Bill Maher is Back

The first show of the new Bill Maher season premiered last Friday. I missed it Friday but caught the replay on Monday night.

Bill had interviews with Russell Feingold and Fred Barnes, a conservative commentator that has written a book claiming that George Bush is a “rebel.” The roundtable consisted of actor Eddie Griffin, reporter Helen Thomas and Iraq advisor Dan Senor as the conservative sacrificial lamb.

The interview with Russ focused first upon campaign finance reform as brought about by the McCain-Feingold bill and then upon the tendency of the Bush administration to assume powers for itself in defiance of both law and tradition. The format consisted of Maher flipping up fungo balls for Russ to whack. I thought Russ did pretty well (how could he not with Maher playing shill?) until he brought the Democratic Party into the conversation. Yes Russ, you need to be a loyal Democrat BUT let’s not remind everyone about that too often.

Hmmm, McCain-Feingold, what a presidential ticket that would make. Then in eight years we could go with Feingold-Obama for the next eight years. That would work for me.

Fred Barnes’ book is entitled “Rebel-in-Chief: How George W. Bush Is Redefining the Conservative Movement and Transforming America.” Fred Barnes is one of the bobbing talking heads at Fox News and his book is a yay-yay Dubyah treatise worthy of Harriet Miers (Oh George (*clutches hands and blinks eyelids rapidly*)).

In response to Bill’s incredulous attitude about Dubyah being a “rebel” while still putting the welfare of big business ahead of the welfare of us poor schnooks working for a pay check, Barnes claimed that Bush was rebelling against the political establishment and the foreign policy establishment.

Yo, Freddie, being incompetent in domestic and foreign affairs isn’t rebelling, it’s just being ignorant and/or dumb. You should have entitled your book “Rebel without a Brain.” That would have made a lot more sense and maybe you would have gotten better than a two star review.

In the roundtable, Dan Senor tried to defend the disappearance of $9 billion in Iraq by saying we couldn’t wait until we had 1st World accounting procedures in place. How about a few thousand laptops with Excel running just to keep track of who got what? We could have done the formal accounting later. You can get a decent laptop for $500 so ten thousand of them would have cost about $5 million which is a drop in the bucket compared to $9 billion!

On the other hand, Senor spent 15 months in Iraq and I'll listen to anyone who's done that, and I understand that often things are much easier said than done, but $9 billion? Come on!

I do give Dan credit for making the point that the press corps tends to focus on trivia. As an example he pointed out the tremendous amount of interest in the Dick Cheney shooting incident to the exclusion of everything else that was occurring at the same time. Helen Thomas seemed to disagree. Yes Helen, the Vice President shooting someone is news but not to the exclusion of more important events. I have to agree with Senor on this one. This is another symptom of the American Press abdicating its responsibilities to the Republic. It’s so much easier to focus on trivia than substance.

As for Bill’s New Rules, the most important was Bill making the point that most American’s have “given the finger” to privacy a long time ago so we shouldn’t be all that upset at the NSA listening in on conversations if it can prevent the explosion of a nuclear device in an American city.

Perhaps, but I’d still like to be able to control how much of my privacy I surrender. The fact that I reveal some things in a blog doesn’t mean there isn’t a whole bunch of stuff I keep to myself.