[Cross-posted from my blog.]
I stayed home Friday night and watched Real Time, followed by the great little "Overtime" addendum that streams live online immediately after the HBO broadcast.
Bill Maher used to piss me off on a fairly regular basis. Not all the time, but generally at least once every other episode. Sometimes it was because of his flippant, dismissive views on wiretapping and other privacy issues, sometimes it was for some other boneheaded position he was taking, seemingly just to be contrary. (It was never enough to keep me from tuning in the next time, of course.)
But lately, he's been consistently great, and aggressively going after some of the most pernicious attitudes and trends in media and politics in a way that is usually reserved only for liberal bloggers. Tonight, the part that got me cheering came during the Overtime segment, during which he got into an exchange with John Avlon, ingratiating author of Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America. There's a link to the segment at the bottom of this post so you can watch it yourself.
I've seen John Avlon before, on MSNBC and other cable programs, and I've always been put off by his brand of the intensely unoriginal "both sides" false equivalency, which in the case of Wingnuts is that dangerous radicals on the right and the left pose a dire threat to our country by destroying the discourse and preventing, I don't know, some unicorn of bipartisan good governance. Just look at the cover of his book for instance, where he puts craaaaaaaazy Keith Olbermann along with Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck, as if Olbermann - while occasionally obnoxious and sloppy - is even remotely as deranged and moronic as those two.
So during the Overtime segment Avlon started in on his "both sides" shtick - which I suppose is a pretty smart marketing model and hedge to maximize future publishing opportunities and TV appearances - and Bill Maher simply wasn't having any of it. Maher nailed him to the wall in a tremendously refreshing display of actual straight talk (as opposed to the fraudulent "straight talk" of hosts and politicians who simply use the phrase to mean larding everything up with brainless conventional wisdom and cliche). Thankfully, the observation was even made at some point that even though genuine radicals and weirdos exist on the left, they are marginalized to the point of powerlessness and virtual voicelessness, while the Republican Party condones or even outright embraces the most hateful and disturbed elements of its "base" (and refuses to cross its inexcusably irresponsible de facto leaders, such as Rush Limbaugh).
I suppose it's not that the critique was anything new, or that Bill Maher has never before been so blunt on similar topics. It was just very satisfying to finally see the unctuous false-equivalency peddler John Avlon being confronted on his wildly false premise, instead of the usual sanctimonious nodding of the host that oh gosh, so true, these radicals on the right and the left are ruining everything.
In perhaps the worst irony of all, that fatuous premise is the ultimate enabling recipe for more of the ruinous parade of governmental malfeasance we've been getting for years: the largely right-wing policies that remain when you declare an idea as moderate and middling as the public option to be as untouchably radical as the argument that health insurance reform will create death panels (which turned out to be a debatable question on many shows). It really is astonishing; John Avlon and "concerned centrists" like him furrow their brows so nobly at the unraveling of our country's ability to meaningfully solve problems and make progress, but it's precisely this dismissal of actual liberal solutions and critiques that ensures we keep inflicting the damage that they seem to think stems from liberals and conservatives being equally extreme and unwilling to cooperate. And that's to say nothing of the intrinsic excuse for right-wing extremism provided by insisting again and again that it is "balanced" by commensurate craziness on the left.
Well, Bill Maher seems to have gotten fed up with this corrosive pablum too, and he rightly declared Avlon's cash-cow premise and book to be ridiculous - to his face. What a shame that this sort of bluntness and honesty can only happen on HBO. Late on a Friday night. By a comedian. I suppose HBO really is the station for actual grown-ups. Other networks need to keep their tender, impressionable audiences safe and protected from such disorienting messages, after all.
* * *
Here's the Overtime segment. The portion to which I referred starts at the 3:40 mark. Watching it again, I realized I had forgotten that Sarah Palin impersonator and shameless right-wing panderer S.E. Cupp joined in to fight by Avlon's side in declaring that Keith Olbermann was the liberal equivalent of Glenn Beck. This same person apparently has a book (of course) lamenting how badly religion is treated in the LIBRUL MEDIA, an assertion that she rather laughably failed to defend on the show, despite being a self-appointed expert on the subject. Oh, but she looks great on TV and on the cover of her book, so lets give her some credit (here's a funny critique of her from, ironically, one of Bill Maher's Real Time writers).
I think "both sides" may be the most grating pairing of words in the entire political lexicon.