Maher: Afghanistan should wake up the “woke” Left on America (Spoiler: it won’t)

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.

Proposal: Alternate acceptable way to sing the National Anthem

America’s National Anthem, The Star-Spangled Banner, is hard to sing for most Americans, which makes it not a good choice for National Anthem. Hardly anyone can hit the highs and lows right and those who can are too often compelled to butcher it with by showing off their range in the up and down points.

There is a solution though, and it doesnt involve scrapping the Spangled Banner for a different song: Just sing it differently. I have been in favor of this since kindergarden but in 2015 when Stephen Colbert opened up his new gig as host of the Late Show with exactly this type of re-tuning rendition, all my years of think-singing it differently in my head was confirmed.

In the cold-open to his first show, titled Play Ball, Colbert sings, via multi-location montage from various places and with various people, the Anthem in a way that is goofy for comedic affect, but has a real life implication of accommodating a non-singers vocal range. Throughout the song he is accompanied by singers with talent at singing the anthem in its traditional inflections and the 2 together harmonize wonderfully.

Colberts joke should be the nations reality…

Can you not imagine this being a for-real thing? Each individual in the crowd being able to choose the gifted-singer’s version or the common-mans version and either way – or both together – sounding just wonderful? This should be a thing. I think this should be a legitimate option introduced by official government decree that there are 2 acceptable ways to sing the anthem: the traditional way, and this altered inflection way.

Zombies vs Vampires

Since the nations birthing when the undead Colonists won the war against bloody England, the fight has raged on domestically between the vampires and the zombies. In the beginning there was the Werewolf party but when they couldn’t cut it any more, zombie Lincoln entered the stage to fight against the vampire insurgency and win the battle to keep the union intact.

this bar graph shows the effect political parties in the US government have over which is more popular..

You’re doing it wrong: 21% of self-proclaimed atheists in US believe in a higher power

Another poll confirming that the overwhelming majority of Americans believe in God. Even the atheists??

Most Americans believe that angels and demons are active in the world, and nearly 80 percent think miracles occur, according to a poll released yesterday that takes an in-depth look at Americans’ religious beliefs.
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Most Americans Believe in Higher Power, Poll Finds
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Monday, June 23 at 2:30 p.m. ET: Pew Forum Survey on Religion in America
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Pew Religious Survey
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The study detailed Americans’ deep and broad religiosity, finding that 92 percent believe in God or a universal spirit — including one in five of those who call themselves atheists. More than half of Americans polled pray at least once a day.

But Americans aren’t rigid about their beliefs. Most of those studied — even many of the most religiously conservative — have a remarkably nonexclusive attitude toward other faiths. Seventy percent of those affiliated with a religion believe that many religions can lead to eternal salvation. And only about one-quarter of those surveyed believe there is only one way to interpret their religion’s teachings.

Atheist Pamphlets