A Friday, November 4, 2005, op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times by HBO host Bill Maher begins as follows (emphasis mine):
"President Bush's new Supreme Court nominee, Samuel Alito, must bomb an abortion clinic."
It gets ... worse. Four paragraphs later (emphasis mine):
"Is Alito a decent man with Christian values? Until he kills a nurse with a pipe bomb, there's no way to be sure. Sometimes the only way to convince some people that you're truly pro-life is to kill a few of them. Like when a gang member has to knife some random guy to prove himself."
"Kill[ing] a nurse with a pipe bomb"? Comparing pro-lifers to murderous gang members? Maher has been outrageous in the past, but ... this?
We can only imagine the "outrage" in the media if [fill in your favorite conservative writer here] had printed anything even remotely like this, regardless of whether or not it was a "joke."
Want to read the entire article yourself? Good luck. The title of the piece is "Is abortion finito with Alito?", but this writer has been unable to find it anywhere on the latimes.com website, Google, or Yahoo. The article is only to be found on page B13, in the editorial section, of the actual print edition (which I have).
In the last several weeks, articles by Maher have begun to appear on a regular basis (Fridays?) in the Times. Although an October 21, 2005, piece by Maher is found in their archives, it seems that many of his articles are not archived by the paper. Why?
Is the Times trying to avoid accountability for Maher's often-incendiary diatribes? Are they afraid of drawing too much attention to their pairing with Maher? Are they trying to avoid further discussion of his work (through posts like this)?
It looks like it.
