CBS Stumbles Again
Though I'm no fan (to put it mildly) of Bill Maher's HBO self-love fest disguised as a talk show, there are times when he gets it right.
His previous half-hour show, the celebrity-populated and superficially provocative Politically Incorrect, was most often entertaining and sometimes even accidentally illuminating before Maher was tarred, feathered and dumped by ABC for making, well, a politically incorrect statement. Unfortunately, this began his slow descent into BDS, as if somehow the Bush Administration were to blame for the unpleasant taste of shoe leather in Maher's own big mouth, a delusion he appears to share with Howard Stern.
But I digress.
Maher got it very right during the Israel/Lebanon war when he refused to knuckle under to the Blame Israel faction of the Neo-Dems: "It strikes me that the world IS Mel Gibson. Most of the time, the anti-semitism is under control, but that demon lives inside and when the moon is full, or there's been enough alcohol consumed, or Israel is forced to kill people in its own defense, then it comes out."
He caught a bit of flack from the Hezbollah apologists for that one.
And now it seems, again, that he may have gotten it right by walking away from a CBS offer to appear on a "Free Speech" segment after they allegedly told him that he could talk about anything he wanted, except for what he wanted to talk about: i.e. religion.
Maher is outspoken about the dangers of clinging too tightly to the unknown (which, to me, is yet something else he's gotten right): "I think that religion stops people from thinking. I think it justifies crazies. I think flying planes into a building was a faith-based initiative. I think religion is a neurological disorder," he says.
And he has a point.
CBS denies Maher's version of events, of course, but their relationship to the facts has been called into question before, and the network didn't emerge looking too good then, either.