It’s a nice sentiment but if 9/11 didn’t wake up the woke (instead if blossomed fields of woke mobs) then Afghanistans reality is unlikely to click any lightbulbs. Still, he tried. And its commendable since he’s talking against the grain with his audience instead of stroking them in the ways their spoiled sensibilities expect to be massaged by figures like him.
“We Americans should really get some perspective on where we live,” Bill Maher declares before going into an obligatory 90 seconds dunking on conservatives for being patriotic in order to set the tone and then saying the obvious:
“We’re not the bad guys. Oppression is what we were trying to stop in Afghanistan. We failed, but any immigrant will tell you we’ve largely succeeded here. And yet, the overriding thrust of current ‘woke’ ideology is America is rotten to the core, irredeemably racist from the moment it was founded and so oppressive, sexist and homophobic we can’t find a host for the Oscars or ‘Jeopardy!’”.
“And this is where your new [Afghan] roommates that you took in will prove so valuable because they’ll turn to you and say ‘Have you people lost your fkking minds?!?…
Have you ever heard of honor killings,
public beheadings,
throwing gay men off of roofs,
arranged marriages to minors,
state-sanctioned wife-beating,
female genital mutilation,
marriage by capture?
Because we have.’”“What’s the lesson of Afghanistan. Maybe it’s that everyone from the giant dorm room b—- session that is the internet should take a good look at what real oppression looks like,” Maher continued. “Ask your maid, ask your Uber driver, ask the Asian woman giving you a massage. … America may not be the country of your faculty lounge and Twitter dreams, but no one here tries to escape by hanging on to an airplane. No, we wait ’til we get inside the plane to fight – and only because they cut off the beverage service.”
PS: The part in the video about Justice John Roberts essentially saying that “the south was ready for the honor system [but they weren’t]” is a reference to a Supreme Court ruling a couple months ago (July 2021) that two provisions of an Arizona voting law that restricted the how ballots can be cast do not violate the Voting Rights Act, because, well – they don’t. At all. Which I explain at length here.
Ed Morrisey further rebutted Maher’s criticism of Conservative patriotism, noting that references to former Speaker Boehner who used to cry at mentions of American opportunity afforded to working class people a lot are as bout as timely as the Macarena, adding:
Maher takes the easy slams on conservatives’ expressive patriotism and the obligatory audience-pleasing shots at Donald Trump — and George Bush, for just criticizing him almost two decades ago — which tend to undercut his own argument on perspective. The Trump lawsuit is much more recent and had to be a legal headache (and certainly is worthy of Maher’s scorn here), but criticism from one of your frequent targets is part of the job, no? And on that score, why bring up Bush in 2021 if you’re arguing for perspective? Why bring up Boehner at all? Couldn’t Maher and his team find an example of excessive patriotic fervor from sometime over the past ten years? If not, maybe that’s not a point worth making.
The same goes for ripping Kristi Noem for riding on a horse to celebrate a major cultural event — the Sturgis rally. Maher didn’t include that as a criticism of her participation in the event during the pandemic, which has been a point of controversy, but merely for holding an American flag while riding the horse. Perhaps that’s overweening patriotism in Maher’s eyes, but even so it hardly equates to the witch-hunt atmosphere that pushed Kevin Hart out of an Oscars hosting gig. To quote the famed philosopher Jules Winnfield, that “ain’t the same f***ing ballpark, it ain’t the same f***ing league, it ain’t even the same f***ing sport.” It’s a rhetorical reach that should have resulted in emergency rotator-cuff surgery for Maher.
But the fact remains that Maher didn’t have to point out that we’re not the bad guys here, and he did anyway. and deserves some kudos at least.
