"We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away.
That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want
about it, it's not cowardly."
Bill Maher, September 17, 2001
"We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away.
That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want
about it, it's not cowardly."
Bill Maher, September 17, 2001
2002-10-18
People’s lives and fortunes [have] been relinquished to renegade judges – a robed, contemptuous intellectual elite. Judicial despotism. . .stands like a behemoth over this great land.” John Ashcroft, renegade Attorney General of the United States, in a 1997 speech.
Let's see. America is good and Iraq is bad, and Osama is bad.
Iraq is bad because Saddam Hussein is a dictator. A dictator is a man who rules without consent of the governed. Hmm, sort of like John Ashcroft, who was turned out by voters in Missouri who didn't trust him to be their senator, but then got put in charge of all the laws and courts in the land by George Bush Jr. In fact, Ashcroft was defeated by a corpse: the ex-governor Mel Carnahan.
But I digress. I'm thinking of Bill Maher, one of the few, very few, oh so very few minds on television that seems to speak his. (Don Cherry is the other, but we won't get into whether a mind is worth being spoken).
Now, I'll bet most people think there is a very strong consensus in this country that war is good, capitalism is great, taxes are evil, Kyoto is the product of environmental extremists, and it is better to spend money on a $2 billion dollar airplane designed to defend us against nobody than on hungry children in our own inner cities. You would have to think there is this strong consensus because all the television networks and major newspapers parrot this point of view incessantly.
The mother of all of these politically correct views is that America was attacked by Al Qaeda for no good reason at all, because America is a force for goodness and freedom in the world, and Al Qaeda are nothing but evil, envious, fanatical Moslems who hate us because we are good.. Since we are good, we are courageous, honest, pure and true. Since they are evil, Al Qaeda members are cowardly, dishonest, and mean.
Why the uniformity of political views in the U.S. media? That's easy. The networks and newspapers are owned by fabulously large corporations. For example, ABC television is owned by Disney Corp. Disney Corp. wanted Congress to extend copyright protection on Mickey Mouse by about 20 years (?). Do you think any ABC newscasters or editorialists would dare to editorialize against this stupid proposal (which was passed, of course, but is now before the Supreme Court)? Not likely.
Don't be fooled by the fact that you don't hear about, say, Peter Jennings getting fired because he wanted to do an editorial about it but was told he couldn't. They would rarely be so crass. No, it's more subtle and clever than that, but just as explicitly purposeful. Reporters are hired and promoted through a system that consciously weeds out anyone who rocks the boat. The question, why is Peter Jennings the man doing the newscast? And the answer is: because he has proven through years of reliable mainstream reporting that he is a reliably safe conformist. If Peter Jennings, for example, took it into his sweet little head that the Patriot Act was undemocratic, a simple phone call from the White House would convince him that there was, at least, serious debate about the issue, and that there is certainly no call for outrage or anger.
There are exceptions. It's a crazy world, but once in a blue moon a guy like Bill Maher accidentally slips through the cracks in the system and gets to have his own television show -- "Politically Incorrect".
Yes, "Politically Incorrect". That's rich. Firstly, you have a television show that adopts as it's title the term for ideas and opinions that cannot be expressed publicly because some, presumably self-appointed, power will suppress it. So you are led to believe that this program is actually going to defy the establishment and express some controversial opinions.
Bill Maher did. He said he thought "we" were cowardly, launching cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. He made the point that piloting a jet into a building, whatever else you might think about it, isn't "cowardly".
You could quibble or not quibble, but Sears and FedEx immediately cancelled their sponsorship of the show.
ABC Television, which is owned by Disney, for the record, claims that declining ratings are the real reason the show was dropped. Since they had attempted to replace it, and Nightline, earlier (with Letterman, if he had signed on), you can't totally ridicule their position.
Maher will be missed, however. More important than any particular thing that he said is the fact that "Politically Incorrect" was one of very, very few programs that featured lively, controversial, unscripted discussions on current political issues.
When you check out what passes for political "discussion" on the other networks, you'll shed a tear for that.
Copyright © 2002 Bill Van Dyk All rights reserved.