HBO’s Bill Maher is known for being outrageous. And usually, his outrageousness is directed at things most Americans would place under the heading of “Traditional Values.” For this reason, a large swath of our population long ago chalked Maher up as a liberal ideologue and went on about their business.
However, it now seems that at times Maher wants to be taken seriously as a sane, social critic, and sometimes he actually has something interesting to say, as when he recently spoke out against Islam’s continued encroachment into the Western world. Maher worries about Islam’s spread because he believes Western values are “better” than Islamic ones. And when given every chance to retract or recant such statements, Maher instead insists that the correctness of his statement is proven by the fact that Christians and Jews laugh off criticism of their religions, while Muslims make “death threats to cartoonists.”
But there’s an inconsistency in Maher’s social criticism, and it lies in the fact that he appears too ideological to allow himself to fully follow his own maxims or embrace his own truisms. For instance, after fighting off accusations of racism (for his comments about Islam), Maher told his detractors: “It’s not because of [their] race, it’s because of [their] religion.” Is this not something Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, and dare I say Juan Williams, have all said as well?
This is a well reasoned, succinct, and demonstrable point of view.
But after saying it, Maher was so bothered by the impact the Tea Party had on the 2010 midterm elections that he turned around and compared Americans to dogs: arguing that they “cannot understand actual words,” but instead only understand “fear.” (Here Maher makes the same mistake that Sheryl Crow made when she lashed out at Tea Partiers by saying: “These people…really don’t even know what the issues are, they’re just swept up in the fear of it and the anger of it.”)
First of all, I would argue that the Tea Party was not driven by fear as much as by principles (although the argument could be made that they did fear further damage to this country by Democrats if Republicans didn’t win in 2010).
And secondly, what’s wrong with fear if it’s a response to something that’s worth being afraid of? Maher himself indicated as much in his defense of the West when he said Islamists were “violent” people who “threaten us.” He said this in such a way as to intimate that the threat was too great to casually overlook.
I would argue that the threats we faced while the Democrats were running the show justified a certain degree of fear on the part of every thinking American: for what could we do but fear as Obama & Company tried to appease terrorists with apologies for American exceptionalism on the one hand, and promise to bring our troops home and leave the murdering cave dwellers alone on the other?
It doesn’t make me a dog to recognize the same threat Maher recognized (and obviously fears), nor do I (or the Tea Party) merit criticism because of wanting to somehow place the reigns of the military closer to the hands of the party that knows how to use that military.
Maher can continue to be outrageous all he wants: that’s his style. I’m just hoping he’ll also be consistent.
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