It could be a real contest for which thing Bill Maher said on CNN's Larry King Live was the most ridiculous. It began with the assertion "Christine O'Donnell, like all these tea baggers, has no plan, no agenda. No policy points. They have one advantage. They're running against Democrats. That's their big advantage."
But for a sheer lack of factual grasp, it might be this statement, that domestic terrorism has apparently vanished under Obama: "And by the way, Obama has been president for 20 months and there has not been an attack. Bush was president for nine months when we got hit. So on that score, he's kept us safer." Did Maher sleep through the Fort Hood mass murder, not to mention the failed attacks in New York and Detroit?
Larry King typically asked Maher about the "crazed fringe" on the right and their hatred of Obama. King never asked Maher about his own "crazed fringe" on the anti-Bush left suggesting the last president was a Nazi, a chimpanzee, and mentally ill or disabled:
KING: What do you make of this whole -- the anti-Obama thing which has gotten kind of, in a sense, crazed? No, he wasn't born here. He's a Muslim. He is against America. What do you make of that fringe?
MAHER: I was talking about it with Jay Leno last night. I suggested maybe he's not even a mammal. He might be a werewolf, Larry. We don't know that.
KING: That's right. We don't know.
MAHER: I mean it was bad enough when we had these people called the birthers who thought he was not born here.
KING: They're still around somewhere, though.
MAHER: Many of them. Yes. No, they haven't gone away. But I was saying last night that I've identified this new group and I'm calling them the churchers.
KING: The churchers?
MAHER: The churchers. They're the people who don't think that he is a Christian. They think he's --
KING: He's the first president ever to issue a press release that he is.
MAHER: He's a secret Muslim, Larry. I guess you haven't been paying enough attention.
KING: Secret Muslim.
MAHER: When I talked to him, he told me about his plan to use drinking water to sterilize white people. I get -- whoops, I've said too much.
KING: Oh my gosh.
MAHER: No, it's the -- what's really scary is that more people think he's a Muslim now.
KING: How did we get to this, though?
MAHER: Well, you know, I have a theory that the Internet makes people stupider. And Also Fox News makes people stupider. You know the Pew group did a study recently and they found out that 10 years ago, Democrats, Republicans and independents basically got their news from the same sources, probably more from CNN, for example. Then we had this polarity.
And now, you know, John Edwards said we have two Americas. We do have two Americas. We have the America that's living in reality. The people who understand that Obama is a centrist liberal from Hawaii who is trying to dig us out of the hole we're in. And then we have this other Fox/Matt Drudge/Rush Limbaugh reality where he is a Muslim sleeper cell, Manchurian candidate who was sent over by his Kenyan father imbibe -- you hear --
KING: What kind of intelligent person would believe that?
MAHER: Intelligent person? Larry, we're broadcasting in America. How ridiculous. Well, no, I don't think intelligent people do believe it. But, you know, then we're going to get into partisan bickering because more than half of Republicans agreed with the state that said Obama is trying to impose Islamic law on America. I mean that is a very radical thing to believe. And it's more than half of Republicans. Not tea baggers. Not radicals. The mainstream Republican people.
KING: Is there a racist tone in this? Is there -- in other words, is this racist -- is this inherent racism? Where's it come from?
MAHER: Does the Pope go to the bathroom in the woods? Yes, Larry, it's extremely racist. I mean it's so funny because the tea baggers, the one thing they hate is black people.
For all Maher's talk of "two realities," he's too arrogant to contemplate that he's mangling the facts on the Tea Party or terrorism, or just smearing the entire Tea Party as racist. King let his buddy Bill Maher unspool a long soliloquy against the insanity of the entire prospective field of Republican presidential contenders about to assemble:
MAHER: I cannot wait to see the Republican debates in 2012 when you think about who is going to be on that panel. Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Haley Barbour, John Bolton, Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney. How are they going to out-fire breath each other? I mean where this rhetoric has gone to at this point? It's only 2010. And we're having Newt Gingrich, as we were talking about before, calling him an anti-colonial Luo tribesman. Luo tribesman.
That's the new Kenyan, Larry. And Kenyan, of course, was code for nigger. But that's where they are. They can't say it out loud. But that's where this whole campaign is going to be. You asked about racism. It's all about racism. They cannot fathom this idea that there is a black president. And that's what they are going to fight about.
The other thing about Sarah Palin is that if you read that "Vanity Fair" article this month, if you read the "Newsweek" cover story a few months ago where she was praying on the cover, she's a true religious snot. I know people are saying, oh there goes, Bill Maher. He's always talking about religion.
Well, read the article. Read about her. There's a part where it says they were giving her books to study up on. And they came back and said, did you read any? She said, No, I haven't looked at the books. I'm just reading the e-mails from my prayer warriors.
Prayer warriors. These are people -- and she's one of them -- who believe there are demons in the world. Everything in her world view is about demons or angels, people who are with us and people who are against us. You know, when liberals say things like, well, when you fight the mosque, building the mosque in New York, you're just encouraging a war with Islam, they don't understand, people like Sarah Palin want a war with Islam. That's what it says in the Bible. Bring it on. Let's get it over with. That's who could be running our country in four years -- two years.
