Maher Marred by Misquote

Like many of you, I don't watch Politically Incorrect very often. Heck, it goes up against a rerun of the Peabody Award-winning Daily Show, not a tough choice in my book. So normally I don't tune in to Politically Incorrect and watch Cornell's own Bill Maher '78 lead roundtable, no-holds-barred discussions on current events. The show does not have a reputation for actually causing a current event, but last Monday, that changed. Maher might just have shown that our generation is headed for its own McCarthy-esque Red Scare.

On his Sept. 17 show, Maher talked about the recent terrorist attacks with his panel. One panelist said that the terrorist hijackers were warriors, not cowards. Maher agreed, "We have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly."

For that statement, Politically Incorrect lost commercial sponsors and no longer airs in some parts of the country.

Irate viewers called the show's advertisers on Tuesday morning to say that Maher had called members of the American military cowards. A Houston radio station demanded Politically Incorrect be taken off the air. In a matter of days, KSFY in Sioux City, KLKN in Lincoln and WOI-TV 5 in Des Moines all yanked the show off their schedules. Sears and FedEx distanced themselves from Maher's viewpoints by pulling their commercials from the show. What the stations and advertisers inadvertently did was punish Maher for a misinterpreted statement.

A few days later, Maher clarified his stance. "I never meant to imply nor have I ever thought that our actual servicemen are cowardly... it's our government, it's our politicians, who have been cowardly in not letting the military do their job." Sounds like a reasonable statement that actually compliments the United States military. Yet Sears, FedEx, KSFY, KLKN and WOI-TV 5 are still sitting on the sidelines.

Now I completely disagree with anyone who calls American military personnel "cowards," but I respect the right to hold and share that viewpoint. So even if Maher meant to call members of the American military the c-word, I believe in the First Amendment and will let him speak his mind. And yet Maher is being punished for spreading that belief, a belief he says he does not even hold.

In other words, Maher is the victim of a witch hunt. This brings to mind a famous widespread bullying from just a few generations ago -- Joe McCarthy's character-destroying investigations of "communists" in the 1950s. Will America again shun those with dissenting opinions and jump to conclusions about those it fears?

It is our duty to stand by Maher, to stop people from running his character into the ground. Half a century ago, Americans stood idly by while Joe McCarthy ruined the reputations of countless people. The nation was concerned about communists, with good reason considering the unstable status of the world. McCarthy played on this fear for his own political gain, aggressively pursuing anybody he suspected might be a communist. The communist threat was real, but McCarthy overstepped the bounds of decency in his quest to defend America.

Could Maher's treatment be a warning sign for an impending repeat of the Red Scare? We as Americans must be careful that we do not turn our heightened defensive state into justification for the mistreatment of those different from us, either in background or in beliefs. Across the nation Arab-Americans and Indian-Americans have been assaulted because of their race. In Minnesota, three men of Middle Eastern descent were kicked off Northwest Airlines Flight 673 because of their ethnicity. Mosques and temples have been torched. Those unwilling to support an all-out assault on Afghanistan are treated like unpatriotic outsiders. How long until we roundup these "undesirables" and toss them into internment camps?

Bill Maher probably will not be thrown into an internment camp for his beliefs, or what others perceive to be his beliefs, but his situation raises questions we need to answer. Will we respect those we disagree with? Will we mistreat those of Arab-American descent? Will we prosecute and persecute those we are scared of?

The terrorists who attacked America hate us because of our freedom. We have the freedom to say what we want, to worship as we please and to disagree with each other without fear of reprisal. Unless we watch our step, history will repeat itself and our nation will rescind those liberties. Make no mistake about it, we are in a fight against terrorism, but more importantly we are in a battle to defend our way of life. And if we choose to revoke people's freedoms when we find it convenient, then we have already lost the war.

Now I completely disagree with anyone who calls American military personnel "cowards," but I respect the right to hold and share that viewpoint.

Fine. Corporations are also entitled to be associated with anybody they want to as well. Or would the author force them to sponsor Maher.

I wonder where this author was when John Rocker was being crucified. Oh that's right, the liberal press was calling for everything but his public execution.

No, that would the Stalinism of political correctness. As practiced by your pals for the last two, three decades.

And if we choose to revoke people's freedoms when we find it convenient, then we have already lost the war.

I can't stand these people. Denying freedom is a way of life for libs, and now he wants to cry about some strawman.

I responded to a post like this earlier with this thought:

Sure, there's freedom of speech. You can say any darn thing you like. At the same time, while the government is not suppossed to inhibit your right, there are social consequences to acting like a complete ass. This is the sitation in the case of Bill Maher. He acted like a complete idiot, which while consistant for his behavior, is completely socially unacceptable at this point in time. One would think that Darwinistic instincts might overcome the urge to make a complete ass of himself, but in this case such did not come into play.

The left would have us believe that any behavior is socially acceptable at any given time. Fortunately, society is showing that to be a complete falsehood. Maher is reaping the consequences of behavior that borders upon giving support and comfort to the enemy. This is the type of behavior that typically results in getting your bitch-ass kicked any time you have the gall to show your pimply face in public after making such remarks. Yes, there is freedom of speech in America. It is alive and well, and you have your free will that you may excercise in enjoying this right. You are also going to be held in account by the standards that society holds in the execution of this right and you will be judged by how you use it. This factor of accountability is always what seems to upset the left. Bill Maher is just one example of what is to come. The left is only beginning to learn just how wrong they've been about America all these years.

Bill Maher echoed the same sentiments as Washington Times conservative columnist Fred Reed. Here is Fred's column which ran before Maher's comments. You can check out his other columns here.

The World Trade Center

The Price Of Pansyhood

A few unorganized thoughts regarding the events in New York:

(1) We lost. Our moral posturing about our degradation is merely embarrassing. We have been made fools of, expertly and calculatedly, in the greatest military defeat the country has suffered since we fled from Viet Nam. The Moslem world is laughing and dancing in the streets. The rest of the earth, while often sympathetic, sees us as the weak and helpless nation that we are.

The casualty figures aren't in, but 10,000 dead seems reasonable, and we wring our hands and speak of grief therapy.

We lost.

(2) We cannot stop it from happening again. Thousands of aircraft constantly use O'Hare, a few minutes flying time from the Sears Tower.

(3) Our politicians and talking heads speak of "a cowardly act of terrorism." It was neither cowardly nor, I think, terrorism. Hijacking an aircraft and driving it into a building isn't cowardly. Would you do it? It requires great courage and dedication -- which our enemies have, and we do not. One may mince words, but to me the attack looked like an act of war. Not having bombing craft of their own, they used ours. When we bombed Hanoi and Hamburg, was that terrorism?

(4) The attack was beautifully conceived and executed. These guys are good. They were clearly looking to inflict the maximum humiliation on the United States, in the most visible way possible, and they did. The sight of those two towers collapsing will leave nobody's mind. If we do nothing of importance in return, and it is my guess that we won't, the entire earth will see that we are a nation of epicenes. Silly cruise-missile attacks on Afghanistan will just heighten the indignity.

(5) In watching the coverage, I was struck by the tone of passive acquiescence. Not once, in hours of listening, did I hear anyone express anger. No one said, coldly but in deadly seriousness, "People are going to die for this, a whole lot of people." There was talk of tracking down bin Laden and bringing him to justice. "Terrorism experts" spoke of months of investigation to find who was responsible, which means we will do nothing. Blonde bimbos babbled of coping strategies and counseling and how our children needed support. There was no talk of retaliation.

(6) The Israelis, when hit, hit back. They hit back hard. But Israel is run by men. We are run by women. Perhaps two-thirds of the newscasters were blonde drones who spoke of the attack over and over as a tragedy, as though it had been an unusually bad storm -- unfortunate, but inevitable, and now we must get on with our lives. The experts and politicians, nominally male, were effeminate and soft little things. When a feminized society runs up against male enemies -- and bin Laden, whatever else he is, is a man -- it loses. We have.

(7) We haven't conceded that the Moslem world is our enemy, nor that we are at war. We see each defeat and humiliation in isolation, as a unique incident unrelated to anything else. The 241 Marines killed by the truck bomb in Beirut, the extended humiliation of the hostages taken by Iran, the war with Iraq, the bombing of the Cole, the destruction of the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the devastation of the Starke, the Saudi barracks, the dropping of airliner after airliner -- these we see as anecdotes, like pileups of cars on a snowy road. They see these things as war.

We face an enemy more intelligent than we are.

(8) We think we are a superpower. Actually we are not, except in the useless sense of having nuclear weapons. We could win an air war with almost anyone, yes, or a naval war in mid-Pacific. Few Americans realize how small our forces are today, how demoralized and weakened by social experimentation. If we had to fight a ground war in terrain with cover, a war in which we would take casualties, we would lose.

(9) I have heard some grrr-woofwoofery about how we should invade Afghanistan and teach those ragheads a lesson. Has anyone noticed where Afghanistan is? How would we get there? Across Pakistan, a Moslem country? Or through India? Do we suppose Iran would give us overflight rights to bomb another Moslem country? Or will our supply lines go across Russia through Turkmenistan? Do we imagine that we have the airlift or sealift? What effect do we think bombing might have on Afghanistan, a country that is essentially rubble to begin with?

We backed out of Somalia, a Moslem country, when a couple of GIs got killed and dragged through the streets on TV. Afghans are not pansies. They whipped the Russians. Our sensitive and socially-conscious troops would curl up in balls.

(10) To win against a more powerful enemy, one forces him to fight a kind of war for which he isn't prepared. Iraq lost the Gulf War because it fought exactly the kind of war in which American forces are unbeatable: Hussein played to his weaknesses and our strengths. The Vietnamese did the opposite. They defeated us by fighting a guerrilla war that didn't give us anything to hit. They understood us. We didn't understand them.

The Moslem world is doing the same thing. Because their troops, or terrorists as we call them, are not sponsored by a country, we don't know who to hit. Note that Yasser Arafat, bin Laden, and the Taliban are all denying any part in the destruction of New York. At best, we might, with our creaky intelligence apparatus, find Laden and kill him. It's not worth doing: Not only would he have defeated America as nobody ever has, but he would then be a martyr. Face it: The Arabs are smarter than we are.

(11) We are militarily weak because we have done what we usually do: If no enemy is immediately in sight, we cut our forces to the bone, stop most R&D, and focus chiefly on sensitivity training about homosexuals. When we need a military, we don't have one. Then we are inutterably surprised.

(12) The only way we could save any dignity and respect in the world be to hit back so hard as to make teeth rattle around the world. A good approach would be to have NSA fabricate intercepts proving that Libya was responsible, mobilize nationally, invade, and make Libya permanently a US colony. Most Arab countries are militarily helpless, and that is the only kind our forces could defeat. Doing this, doing anything other than whimpering, would require that ancient military virtue known as "balls." Does Katie Couric have them?

www.fredoneverything.net

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