Bill Maher Kicks Some Ass

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[Ol'Hickster]

ASS KICKING IS WHATS CALLED FOR !

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

Those guys are hardly helping their cause any, coming into that space assuming that Maher's going to engage them in dialogue because they're shouting through his show. He's also right - "audience" means "the people who listen".

[nibbler]

The man comes down on him for having an inquiring mind, for speaking the truth, and promptly throws him off the air in the weeks after 9/11.

Now he's just another turncoat. Phil Donahue has more integrity.

Edited October 29, 2007 by Guest

[d_rawk]

The man comes down on him for having an inquiring mind, for speaking the truth, and promptly throws him off the air in the weeks after 9/11.

Hmm. I thought he threw him off for being belligerent, unintelligible and disruptive. Or do I misunderstand the circumstances?

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nibbler, who are you talking about? are you talking about the video posted above? Who is 'him' and who is 'the man'? who has the enquiring mind?

[nibbler]

[nibbler]

Somebody's inquiring mind and philosophy of open discourse with the public changed focus after he lost his Politically Incorrect Pulpit.

[d_rawk]

Just trying to get a handle on the grievance here -- you are upset with Maher because he kicked a guy who wouldn't stop shouting out of his audience, or because of his opinion regarding the amount and scope of prior knowledge (or involvement) that the American government may have had (or have been engaged in) as to the collapse of the World Trade Center?

It seems to me that the guy could have been hollering something entirely uncontroversial like "grandma makes good cookies!" and still ought have been kicked out, as a courtesy to the other audience members who are having their ears screamed off and to the guests who have been invited to participate in an organized panel discussion.

If the grievance is with the latter, that seems fair enough - and there are venues for those of opposing views to air those disagreements - but I don't see how it extends to the former? Dude was being a loud mouthed dickhead, and made his viewpoint/opinion appear as though it could only be held by maniacs. I can't see anybody watching that and thinking "hey, that really really loud guy screaming a lot .. he must really be on to something!", and I can't imagine any television show letting itself be reduced to "welcome to 'So Much Noise From the Audience That You Can't Even Hear the Guests'!. And now, here's your host ..."

It's not an audience participation show. If it *was* and he had kicked someone off for *discussing* a point of view that he didn't agree with, I would think him supreme prick of the world and not worthy of any further attention. But it's not, and he didn't.

[nibbler]

Not trying to be cryptic; I thought the word turncoat was pretty straightforward.

Like Maher, Phil Donahue stood up for what he believed to be his America before AND after 9/11, and he also lost his TV show for it.

Donahue has refused to bend over and assist the Administration in spreading the big lie just so he can be on TV.

Thats Maher's role now. Lots of little truths, and the occasional backup of THE BIG LIE. Here's a TV show for you Mr. Maher. Good boy.

[ollie]

I thought Donahue was canned because his ratings sucked.

[nibbler]

Here's a reminder of Bill Maher back in the good ole days; and also a reminder of overwhelming pre 911 dissatisfaction with Bush. Some good musical guests too.

Edited October 29, 2007 by Guest

[nibbler]

Why Donahue was canned:

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

Thanks for that clip - I grew up on Donohue way, way back when, but don't remember this edge to him (he'd struck me more as a friendlier Jerry Springer type).

I don't know if I'd say Maher's lost any of his edge recently; I think it's more the case that he's unconvinced by the deliberate-collapse arguments. In terms of his personality, though, if he's affronted, he responds in kind, whatever the argument. I love this exchange, e.g.

Impeach Bush

[d_rawk]

I love how that line from Chomsky turned Donahue's life around. And it's a funny line from Chomsky, of all people, isn't it. 'Never trust the state'.

This forum can get pretty incestuous at times - our numbers are so few - but it is what I would like to coin as the 'birdy and d_rawk sitting in a tree' (ideologically. get your fucking head out of the gutter or meggo will bust your kneecaps) phenomenon.

Here's an article about that very night, from 2000.

Libertarians aren't supposed to like Noam Chomsky. For many classical liberals, mere mention of his name is enough to provoke a visceral rage, matched in intensity only by the fawning adulation he receives from so many of my crunchy comrades at NYU. But for years, his books have been a guilty pleasure of mine. So how could a nice free-market boy like me find himself curled up in bed (figuratively speaking) with the radical left's most notorious demagogue?

Let me answer by way of anecdote. I recently attended a 15th anniversary gala for FAIR, the ultra-left media watchdog group, at which Chomsky was the keynote speaker. He was introduced by the spectacle of Phil Donahue, visibly humbled after his ouster from stardom by the likes of Oprah and Springer, and clearly yearning, despite his professions of radicalism, to return to the womb of the Democratic Party. Old Phil was flung from the political mainstream, he explained, by his conversations with Chomsky, which began with a single sentence, still vivid in Donahue's mind: "Never trust . . ." Big corporations? Exploitative capitalists? Nope: "Never trust the state!"

This was an "applause line," but the crowd's response was palpably lukewarm: their animus was towards capitalism, and only secondarily towards the (current, ostensibly capitalist) state. Unlike his acolytes, who play at revolution by flying to WTO protests on daddy's credit card, Chomsky is the genuine article: an anarchist. (Well, a tenured anarchist, but close enough.) And believe it or not, that puts him a hell of a lot closer to libertarians than he or his groupies dare admit.

Don't buy it? Pop quiz: what magazine has Chomsky described as "for years the only journal I could publish in as long as it existed," with which he had "lots of beliefs and interests in common"? Some left wing rag, surely? Actually, it was Inquiry, published by the notoriously pinko Cato Institute, and edited by such dyed-in-the-wool communists as Ralph Raico, Doug Bandow, Williamson Evers, and Sheldon Richman . What about Chomsky's lecture Free Market Fantasies? That must be a thoroughly anti-libertarian polemic, right? Well, it's not exactly The Virtue of Selfishness, but oddly enough, his main argument is that many market advocates aren't consistent enough. The same business leaders who trumpet the benefits of laissez faire when seeking deregulation, Chomsky complains, are only too happy to run to mommy-state for bailouts or subsidies at the first sign of trouble. Chomsky seems much less concerned with the faults of capitalism as such, than with the extent to which current markets fall short of the ideal. In another lecture, Capital Rules, Chomsky faults libertarians for failing to see that corporate America is the "substance" of which overreaching government is merely the "shadow." There's a certain degree of truth there, and libertarians might've gained a valuable ally if Chomsky hadn't stopped short of realizing that the remedy isn't the abolition of markets, but rather a government too limited in power and scope to be worth buying on the market.

Turn to Chomsky's specialty, foreign policy. Admittedly, Chomsky is frequently hyperbolic, and focuses one-sidedly on the sins of the U.S., without looking at the context--particularly the context of Soviet aggression--in which many of them were committed. Still, much of his critique is difficult to distinguish from what a principled libertarian might say. With the bluntness of a Murray Rothbard, Chomsky relentlessly points out that terrorism and mass murder do not become any less heinous when practiced by governments, even our own, however many euphemisms our leaders coin for them. Chomsky says his guiding principle is that states should be held to the same standards that apply to individuals. Exactly right.

I don't mean to deny that Chomsky subscribes to (and promulgates) plenty of absurd and tiresome lefty dogma. (It's hard to keep a straight face when he suggests that the U.S. is hostile to Cuba because it fears poor countries will imitate Castro's "good example.") I do want to point out that the Chomskyite set may not be the irredeemable hive of evil they initially appear to be. In fact, many of them have the most essential characteristics of a proto-libertarian: a sense that mainstream politics is royally screwed up, and what Chomsky calls the "instinct for freedom."

Let me close with a final anecdote. A few summers ago, as an intern in Washington D.C., I joined a group of other young libertarians in a "counterprotest" of a Sierra Club demonstration. The crunchies were initially convinced that we were some sort of paid corporate shills. But when I engaged a few of them in calm conversation, they seemed genuinely interested in what I had to say. Nobody had ever suggested to them that market forces, unsullied by political jockeying for control of federally owned land, could protect the environment better than the EPA. Nobody had exposed them to an argument for free trade or "globalization" that wasn't a pathetic strawman. And what about a libertarian argument for third world debt relief? Why demonize corporate creditors when the most pertinent fact is that those debts were mostly incurred by despots, and not the people? These possibilites were, to them, new and fascinating.

Libertarians have spent so much of the last decade cozying up to conservatives that the snide characterization of us as "Republicans who smoke pot" is beginning to feel uncomfortably apt. This strategy has had some degree of success (in getting funding for our think tanks, at least), but has also left plenty of "low-hanging fruit" unplucked among the ranks of the student left. How many of these kids are only a copy of Economics in One Lesson away from realizing that markets, rather than statism in the guise of "democratic social justice", are the last, best hope of the world's poor? Remember, the late and very brilliant Robert Nozick started out a socialist, only to be brought around by a libertarian friend. For all we know, his successor is standing on a protest line now, waiting to be turned. If we don't soon get over our myopic focus on the right as a source of potential allies, we may have another Chomsky to grapple with instead.

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

Surely there's a band out there with the name, "Republicans Who Smoke Pot".