Today, the sun rose in the East. The other night, just as predictably, Bill Maher opened his mouth and something stupid came out. You can follow that link for details. The short story is that he defended “his friend” Chris Matthews and doesn’t think Matthews should be fired for what most of us (not Maher) would call sexual harassment.
Of course Chris Matthews should have been fired for that, but he should have been fired long ago for his moronic remarks, as well as just his general entitled laziness.
I’m going to guess that Maher has a harassment skeleton or two in his closet. He reeks of creep. But even if he doesn’t, he’s terrible. He’s not funny, a lot of his guests suck, and he thinks his sexist hot takes are somehow edgy when they’re just misogynistic. Can’t he just be fired for that? Does the ability to eke out halfway decent ratings on a cable show mean that he’s got a lifelong appointment (as Matthews seemed to have until he was finally canned)?
Immanentize
Harris has endorsed Biden
Elizabelle
@Immanentize: That’s marvelous. And no surprise.
SO: have you formally cancelled your cruise? Is Viking holding your deposit for ransom for months?
I wish you and Immp could take the cruise at another time.
dmsilev
@Immanentize: Not much of a surprise, but good to hear. I imagine her name is in the veepstakes pool.
Jane2
@Immanentize: Thank heavens I have both “Biden” and “Sanders” muted on Twitter so I won’t have to see the outrage of “corporate sell-out” and the internet medical experts’ take of “how dare she support a person with cognitive dissonance versus the sharp as a tack hero of mine?”
Ten Bears
Probably ten years ago I stopped pointing out to people (Cassandra’s grandson) how hard it is to take someone’s claims to atheism – No Religion – when they never pass up an opportunity to remind people he is of “God’s Chosen People”. Can’t say he harmed his credibility when he doesn’t have any in the first place.
And he’s not funny …
Facebones
I’ve said it before. The least edgy thing in the world is a rich straight white male complaining about “political correctness.” Just so lazy. May as well just shout “ARE YOU TRIGGERED, SNOWFLAKE?”
RepubAnon
I’ve always despised the “politically incorrect” folks for claiming that spouting the talking points of the rich and powerful while verbally kicking those society routinely abuses was somehow laudable.
WereBear
The recent Gaslit Nation podcast opened with an excruciating clip of Chris Matthews — on air — flirting with the correspondent who filed the complaint that finally brought him down.
But NBC, according to Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow, is a hive of such scum and villainy. And the head of CBS. And Weinstein.
But especially NBC, who pressured Farrow to abandon the story.
JPL
Good news about Harris, and she’s my favorite for VP. She’s be with Joe in Detroit tomorrow.
Capri
I drive a lot and get books on CD out from the library to listen to. I once checked out a compilation of “New Rules” by Maher. It was excruciating. Hearing one every so often is bad enough – 4 straight hours is unspeakable. The only book I have ever checked out where I could not get past the first CD.
Darrin Ziliak (formerly glocksman)
I couldn’t stand Maher when I was a right-wing Republican and I still can’t stand him as a liberal Democrat.
He’s like Johnny Carson to me in that a lot of people think he’s funny, but I find him about as humorous as a hernia operation.
MattF
My solution is ‘don’t watch’. I’ll allow as how that’s easy for me since I don’t presently have a functioning TV.
TTT
@Ten Bears: pretty sure Maher has never claimed to be Jewish or any related “chosen-ness.” He regularly references his upbringing in strict Catholic schools.
Starfish
@Ten Bears: His Islamaphobia masquerading around as pretend atheism is gross.
Betty Cracker
The only remotely interesting thing Maher does is bring together odd groups of people to have discussions on the topics of the day, which we manage to do on this blog every day FOR FREE. :)
I know a few guys who are devoted Maher fans. They are exactly the type of guys you’d expect to be devoted Maher fans. I guess there’s enough of them to make the series profitable.
mrmoshpotato
@Jane2: ?
JukeboxHeart attack hero!?(Yeah, it may be in poor taste, but part of Bernie’s heart muscle is dead, and his campaign hasn’t sufficiently addressed it.)
Immanentize
@Elizabelle: yes, we are going to cancel. The only return I will get is a voucher from Viking, but for the whole amount. That is good, but I want them to show me some cash!
Immanentize
@JPL: I wonder if Harris and Biden can possibly compete with Cornel West (who was in Detroit yesterday).
geg6
@TTT:
I believe he is half or at least partly Jewish but was brought up Catholic.
mrmoshpotato
@RepubAnon: Yup. Punching down doesn’t make you “edgy.” It just makes you an a-hole.
HalfAssedHomesteader
He has some sometimes funny writers but his self-congratulatory delivery style is more than I can bear. With all the racist, misogynist crap he’s excreted over the years I don’t understand why he still has a platform.
JPL
@Immanentize: Jesse Jackson is coming out for Sanders also. Old activists campaigning together. I’d rather see Harris, Biden and Gov. Whitmer on stage together.
geg6
@geg6:
Yes, I was correct. Interesting story, actually:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Maher
JPL
Harris did not want to endorse a candidate while a woman was still running. Good for her.
mrmoshpotato
@Darrin Ziliak (formerly glocksman):
How do you feel about upper arm operations?
(I’ll see myself out.)
debbie
@WereBear:
I think this whole situation was perfectly framed back when Charlie Rose, in response to being labeled a harasser, apologized, saying he had thought the attraction was mutual. Isn’t that just typical?
Baud
To be fair, Matthews didn’t have a rape room at NBC, so he was a relatively good guy. #MattLauer.
Chyron HR
@Immanentize:
And here comes a flood of monkey emojis from Bernie’s paid campaign staff.
(And here comes what’s-his-face whining that I’m SO MEAN TO BERNIE’S INNOCENT BABBY FOLLOWERS.)
oldster
But you can’t fire him from his entertainment job until you have proven that he is guilty of a felony, to a standard of proof that is beyond a reasonable doubt!
Don’t you have any respect for dude process, you monster?
Now, of course if a woman runs a talk-show and gets canceled after a season, well, that’s just the free market speaking. What, you think the world owes her a living?
(“Dude process” is an LGM coinage, for cases just like this.)
mrmoshpotato
@debbie: What? Who doesn’t look at Charlie Rose and think, “Look at that tall drink of water?” /S
Brachiator
I can understand being fired for harassment. But to be fired just because you find a person’s remarks to be “moronic” or a person “entitled” or “lazy?”
This is the same level of stupid as a Trump tweet storm about CNN or some comedian who poked fun at him.
Baud
@JPL:
Hmm. I wonder if that would have helped Sanders if it came earlier.
debbie
@WereBear:
Speaking of Ronan Farrow, Hachette canceled publication of Woody Allen’s memoir after employees walked out in protest and in defense of Ronan Farrow (also a Hachette author).
I used to work with the head of the company, back when we were both bottom-of-the-barrel assistants. I can’t imagine what he was thinking when he decided to publish Allen’s book. I’d like to slap him like Cher, shrieking “Snap out of it!”
geg6
On topic, I get what you’re saying, mm. But the incentive for HBO is different even from cable. Yes, you may pay extra for cable news channels but that is usually as a package with many other channels and it is not a subscription service like HBO. Unless their subscribers start cancelling over it, Maher will keep his show. Personally, I’m won’t do that because I like a lot of stuff on HBO and I can just choose not to watch what I don’t like.
WereBear
@debbie: “I was just flirting!”
@Baud: Given the man’s apparent lack of filters, if he’d had a rape room, he would have talked about it.
Also, never understood the attraction of waking up to Matt Lauer’s dead eyes. Bad enough I have to go to work.
Dr. Ronnie James, D.O.
Maher’s been a known, documented creep for 25 years. I remember this charming anecdote about him making lewd comments to an intern in Spy Magazine (RIP) from 1995 (search for “Maher” if you’re morbidly curious, ~ page 14):
https://books.google.com/books/about/Spy.html?id=NxR5FFDMZZwC
HalfAssedHomesteader
@JPL: Wait, what? Because the loss of women in the race was inevitable? Why not endorse one of the women while they were still in? Couldn’t hoit! (Not dissing Harris, it just doesn’t make much sense to me.)
Brachiator
@Immanentize:
This is good news.
I would like to see Warren endorse Biden today, maybe to nudge things in his favor as the Michigan primary approaches.
MomSense
@Ten Bears:
He is atheist, Zionist, and Islamophobic.
Does not compute.
Adam
The projection is strong in this one.
WereBear
@debbie: Yes, and that was a bright spot. I got Catch and Kill on pre-order because I love his work, then didn’t read it until recently, after the Weinstein trial. Because it was just so depressing at the time.
Baud
@HalfAssedHomesteader:
My guess is that she would have endorsed Biden after SC but before California, but didn’t want to step on Warren or Amy.
MomSense
@HalfAssedHomesteader:
Why would she? The women in the race were not well liked by Black voters.
Adam
@Darrin Ziliak (formerly glocksman): nah, I had a hernia fix, that was better.
Mark C
@Immanentize: Cornell would carry more weight if he was Kanye’s father.
JPL
@Baud: That’s what I think.
Immanentize
I just like the fact that endorsing Biden is now a two-fer.
Like people in RedSox Nation say, on any day during the season two good things might happen: The Sox could win and the Yankees could lose.
Ohio Mom
geg6@ 23: That is an, um, interesting story.
I imagine a pyschotherapist could have a fun time dissecting Maher, growing up in a family that thought the fact that the mother was a Hungarian Jew was something to be kept secret — and successfully kept it a secret until Maher was a teen.
So there Bill is, at the age where questions about “Who am I, anyway?” are bubbling up, and
the age when you start separating from your parents, and he finds out his family has been living a lie, his mother is not who he was led to believe. Which really complicates Bill’s questions about who he is.
Probably no coincidence that he grew up to be a cynic’s cynic.
Please note, I still have no use for him, still tho k he’s a creep and a jerk.
Shrillhouse
Maher is neither funny, nor smart.
Chris Matthew’s comments to his female guests (and coworkers) weren’t just “kinda creepy”. They were disgusting, inappropriate and totally unprofessional. Matthews should have been canned decades ago. The fact that he lasted as long as he did is directly attributable to the “Lighten up, cookie. You should smile more..” attitude of wankers like Maher…
Joey Maloney
@Mark C: Cornel might carry even more weight if people don’t remember him calling Obama a house n-word and plenty more, all out of pique for not getting tickets to the 2008 inauguration.
Immanentize
@Baud: I really don’t think Jackson’s endorsement would have meant much at any time. The Rainbow/PUSH Coalition is not now what it once was in terms of organizing power or relationship building.
MomSense
@JPL:
Jesse Jackson said he wanted to cut off Obama’s balls. I have a hunch his endorsement would not have helped. I doubt Joe would want his endorsement.
Geminid
I think it was William Safire who came up with the epithet, “effete snobs” which is so applicable to Maher. If I were an atheist I’d be mad at him for giving atheism a bad name.
Baud
@MomSense: I didn’t not know that. Thanks.
Barbara
@MomSense: I don’t remember that. I do remember watching him on tv at the huge gathering at Grant Park in Chicago on the night Obama won his first term, with tears streaming down his face. I think Jackson is fundamentally a guy on the right side of things whose sell-by date passed, without having found or been willing to pass the baton to a successor. Much like Sanders. Cornel West is a showboat who can’t stand not being in the center of things.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
I just wish Maher would come out and admit he is a conservative.
Baud
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: He’s libertarian.
MomSense
@Barbara:
That was 2008. He said it in 2009. It’s on the google.
TTT
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Shrillhouse: thank you! Re: Matthews- I always flipped past him even if he had a guest on that I liked because the combination of racist and misogynistic remarks and Constantly talking over people/finishing their sentences drove me to throw things at the TV. Maher is all that plus an anti vax, Islamophobe. I always find it funny(not) that he can only ever have one woman on a panel and then talks over her. Blech!!
evodevo
Well, Maher is on HBO, which gives him a secure sinecure from which to mock whatever he wants, and doesn’t have to curb swear words. I like that he is anti-Trump, but the ego is hard to deal with…he can’t even take “pun groans” or “Oh Snap!” moments on the part of the audience without misinterpreting them and getting really pissy about it. If it doesn’t look like his guest list is interesting, I don’t even bother. He reminds me too much of other right winger atheists I know for me to be fooled into thinking he’s a lib…and yes, I bet he has a lot of sexual harassment incidents in his past…
ThresherK
I don’t watch him, no HBO, little interest. I didn’t know Maher did this. I know he’s an atheist who is somehow an Islamophobe.
He was raised Jewish, I take it?ETA: I read geg6 about his being raised Catholic, and his mother being secretly (until Bill was a teen) a Hungarian Jew.Does he back up the “chosen people” thing with stories of being discriminated against or slurred from his younger life (when he wasn’t “Bill Maher”)?From someone else, with a decent sense of perspective and self, talking about “How I was raised
JewishCatholic with a secretly Jewish mother and people mistreated me for this, so now I’m an atheist, and I’m getting slagged for both of these things” could be entertaining and enlightening, especially in a greater conversation about anti-Judiasm, xenophobia, and other kinds of right-wing “saying the quite parts loud” we’ve had since Trump rode down the escalator.From Maher, I can’t imagine it going that way.
(And of course he has a hundred other black holes on his show, and in public, where honest intellect talk goes to die.)
dww44
@Baud: I’ve long been irritated by Matthews and his annoying habit of interrupting any and every guest on his show, but as a member of his generation, I believe that his major sin was cluelessness, not willful misogyny.
Ohio Mom
Ten Bears @5: There’s an old Jewish joke, proudly told, that goes, Judaism is a religion full of atheists. Many of whom use the term “chosen people” ironically.
Now is Maher really a Jew? I don’t watch him, only have second and third hand information on him, so I can’t say. Some maintain that any child of a Jewish woman is automatically a Jew but I think a person has to take positive actions to have claim to that identity.
As an analogy, though all my grandparents were from Eastern Europe, and kept some traditions (mainly recipes) , I don’t consider myself Eastern European at all. I have assimilated out.
But I certainly know for example, American Irish and Greek families who many generations out still consider themselves Irish or Greek, and belong to Irish and Greek organizations, and do other things to celebrate their culture.
The Jewish people is a very, very old one, and individuals have been assimilating out and joining up all along. I know there is a tendency to equate Israel with Judaism, but the modern country is a blip in our history.
Ohio Mom
Momsense@39: It’s perfectly possible to be an atheist and a Zionist at the same time (lots of Israelis fit this description, as well as American Jews) — and Ialamaphobia is sadly widespread among all sorts of people. There is no conflict at all among these self-identifiers.
Barbara
@MomSense: That is fairly astounding. I think that Jackson and West both felt like Obama should have paid more attention to them. For whatever reason I clearly remember West’s anger and pissiness that Obama wouldn’t — essentially — take direction from West. I imagine Jackson had similar feelings, though also, there was a lot of fallout in the Jackson family associated with the selection of Obama’s replacement in the Senate. That’s why Blagojevich ended up in jail, and Jackson’s son also ended up losing his political career, though based on other things that were discovered while feds were investigating Blago. Basically, he and his wife were making personal expenditures with campaign funds, similar but not nearly as wide ranging or extravagantly as Duncan Hunter and his wife.
International Mikey
@Immanentize: Seriously? Cornell West is a cartoon character with really bad teeth and stinky looking clothes. He also seems like a jerk. After his hissy fit over Obama not kissing his ass, he alienated a good portion of the Black Community. Another desperation pick by Wilmer.
debbie
@Barbara:
West had a platform for his grievances by weekly appearances on Tavis Smiley’s weekly show on NPR. He came across as petty and mean spirited. He’ll be the perfect partner for BS. //
debbie
@MomSense:
I Googled, and a July 2008 NPR report popped up about it.
Apparently it can be blamed on a “hot mic” which caught Jackson’s complaint about Obama not addressing the black community’s issues sufficiently during the campaign.
Mr. Mack
Maher and Real Sports are why I subscribe to HBO. BTW, he donated a million bucks to the Democratic Senate Majority Pac. Bill is a comedian, not a pundit. My wife loves him and I asked her if he (or Matthews for that matter) gave off a creepy vibe and she just laughed and said…”He’s an atheist and a vegan, I grew up around meat eating religious types, I know about creepy.
Edited to add: Great news about the Harris endorsement!
Capri
@Ohio Mom:
Post WWII there were a lot of immigrants who kept their Jewish roots a secret. There are autobiographies of kids raised in the Catholic church who were taught at an early age to memorize the Lord’s Prayer in several languages who then found out that their parents were Jewish as adults. Many Jewish immigrants believed that it was just a matter of time and they did whatever they could to protect their children.
Ohio Mom
@Capri:
Yes, and then there are the Marranos. But Maher is only one year younger than me, grew up in NYC area as I did, and I didn’t know who hid their Jewishness like that, even among the Holocaust survivors. It’s a very Jewish part of the world after all, the largest Jewish population anywhere outside of Israel.
Not saying it didn’t happen, clearly Maher’s mother denied her Jewishness, though in her case, I wonder how much it had to do with her marrying a Catholic and agreeing to raise the children in the Church. Intermarriage was still scandalous back then (nowadays, liberal synagogues have adult education on how to manage your mixed family life).
All the Jews I knew who didn’t want to identify any more joined Ethical Culture.
debbie
@Ohio Mom:
I knew a family (they moved here from Cincinnati, actually) who were rabid anti-Semites. Later, I learned they had converted from Orthodox Judaism to Episcopalian before moving because of the anti-Semitism they’d suffered through in Cincinnati. I wish I were enough of a writer; their story would make for a really provocative play.
Ella in New Mexico
Bill Maher is slipping rapidly into “Even a broken clock is right twice a day” territory.
Lately his bad takes on thing far outweigh the smart ones, which is why I can hardly ever watch his show unless there’s someone I really want to see on the panel
Also, whenever I hear some guy empathizing/excusing other men getting fired, for being demeaning or sexually inappropriate with their female peers I assume the whole guilty conscience thing is in play.
Sab
@Ohio Mom: In my youth ( 1960s) they became Unitarians. I have a lovely amethyst cross that I inherited from my grandmother, who inherited from her aunt who was born and raised Jewish and became Episcopalian. That was the 19th centuy compromise for Jewish/Catholic marriages.
EthylEster
@geg6: That very minor talent has a star on Hollywood Blvd? Talk about a low bar!
brantl
@MomSense: Maher is not a zionist. And he’s against all proselytizing religions.
Procopius
@geg6: I may misunderstand, but I think if your mother is Jewish, you are. If your mother is not Jewish, you are not. The idea that you are Jewish is one of your great-grandparents was is from the 19th Century anti-semites who thought there is a “racial” difference between Italians and Swiss, and did not know that the high castes of the dark-skinned East Indians call themselves Aryan. Anyway, Bill Maher is not funny, and I blame it on his lacking a sense of humor, like most conservatives. Those “comedians” who complain about “political correctness” mostly want to tell ethnic jokes or gimp jokes. Sometimes rape “jokes.”