On Friday's Real Time show on HBO, liberal comedian Bill Maher and his guests made a number of incendiary comments about conservatives, including Maher joking that HIV is "what you (Donald Trump) get for sleeping with" Fox News host Sean Hannity.
He joined Bari Weiss of the New York Times and gay activist Dan Savage in blaming the NRA for school shootings, and Savage -- known for a history of incendiary attacks on conservatives -- hypocritically blamed President Trump for introducing "ugliness" and "poison" into the "body politic." As if Dan Savage can't do that on his own.
During the opening monologue, the liberal host joked about tweets that Trump might write to show approval toward Ebola, the Hawaii volcanic eruption, and the school shooting in Texas, which he referred to as "whatever the NRA wants."
A bit later, he joked about Trump not knowing the difference between the HPV and HIV viruses, and then cracked: "HPV -- that's what you get for sleeping with a porn star. HIV -- that's what you get for sleeping with Hannity."
As he began the panel segment, Maher suggested that President Trump was causing more school shootings and inciting bad behavior by Americans:
I feel like he's remaking this country into his own ugly image. We have had school shootings before, of course, but this is the sixteenth this year. That's the most ever. I read that November 9th -- the day after his election -- the most hate crimes ever reported that year. He calls immigrants animals. I saw this guy ranting about the -- the New York lawyer renting about "you're speaking Spanish."
After accusing the Republican party of using racist "dog whistles" for decades, Savage complained:
Trump has been the great disinhibitor -- and what he's disinhibited is a lot of ugliness that was under the surface and a little bottled up -- and should be bottled up because it's a poison. And Trump has just opened up the floodgates, and the poison is just coursing through the veins of our body politic.
Again, Savage is one of the last public figures who should lecture anyone else about civility given his history of targeting former Republican Senator Rick Santorum with an online smear campaign and suggesting that another conservative "should be dragged behind a pickup truck until there's nothing left but the road."
He even once wrote an article bragging about visiting a Republican campaign headquarters and licking door knobs in an attempt to spread the flu.
Weiss soon jumped in to make her own contribution to vilifying Trump and the NRA:
Well, the NRA has grabbed -- has Donald Trump grabbed by the pussy, okay, and it is absolutely appalling the fact that we are not trying to do everything possible to try and stop these shootings is disgusting. You have to be 25 years old to rent a car. Why don't you have to be 25 years old to buy a gun?
Savage soon declared that "this is something that f---ing happens every day in this country because of the NRA and the GOP."
