Two particularly peculiar bits of reasoning Friday night from Bill Maher on the season premiere of his HBO show, Real Time with Bill Maher, starting with his bizarre explanation for why Jared Lee Loughner was able to commit mass murder. After panelist Chrystia Freeland, global editor-at-large for Thomson Reuters, trumped how her native Canada has “universal health care,” Maher jumped in to assert:
Because we don't have government health care, that's one reason why a crazy person gets a gun because, you know what, it’s hard for a crazy person to get a job, so therefore it’s hard for them to get heath care in a country that doesn’t have government- (Audio: MP3 clip)
The conversation moved on and Maher never offered any further explanation, if there could even have been any which made any sense.
Earlier in the January 14 program, Maher expressed frustration that President Barack Obama would employ the same arguments as Sarah Palin as he twisted a Palin quote into a rationale to oppose intervention in Afghanistan:
This is what bothers me, is that his [Obama] quotes and some of Palin's quotes from Wednesday are interchangeable. He said “terrible things happen for reasons that defy human understanding.” Then he quoted Job. She said “acts of monstrous criminality stand on their own. They begin and end with the criminals who commit them.” Well, if that’s true, why are we in Afghanistan?
— Brent Baker is Vice President for Research and Publications at the Media Research Center. Click here to follow him on Twitter.
