A truly extraordinary event happened on HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher" Friday evening: the host, in the first show of the new season delayed as a result of the Hollywood writers' strike, began the program bashing Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) for faking a teary moment in a New Hampshire diner Monday.
Maybe even more astounding, Hillary's charade was a central focus of Maher's monologue, as well as the entire program during which he questioned the sanity of voters who bought into her crying game hook, line and sinker.
Readers are cautioned to hold on tightly to their seats, for this was how Friday's show began (video available here courtesy our friend Ms Underestimated):
Ladies and gentlemen, much like Hillary Clinton, I finally come before you tonight without armor, no writers, no one putting words in my mouth, I'm going to speak from the heart, and hopefully by listening to you, I will find my own voice (begins crying.)
I'm not kidding, folks. That's how the show began.
Keep those seatbelts fastened, because he continued with this line of attack:
I don't get this. Hillary Clinton's been bragging all year long that she's been doing this for 35 years - but she just found her voice on Tuesday? There's a medical term for this: slow learner!
Wouldn't it be wonderful if the media that fell all over themselves Monday and Tuesday aiding and abetting this canard would have been so skeptical about her performance?
Regardless of the answer, Maher was just getting warmed up:
These are challenging times for the politically correct, I mean, don't blame me for being sexist, because I read this in the New York Times that Hillary Clinton was going to lose New Hampshire, and then she cried and people voted for her especially the women. They wanted to see the robot cry. That's what it was. It was like P.T. Barnum, "See the robot cry." She broke the fourth wall. She cried, and then there was blood on the Son. But I've heard of electing a president you want to have a beer with. But, electing a president you want to have a good cry with? I mean, it's not a serious country. And I noticed that it was the exact right amount of crying. Did you see that? I mean, it wasn't like a full tear, people would have been like, "Oh, come on, that's glycerin! That's bullshit!" It was just, it was like, if it was any more crying, it would have been like Howard Dean's scream.
[...]
And the timing of the crying was a little suspicious. I mean, she's been in public life all this time, she never once cried. On the day before her entire career was on the line, the crying comes. So, who do I more believe, Hillary's cry or Roger Clinton's denial? I gotta go with Roger on that one. I really do.
Amazing, wouldn't you agree? But he wasn't finished:
And you know that this cry was all prompted by a question that Hillary got, she was in a diner, where she eats most of her meals. And a woman said to her, "I just want to know, how do you do it?" You know, and Hillary went through this long teary response about how it was personal for her, and she was there to fight for us, and then the woman said, "No, I just mean your hair. How do you do your hair?"
Tough to believe, don't you agree? Wouldn't it have been marvelous if the real press would have shown such skepticism concerning the authenticity of this event rather than the sycophancy Americans were largely treated to by supposedly impartial journalists?
But don't unfasten those seatbelts just yet, for later on in the program, during the panel discussion, Maher had more to say on this issue:
Let's assume that there was a sixteen point change, okay, because Obama was up as much as thirteen points in, in some polls that I read. Okay, and that seems to be because, again, Hillary did have a crying moment, the, the night before. Are we a serious people?...Are we serious people if someone can cry, and the next day people go, "Well, she finally cried, she's got my vote? She showed some emotion. She's a human." What kind of criteria is that?
Exactly, and that's been my feeling since the moment I saw this disingenuous display change the results in New Hampshire: what kind of criteria to be president is crying over one's own misfortune?
More importantly, why weren't more media members asking that very question rather than enabling her charade? And, other than those on the right, why did it take someone like Bill Maher to be willing to discuss the empress's poor attire?
Bravo, Bill.
As I have stated here on several occasions, I used to be a big fan of Maher's when his show "Politically Incorrect" was on Comedy Central. If this is the kind of balance this program is going to have without his writers - readers should be advised that he was guilty of a lot of Bush-bashing during this program, as well as an anti-GOP conspiracy theory reported earlier by the Media Research Center's Brent Baker - I hope the strike never ends.
After all, comedians should be equal opportunity offenders if they don't want to appear biased. For the most part, "Real Time" has been a 60-minute Bush and Republican bash since its inception.
With that in mind, if this wasn't just a rare deviation from the typical modus operandi of this program, and Maher is going to go back to his old format of lampooning people of all political stripes who are deserving of such, this could be a very happy new year indeed.
