Bill Maher, the one true liberal?
by digby
My post for Salon today discusses some recent Bill Maher comments that truly are startling. If he hadn’t made such a fetish out of the Islamic fundamentalist threat one might just dismiss it as a case of lazy rhetoric. But in the context of everything else he’s been saying lately it’s worth looking at:
When he is defending his sweeping condemnation of the Muslim religion, Bill Maher inevitably proclaims himself to be “the real liberal” implying that those who don’t see things his way are impure in some way. He’s said it numerous times on his show and in interviews such as the one he did here at Salon with Elias Isquith claiming that standing on liberal principles (as he defines them) even against people who are oppressed minorities is what makes him “the liberal in this debate.”
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But how to explain his latest comments defending the comments of Benjamin Netanyahu in the final days of the Israeli election complaining, “Arab voters are going en masse to the polls, left-wing NGOs are bringing them on buses.” Maher said:“I guess that is racist, in the strictest sense — he’s bringing race into the equation. But, first of all, like Reagan didn’t win races with racism? Or Nixon? Or Bush? Like they didn’t play the race card? Reagan opened his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, remember that? Remember Willie Horton?”
Real liberals don’t say that racism doesn’t work. It’s that it’s wrong. But he didn’t stop there:
“I heard a lot of commentators here say, it would been as if Mitt Romney, in 2012, on the eve of the election said, ‘black voters are coming out in droves to the polls. But I don’t know if that’s really a great analogy. I think that would be a good analogy if America was a country that was surrounded by 12 or 13 completely black nations who had militarily attacked us many times, including as recently as last year. Would we let them vote? I don’t know. When we were attacked by the Japanese, we didn’t just not let them vote, we rounded them up and put them in camps.”
I’ve got a better analogy for him. Not too long ago there was a nation run by white people, surrounded by “black nations” and filled with oppressed black citizens who were very hostile to it. It is called South Africa. And principled liberals didn’t think their system was such a great idea and they certainly defend the white South African overlords simply because they felt afraid of losing power. Ronald Reagan did, as did most right wingers. And so did the other Republicans who Maher mentions using racist language to get elected. Liberals, on the other hand, believed that black South Africans should have full citizenship. Certainly they thought trying to prevent black people from voting, whether over there or here, was a very illiberal thing to do. Liberals were on the right side of history on that one.
Interning the Japanese was an immoral blight on America’s record for which the nation apologized and made reparations. The president who signed that reparations bill was none other than Ronald Reagan. The internment happened more than 70 years ago during a period when open racism was a normal part of American society. Today, the only people who support such a horror are Maher’s right wing buddy Ann Coulter and her fellow travellers like Michelle Malkin.