Bill Maher v.s. Sanity

I just found this video of Bill Maher’s commentary on Jon Stewart’s “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.” It’s a bizarre mix of a few good points and a lot of partisan hackery, so I thought I’d add some commentary. And, really, Bill Maher just makes me feel like ranting.

With all due respect to my friends Jon and Stephen, it seems to me that if you really wanted to come down on the side of restoring sanity and reason, you’d side with the sane and the reasonable, and not try to pretend that the insanity is equally distributed in both parties.

It’s not okay to talk bullshit just because the other side spews even more bullshit. You don’t have to have an opinion on how the bullshit is distributed across the parties to know that you don’t want to get any on you.

But the message of the rally, as I heard it, was that if the media would just stop giving voice to the crazies on both sides then maybe we could restore sanity. It was all non-partisan and urged cooperation with the moderates on the other side, forgetting that Obama tried that and found out there are no moderates on the other side.

If by “moderates,” Bill Maher means people who will roll over and give Obama whatever he wants without getting something in return, then that’s probably true. And the other side feels exactly the same way, I’m sure. After all, with the Democrats controlling the White House and both Houses of Congress, I’m sure they haven’t exactly been accomodating to Republican interests.

When Jon announced his rally, he said that the national conversation is dominated by people on the right who believe Obama is a socialist and people on the left who believe 9/11 was an inside job, but I can’t name any Democratic leaders who think 9/11 was an inside job, but Republican leaders who think Obama’s a socialist? All of them: McCain, Boehner, Cantor, Palin. All of them.

The real problem here is that Jon Stewart and Bill Maher are both subject to their own liberal biases. I don’t usually throw around loaded phrases like “liberal bias,” so let me explain.

When I lived with my parents, they used to get into some fierce family arguments, and whenever I happened to think my mother was wrong, she always asked me, accusingly, “Why are you taking his side?”

I never did come up with a good answer, because I thought the question was unfair. I wasn’t taking my dad’s side. I was taking the side that I thought was correct. As far as I was concerned, my dad and I were only on the same side because we were both on the right side. My mother never considered that, because she thought she was on the right side.

Now Bill Maher sees that a lot of Republicans think Obama is a socialist, and he concludes that they’re all insane. He’s making the same assumptions as my mom was. He’s ignoring the possibility that Republican leaders think Obama is a socialist because he is, in fact, a socialist. Bill Maher is a liberal, so to him, that seems wrong. That seems insane.

Jon Stewart also has the same liberal viewpoint, which is probably why thinking Obama is a socialist seems just as crazy as thinking Bush planned the murder of 3000 people on 9/11. But it’s not quite that crazy.

I know, I know. Obama isn’t a Socialist socialist. He’s not a member of a socialist party, and he doesn’t advocate government ownership of the means of production. But if you’re willing to accept that his opponents are bending the definition as a bit of political hyperbole, to attract attention to what they see as Obama’s bad policies, then they’ve got a point.

Obama may not have plans to transfer all corporate capital to the government, but his healthcare reform plan is something of a takeover of the the health insurance industry. The goverment won’t actually become the owner of these insurance companies, but there’s clearly going to be a lot of regulation, and a lot of business decisions that used to be made by the insurance companies will now be made by one of the many regulatory bodies created by the new reform laws.

That’s kind of what American socialism looks like: We keep the private companies around, but we subsidize them, tax them, and regulate them so much that they are essentially owned by the government. Joe Biden’s beloved Amtrak is a prime example, as were Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. And don’t forget, Obama did nationalize a couple of automobile manufacturers.

As another example of both sides using overheated rhetoric, Jon cited the right equating Obama with Hitler, and the left calling Bush a war criminal. Except thinking Obama is like Hitler is utterly unfounded, but thinking Bush is a war criminal–that’s the opinion of General Anthony Taguba, who headed the Army’s investigation into Abu Ghraib.

So Maher’s defense of calling Bush a war criminal is that somebody else has also called him a war criminal? I haven’t been following the issue closely and don’t know what Taguba’s report really says, so maybe that’s stronger than it sounds. Some bad things certainly happened, and it’s possible Bush has some kind of direct responsibility for them. After all, he did just admit to approving waterboarding.

But if George Bush is a war criminal, or if there are war criminals in his administration, then Obama seems to be covering up for them. After his election victory, someone on the change.gov website asked him if he would appoint a special prosecutor to investigate crimes within the Bush administration, and here’s his response:

We’re still evaluating how we’re going to approach the whole issue of interrogations, detentions, and so forth. And obviously we’re going to be looking at past practices and I don’t believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand, I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards. … My orientation is going to be moving foward.

Looking forward sounds great, but it also means nobody has been looking into the alleged crimes of the Bush administration–certainly nothing much has come to light so far. Either Bush’s people never got involved in war crimes, or Obama is helping to cover them up. As evidence for the latter, consider that Obama’s administration is using “state secrets” claims to stop lawsuits by Binyam Mohamed and Maher Arar, both of whom claim to have been tortured as a result of U.S. policies under Bush.

Back to Bill Maher:

Republicans… You see, Republicans keep staking out a position that is further and further right, and then demand Democrats meet them in the middle, which is now not the middle anymore. That’s the reason healthcare reform is so watered down. It’s Bob Dole’s old plan from 1994.

This is more than a little disingenuous. When it came to healthcare reform, Republicans would have been happy to leave things the way they were. It’s the Democrats that wanted to make a lot of changes. The resulting healthcare reform act was a compromise that made some changes–not as many as the Democrats wanted, but more than the Republicans would have made if they’d been in charge. Since when is “leave it the way it is” an extreme position?

I can remember hearing the same sort of “why won’t you compromise?” crap about gun control. The anti-gun folks would pick some until-then perfectly legal piece of firearm technology–large magazines, expanding bullets, non-expanding bullets, plastic parts, bayonet mounts, pistol grips–and propose a total ban. When pro-gun opponents objected to this ban, the anti-gun folks accused them of being unwilling to compromise, even though the anti-gun folks offered nothing in return.

Also, since when is it wrong to stand up for what you want? That’s how negotiations work: Everybody tries to get what they want, then they negotiate. Maher’s just sore that the middle turned out not to be what he wanted it to be.

Same thing with Cap and Trade–it was the first President Bush’s plan to deal with carbon emissions. Now the Republican plan for climate change is to claim it’s a hoax. But it’s not. I know that because I’ve lived in L.A. since ’83 and there’s been a change in the city: I can see it now. Yeah. All of us who live out here have had that experience. “Oh, look! There’s a mountain there!”

Bill Maher is being an idiot. Smog consists of low-lying banks of suspended particulates and chemicals in the air. It is created by vehicles and industrial processes in cities, and it is a local problem for the cities that create it. If the L.A. basin has clearer air now, it’s because the people living there did something about it. Climate change–by which I assume Maher means anthropogenic global warming–is a matter of the entire planet’s heat balance, and it has little to do with localized polution (although some gases contribute to both problems).

Government, led by liberal Democrats, passed laws which changed the air I breathe for the better. Okay, I’m for them. And not for the party that is, as we speak, plotting to abolish the EPA.

Just because they got one thing right, doesn’t mean they’re getting everything else right.

That said, I don’t know what the Republicans are really planning to do, but because pollution is a result of market failure, a little government-organized environmental protection seems like a good idea, providing it’s done with some intelligence with respect to how tradeoffs are made. I don’t know if that has anything to do with what the EPA does these days.

And I don’t need to pretend that both sides have a point here, and I don’t care what left or right commentators say about it, I only care what climate scientists say about it.

Global warming–the idea that the Earth has been heating up slowly due to the release of certain man-made chemicals–is a relatively new theory, and because of its broad implications, it was the subject of a lot of controversy among scientists. But the scientists have reached a consensus on the important issues, and unless that begins to shift, global warming seems to be pretty real.

Good for Bill Maher, standing up for the importance of paying attention to client scientists. Too bad, though, that he doesn’t have the same respect for medical scientists such as immunologists and epidemiologists:

MAHER: I’m not into western medicine. That to me is a complete scare tactic. It just shows you, you can…

KING: You mean you don’t get a — you don’t get a flu shot?

MAHER: A flu shot is the worst thing you can do.

KING: Why?

MAHER: Because it’s got — it’s got mercury.

KING: It prevents flu.

MAHER: It doesn’t prevent. First of all, that’s…

KING: I haven’t had the flu in 25 years since I’ve been taking a flu shot.

MAHER: Well, I hate to tell you, Larry, but if you have a flu shot for more than five years in a row, there’s ten times the likelihood that you’ll get Alzheimer’s disease.

This is far more insane than calling Obama a socialist, or even being skeptical about global warming. See, Bill?  Insanity is not just for the Republicans.

Back to Maher’s commentary, where I’ll close on one of his better points:

Two opposing sides don’t necessarily have two compelling arguements. MLK spoke on that mall in the capital, and he didn’t say, “Remember folks, those southern sheriffs with the fire hoses and the German Shepherds, they have a point too.”

No, he said, “I have a dream. They have a nightmare.”

Indeed. It’s foolish and misguided to pretend to an inequality you don’t believe in. If you have the courage of your convictions, if you belive that you are right and they are wrong, then it’s alright to stand up and say that you are right and they are wrong.