, which is often alleged.

"The idea that there is a pro-Israeli bias in the broad media - whatever ‘the media' means at this point, I strongly disagree with," Meacham said. "I think if anything you run into a very strong feeling on the Palestinian side."

That led another panelist on Maher's show, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow to protest by asking who is pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel in politics or media.

Bill Maher on Friday compared Americans working for oil companies to the vermin creating and distributing child pornography.

In the "New Rules" segment of his "Real Time" program, the HBO host concluded with a discussion about the "murderous, hateful" oil industry.

"You know, it's Washington gospel that jobs in the private sector are better than government jobs," said Maher.

"But oil jobs are private, and look at the toll this industry takes: cooking the planet; enslaving us to Saudi Arabia; killing animals," he continued.

"Yes, the oil industry creates jobs - so does the kiddie porn industry" (video follows with partial transcript): 

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

Sometimes it’s just so easy. I mean if I really wanted to, I could find all the material needed to expose the folly of the far left just by watching Bill Maher every week and picking apart the claims he offers as “fact” while urged on with hosannas by his trained seals in the Real Time audience. 

The comedian/pundit is a legend in his own studio—and it appears that his embarrassing stint at the big people’s table on This Week a while back, where he was dissected by George Will wielding the carving knife of the Socratic method, did little to humble Maher into questioning his own command of the issues.  “Facts are stubborn things,” said John Adams.  Of course, Mr. Adams never met a left-wing zealot with a worldview for whom reality is often an inconvenience to be waved away like curling pot smoke in a back grotto at the Heff mansion.

I watch HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher so you don’t have to. The most-noteworthy vitriol from Friday night’s show that I tweeted last night -- seven quotes, in sequence, you can read in less than a minute:

♦ Bill Maher opening monologue joke about Rush Limbaugh’s wedding: “They say, instead of throwing rice, throw Vicodin.”

♦ Maher, interviewing Paul Begala, channeling Obama’s reaction to those who say he hasn’t shown enough anger over the oil spill: “You retards...people who are not that bright...you have been used to people like Bush and Reagan who act like the President.”

♦ During the panel, Maher actually came to Sarah Palin’s defense, though he found it distasteful, as he scolded author Joe McGinniss: “He’s stalking her....That someone can get me to defend Sarah Palin bothers me to no end,” but “I think it’s just creepy to move next door.”

♦ Panelist Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic applauded McGinniss: He’s just trying “to find out who this farce and phony actually is.” That earned loud applause from the Los Angeles audience.

We all know former Vice President Al Gore has a sycophantic media supporting him on his pet cause of global warming. But this might be a little over the top, or it could very well explain a lot.

In December 2007, when Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize, The Washington Post's Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan argued the former vice president had won the Nobel Prize for "sexy." Well, apparently this is an inside-the-beltway notion that has existed for years.

On HBO's June 4 broadcast of "Real Time with Bill Maher," film producer, director, and screenwriter Judd Apatow harkened back to a 2000 cover of Rolling Stone magazine that revealed something about the former vice president during the Bush/Gore election cycle.

The mainstream media is of course replete with liberal opinionistas who criticize Republicans far more harshly than Democrats. That is nothing new. It is truly shocking, however, when supposedly "objective" news outlets employ even more egregious double standards than the openly-biased commentators.

The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto caught the Associated Press employing one such double standard over the weekend. The AP's Ben Feller penned quite a sob story about the president's response to the Gulf spill, saying that Obama is "having to work through unforeseen problems" and made sure to note that his "ability to calmly handle many competing issues simultaneously is viewed as one of his strengths."

A contrast with the AP's rheotroic on the Bush administration's response to Hurricane Katrina reveals quite a discrepany in the organization's views on the executive's accountability for natural disasters. That New York Times columnist Frank Rich and uber-liberal mudslinger Bill Maher have both had harsher words for the current president and his response to the Gulf spill speaks volumes.

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. 

Three noteworthy quotes from journalists I tweeted over the holiday weekend:

Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter, author of the ‘The Promise: President Obama, Year One,’ on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher on Friday night, placing himself with Obama against conservatives:

When Obama said “we are the ones we've been waiting for,” we didn't show up. It was the right-wingers at the town meetings.

Jake Tapper to Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, on ABC’s This Week:

Before this crisis occurred, you were perhaps best-known nationally as a critic of big government, as a critic of big spending. And here you are, desperately asking for big government, big spending.

Collating my Friday night tweets on Bill Maher, my nominations for the slimiest, most paranoid and dumbest quotes from Maher on his HBO show, Real Time:

♦ Leaping from Rand Paul to Robert Bork: “Here’s another guy, like Rand Paul, who was against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. He was for literacy tests, he was for a poll tax....Can we look back and just say Robert Bork was a racist who shouldn't have been on the court?”

♦ Great insight into the Gulf of Mexico oil leak: “Do you think BP could end this oil gushing out of the ocean if they just blew up the well and tapped it and they are not doing so because there's still money to be made from the oil coming out of the well?”

♦ Accusing conservatives of being immature by issuing juvenile insults: “Rush Limbaugh is a child. But he gets his way because he's the fat bully on the playground.”

Bill Maher invited comedian Patton Oswalt to his table on HBO's Real Time on Friday night and saluted his small film from 2009, "Big Fan," in which he plays a superfan of the New York Giants, even after a Giants linebacker beats him up severely. Maher turned this analogy to politics and leftist Thomas Frank's book "What's the Matter with Kansas?" which argued that poorer Americans are duped into voting for conservatives against their own economic interests.

"He will not go against the people who are hurting him, and it just seems so typical of the Joe the Plumbers of the world," Maher said. Oswalt replied, "It just seems to me that a lot of the people who are in the Tea Party movement and those other groups, there's been this brilliant magic trick where people are confusing capitalism with corporations, and those could not be more opposite, but they're made to root for these giant corporations as if they're rooting for free enterprise."

"My point," Maher insisted.

John Fund on Friday smacked down Bill Maher for calling Tea Partiers "teabaggers."

As the panel discussion of HBO's "Real Time" convened, the host said, "The teabaggers I guess think they had a big win Tuesday."

He then asked the American Spectator's Fund, "Why are they so silent on financial reform?"  

After Fund answered the question, he said, "I think people should be called by the term that they use themselves...Using 'teabaggers' is equivalent to, I have atheist friends. They don't like to be called 'Christian haters.' They prefer to be called atheists (video follows with partial transcript and commentary): 

Bill Maher on Friday said conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh is intentionally saying "f--ked up s--t" to compete with Fox News's Glenn Beck

While making this preposterous assertion, the "Real Time host falsely claimed that Limbaugh accused the Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad, of having a Barack Obama bumper sticker on his SUV.

Much like other falsehoods spouted by the HBO host on the most recent installment of "Real Time," Maher seemed to be attacking all manner of conservatives in an attempt to save face after his humiliating encounter with ABC's George Will last Sunday.

Feeling comfortable on his home turf without someone to challenge his inaccuracies, the comedian went into a vulgarity laden segment ridiculing the trifecta of Limbaugh, Beck, and former Alaska governor Sarah Palin (video follows with partial transcript and commentary, strong vulgarity warning):

After making a fool out of himself going up against George Will on last Sunday's "This Week," Bill Maher dug an even deeper hole five days later trying to strike back at the well-known columnist with a peculiar blend of falsehoods and Bill Clinton.

As NewsBusters previously reported, Maher was humiliated on national television last week when he errantly claimed Brazil was "off oil" only to be corrected by ABC's token conservative.

On Friday's "Real Time," the HBO host countered first by citing an ad that former President Bill Clinton did back in 2006 in favor of a California ballot initiative that would have implemented a tax on that state's oil producers.

Next, Maher absurdly claimed that "part of the reason" America isn't off oil yet is "because of global warming deniers like George Will" (video follows with transcript and oodles of commentary):

Bill Maher was clearly out of his league Sunday when he made an absurd claim about Brazil being off oil for decades only to be corrected by a significantly more knowledgeable George Will.

As the Roundtable discussion of ABC's "This Week" turned to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, host Jake Tapper mentioned -- without the vulgarity -- what Maher said on HBO's "Real Time" about President Obama not "getting more shall we say guff" for this crisis.

Maher concluded his answer by erroneously saying, "I mean, Brazil got off oil in the last 30 years, we certainly could have."

When Will got his chance to respond, Maher was left looking rather foolish (video embedded below the fold with transcript, commentary, and oil data to further embarrass the "Real Time" host, relevant section at 2:48):

Comments on two Sunday shows reflected an emerging new liberal line of reasoning, which uses the lack of opposition to Arizona’s new immigration enforcement law, as a means to discredit conservatives and Tea Party activists as hypocrites and/or racists. HBO’s Bill Maher on ABC’s This Week:

Government intrusion, government power is something that really bothers conservatives, unless it's directed toward people who aren't white, you know, I mean it does seem like there’s some of that going on there.

Chrystia Freeland of Reuters on the McLaughlin Group:

What I think is really important to notice here is the hypocrisy, the intellectual hypocrisy because we have...a lot of the same people who are very exercised right now...about big government and pointing out the American tradition of liberty, of individual rights, are also the people who are on the side of allowing the government to intrude much more into individuals' lives on immigration.

HBO's Bill Maher on Friday asked an extraordinary question of his guest panel: "Why isn't Barack Obama getting more s--t' for the oil spill in the Gulf?

Almost as surprising, the studio audience applauded after the "Real Time" host said this. 

"Okay, so I mentioned in the monologue I'm a little mad this week," Maher began after introducing his guests.  

"I'm mad at the oil company who didn't obviously build their rig well enough," he continued. "I'm mad at America in general because we should have gotten off the oil tit starting in the '70s."

Hold on to you seats: "But I'll tell you who I'm really mad at which is Barack Obama...So, why isn't Barack Obama getting more s--t for this" (video follows with transcript and commentary): 

Former United Nations ambassador John Bolton had one of the best lines on Friday's "Real Time" when after he got some scattered applause from the typically liberal audience in attendance, he said to Bill Maher, "You let Republicans in."

As the subject turned to America's military operations abroad, the HBO host told his guest, "You can't really believe that radical Muslim terrorists...need Afghanistan to launch an attack on us."

"I think there are plenty of alternative places," replied Bolton. "And I would say the bigger strategic interest going forward is keeping those nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists."

This produced some scattered applause from the crowd leading Bolton to marvelously say, "You let Republicans in" (video follows with transcript and commentary): 

Bill Maher Friday went on quite a little rant about conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh.

During the opening monologue of HBO's "Real Time," Maher mocked something Limbaugh mentioned on his show about the leaking oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico possibly having been attacked by environmentalists.

"That's right, a secret team of hippie frogmen snuck on board an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico and blew it up to frame the oil companies," Maher quipped. 

Next came the cheap shots: "You know what Rush, how many pills is your maid giving you?...Congratulations, Rush Limbaugh, you are now officially the Louis Farrakhan of white people" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Bill Maher on Friday said Barack Obama is a moderate Republican by '70s standards.

As the subject on the most recent installment of "Real Time" moved to the retirement of Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, the HBO host actually said that it was the Republican Party that has changed in the past thirty or forty years and not Stevens' view of the world.  

"You know what's ironic is that you know who's really a moderate Republican by '70s standards?" Maher asked. "Barack Obama."

This stupidity came seconds after guest Richard Clarke actually said that the gun rally in Virginia on April 19 was to commemorate the Oklahoma City bombing (video follows with transcript and commentary, file photo): 

Friday follies. Before the weekend ends, two quotes from journalists worth noting made on Friday night shows:

♦ On MSNBC’s Hardball, NBC’s Chuck Todd forwarded the notion that if Florida Governor Charlie Crist drops out of the Republican primary -- where polls put him way behind conservative Marco Rubio -- and wins the Senate seat as an independent, “he becomes the most powerful Senator in the United States Senate” and “he becomes, probably, the viable third party candidate in the middle in the country” for President in 2012.

♦ A few hours later on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, David Remnick, author of the new book, ‘The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama,' outed the real liberal agenda behind ObamaCare as he predicted that instead of being an “albatross” that will hurt Democrats at the ballot box in November, all those new beneficiaries will be grateful and vote Democratic:

When you add 30 million people to the rolls of getting health care, access to health care, seems to me a huge gain and the potential widening of the base for the Democratic Party among a lot of people who might not necessarily vote before. So, I don't think you're going to see a repeat of 1994 come this fall.

Of course, few of those 30 million will have any better access to health care by this November than they had before the bill passed.

(Updated with anti-Catholic "New Rules" jokes below.) Liberals complained this week when Rep. Michele Bachmann complained about "gangster government." But do they mind if the Catholic Church is compared to (and prosecuted like) the Mafia? So said former Gov. Jesse Ventura on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher on Friday.

MAHER: You did a movie called Predator. Let's talk about the Vatican.

VENTURA: That's a predator, too. Never got me, though, the Vatican. An alien did.

MAHER: My crazy radical friends Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins say that if the Pope travels to England, as he is scheduled to in September, he should be arrested when he hits the tarmac. Now do you think that's going too far?

VENTURA: ...I have another alternative, a question I've asked here in the United States. Why hasn't the Catholic Church been prosecuted under the RICO laws of organized crime?

HBO should name its show "Real Lies with Bill Maher," because on Friday night he was wildly claiming that 98 percent of taxpayers paid lower taxes this year, and so Tea Parties are just a Klan rally:

What a day for the Tea Party people. Did you see that? America's parks and fairgrounds were lost in a sea of man-boobs. (Laughter) As they were venting their anger and rage against taxes, which in most cases for them went down. Protesting, their taxes went down. Why let the truth spoil a perfectly good Klan rally?

After the whoops and applause and laughter, he continued:

It's true, it's true. These are the facts. Federal taxes went down for 98 percent of people -- working families, individuals, almost everybody.

It's an archaic way of thinking - unless it's imposed upon conservatives, then it's OK. It's this notion that commentators that are right-of-center should know their place - that place being only in the realms of talk radio or on the Fox News Channel. Otherwise, it is unacceptable.

Now Politico has joined the fray and is taking news tips from left-wing storefronts that have staked out RedState.com founder Erick Erickson's Macon, Ga. radio show on Newstalk 940 WMAC, to capture any sort of gotcha moment to embarrass Erickson. And all of this seems to have been spurred on by CNN's announcement last month that Erickson would be a network contributor.

At issue is Erickson's claim he would pull a shotgun on an American Community Survey (ACS) worker, an organization that is part of the U.S. Census Bureau, if he attempted to approach his home. However, Erickson's statement has been framed by his critics that he is attempting to prevent the Census Bureau from fulfilling a constitutional requirement, and that has been deemed "threatening" by Andy Barr of Politico in an April 2 post.

In the midst of liberals condemning the tone of anti-Obama conservatives, Bill Maher on Friday pointed to a vulgar and sexually-explicit text message Tiger Woods reportedly sent, which promised aggressive sexual behavior, as representing the attitude Democrats should adopt from the “lying bullies of the right.”

Maher quoted from Woods: “I want to treat you rough, throw you around, spank and slap you and make you sore....I'm going to tell you to shut the f**k up while I slap your face and pull your hair for making noise.” Maher declared that “perfectly represents the attitude the Democrats should now have in their dealings with the Republican Party.” He prefaced his “New Rules” tirade:

Here's a word President Obama should take out of his Teleprompter: Bipartisanship. People only care about that in theory, not in practice. The best thing that happened this year is when Obama finally realized that and said: “Kiss my black ass, we're going it alone George W. Bush style.”

Maher descriptively contended “Democrats need to push the rest of their agenda while their boot is on the neck of the greedy, poisonous old reptile,” arguing: “We need to regulate the banks, we need to overhaul immigration, we need to end corporate welfare including at the Pentagon, we need to bring troops home from everywhere, we need to end the drug war...”

Audio: MP3 clip (3:30)

Editor's Note: The following is an open letter from actress Maria Conchita Alonso, who penned this response to actor Sean Penn's recent remarks on HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher" in which the left-wing actor defended Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez.

Dear Sean, WHY?

Even though I have great respect for your artistic talent, I was appalled by a recent television interview where you vigorously showed support for the regime of Hugo Chavez. Therefore, I've decided to set the record straight for you regarding the Chavez regime, supporting my case based not only on my political ideologies, but on proven facts you choose to ignore.  Otherwise, I believe your position would be different.

Being born in Cuba, a country where freedom of speech is non-existent, it's startling to observe how Venezuela, where I was happily raised, is fast becoming Cuba's mirror image: Dismantling of fundamental democratic rights deserved by its people and citizens of the world.

For example, you said that all Chavez-winning elections in Venezuela were "transparent."

Then WHY didn't the government allow a manual recount of the votes and computer information when doubt set in? After all, how do you explain how these votes that were strongly favoring the opposition mysteriously reflected the opposite results the morning after, thus permitting Chavez to continue on?  On what are you basing your conclusions? I strongly recommend that you read a report by the U.S. State Department written in 2009 entitled "The Fraudulent Elections in Venezuela".

On Friday’s Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO, during a discussion of Mitt Romney’s recent altercation with rapper Sky Blu on an airplane, host Maher seemed to suggest that Romney might have been motivated by anti-black racism in confronting the rapper as the Real Time host brought up racially tinged quotes from former Mormon church president Joseph Fielding Smith – who died in 1972 at the age of 95 after serving two years as president – as if the words were relevant to Romney’s scuffle. Maher: "I just couldn't help but think maybe this has something to do with the fact that the Mormons traditionally have not had a great relation with the black people."

After reading a quote from Smith that came from a 1963 article in Look magazine, in which Smith contended that "I would not want you to believe that we bear any animosity toward the Negro. Darkies are wonderful people," Maher claimed that the words were only 20 or 30 years old. Maher: "I'm just saying if you're a Mormon and this is the ‘pope’ of your church and he says things like this about Negro and darkies – and this is only like, I don't know how long ago this was, 20, 30 years ago." The HBO host then read a quote from the book, The Way to Perfection, published by Smith in the 1930s, without divulging the date.

Greg Gutfeld and the "Red Eye" gang Tuesday tore apart Bill Maher for wishing that Glenn Beck had been killed during last week's Pentagon shootings.

As NewsBusters previously reported, the so-called comedian during last Friday's "Real Time" said of the tragedy, "When we see crazy, senseless deaths like this, we can only ask why, why, why couldn't it have been Glenn Beck?"

This led Gutfeld, along with guests including Ann Coulter and S.E. Cupp, to lay into Maher for his absurdity while also skewering actor Sean Penn for recently wishing his critics would "die screaming of rectal colon cancer."

For the entertainment pleasure of his audience, Gutfeld enlisted the help of his famous Red Eye Robots to offer Maher some new material utilizing "Glenn Beck died" punch lines (video embedded below the fold, h/t Story Balloon):

"When we see crazy, senseless deaths like this, we can only ask why, why, why couldn't it have been Glenn Beck?"

So joked Bill Maher Friday evening on HBO's "Real Time."

During his opening monologue, Maher addressed John Bedell, the man that was shot and killed Thursday when he attacked the Pentagon.

For some reason, the comedian used the incident as a vehicle to go after the Fox News host (video embedded below the fold with transcript, h/t Ed Morrissey, file photo):  

Left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore, appearing on Friday night’s Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO to plug the DVD release of his Capitalism: A Love Story screed, cited the 250,000 killed in Haiti, which he snidely described as an unregulated “Republican’s paradise,” as an apt analogy to justify further regulation of U.S. banks.

Live via satellite from Manhattan, Moore spouted:

Chile had an earthquake this past week that was 500 times greater than the earthquake in Haiti. But here's the big difference. In Chile, they have various -- very serious regulations when it comes to building codes. So a thousand people died, sadly, but a thousand people died with a 500 times greater earthquake. And in Haiti, where there are no building codes, no regulations -- a Republican’s paradise -- a quarter of a million people died.

Audio: MP3 clip

Haiti could better be characterized as an impoverished nation beset for decades by a corrupt socialist government.

Sarah Palin sends liberals into irrational frenzies of contempt and, in the case of Bill Maher, fits of condescension which drive him to denigrate anyone stupid enough to see anything good in her. Maher began and ended his Friday night HBO program, Real Time with Bill Maher, with derogatory “jokes” based on the presumption Palin and her supporters are morons.

He started with how at the health care summit the attendees recited stories about health care perils: “John McCain told how he once carried a brain-dead woman through an entire campaign.”

About 56 minutes later, Maher raised Tiger Woods and his Buddhist beliefs, wrapping up the show by ridiculing the eastern religion, but turned it into a slam at Palin fans: “Thinking you can look at a babbling, barely house-broken, uneducated being and say that’s our leader doesn't make you enlightened. It makes you a Sarah Palin supporter.”