Stefanie Keenan/VF24/WIREIMAGE photo
The 68-year-old Bill Maher should have wrapped it up long ago, but, being a fucking baby boomer, he intends to inflict himself on us for as long as he possibly can. Hopefully, his “show,” which should be retitled “You Damned Kids Get Off My Lawn,” will be canceled sooner rather than later, because it’s not worth watching anymore, and his desperate, vain and pathetic ever-changing dyeing of his hair hasn’t changed that.
Actually, Bill Maher jumped the shark long ago, but his end-of-the-show “analysis” of the Palestinian situation in last night’s show really sealed the deal.
My partner forces me to watch Bill Maher’s “Real Time” with him every week. We’ve watched Maher for years, starting when Maher used to be watchable, and so unfortunately, it has become our “tradition,” and in a relationship you sometimes have to do things that you don’t really want to do. Otherwise, I probably would have stopped watching the smug-ass pseudo-intellectual Maher a long time ago.
I’d actually thought last night that maybe, just maybe, we actually got through an entire Maher show without his lying about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict — one of his favorite blatant lies is that if you oppose the wholesale slaughter of innocent Palestinians with U.S. help, then you are “pro-Hamas” (this lie is so egregious that I know that even Maher is fully aware that it’s a dirty fucking lie, but it serves his tribalistic, self-serving, Zionist narrative, so he repeats it endlessly). But Maher saved his Islamophobic venom and bile for the very end of his “show.” He just couldn’t fucking resist the cowardly parting shot.
In a nutshell, Maher’s shittily conceived and executed end-of-show “argument” is that we should shut the fuck up about the number of civilian Palestinian deaths since October 7 because elsewhere in the Muslim world, women are treated horribly.
Part of Islamophobia is lumping all of the Muslim nations together, and I’m unclear that any of the examples of the Muslim mistreatment of women that Maher gave were even from Palestine.
Where it comes to lumping all Muslims together, indeed, when the unelected, illegitimate George W. Bush regime launched its illegal, immoral, unjust and unprovoked Vietraq War in 2003, a huge reason that it got away with it is that jingoistic Americans just wanted revenge for 9/11, and, being Islamophobic like Maher is, they didn’t care at all that Iraq had had nothing to do with 9/11 (15 of the 19 9/11 terrorists were from Saudi Arabia and not one was from Iraq). We just wanted to slaughter some towelheads in revenge for 9/11, and so we did.
Maher’s nonverbal communication during his intellectually dishonest closing rant of last night seems to indicate that even he knows that he’s spewing complete and utter bullshit, that he’s comparing apples to pineapples, but, being the baby-boomer asshole (redundant) that he is, he nonethless proceeded.
More than 35,500 Palestinians have been slaughtered by Israel since October 7 — compared to not even a full 1,500 Israelis who have lost their lives in the current conflict — yet Maher wants us to forget all of that and instead focus on the mistreatment of women in the Muslim world because Israel and the Zionists already have lost in the court of world opinion (including in the International Criminal Court), and Maher and his Zionist ilk have nothing left to do but try to distract the rest of us as though they were Jedi mindfuckers and as though the rest of us cannot clearly see what’s in front of our own fucking eyes, a fucking genocide unfurling right in front of us in real time (pun intended).
Maher is a self-described atheist — he reminds us of his pro-atheistic movie “Religulous” (from way back in 2008) regularly — yet schizophrenically, he tribalistically still shills for the Israelis and for Jews (his mother was Jewish), and for years he has spouted Islamophobic bullshit on his show because hey, he’s a baby boomer and it’s his show, so we’re going to hear about his baby-boomerian pet peeves and pet “causes” over and over and over and over and over and over again.
To be clear, I acknowledge that in many if not even most Muslim nations, women (and we gay men and others, too) are treated horribly. I get that. I don’t dismiss or discount that.
But that whataboutist bullshit, which Maher and his ilk try to deploy all the fucking time (you have to be intellectually dishonest — that is, a fucking liar — to be a Zionist), doesn’t at all excuse the fucking genocide that the Israelis and Zionists are perpetrating on the Palestinians with my (and your) tax dollars.
And I’m at a loss as to how, exactly, the United States is supposed to force other nations to treat their citizens better than they do. (Some sanctions might work, but overall, there isn’t much that the U.S. can do about the mistreatment of other human beings abroad, except, perhaps, to ensure that we’re not funding that mistreatment, which reaches all the way to genocide.)
And it’s unconscionable to casually dismiss the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians, including babies and children, but that’s what Maher blithely does, every fucking week that he’s on. (He often handpicks fellow Zionists to be his guests, and then they have an orgy of pro-Zionism and Islamophobia, which is especially nauseating, and Maher seems to think that he’s so fucking smart that the rest of us don’t know that he’s stacking the deck for his own selfish purposes.)
If it weren’t for my years-long relationship, I’d be done with Maher, but his show has gotten so bad over the past two or three years that hopefully I won’t have to endure his smug, lying bullshit much longer.
Sooner rather than later, Maher will run out of gas — he can’t run on the fumes of his past fame and success forever — and we mercifully finally will be done with him.
Robert's Virtual Soapbox 