Bill Maher, Boring and Uninspired Hack

It won’t come as a surprise to many regular readers that I have a lot of distaste for Bill Maher. I’ve written before about how awful he is.

From his love for fascistic Dutch politician Geert Wilders:

Endorsing the views of Wilder is a new low at Real Time, but it’s one that has been coming for a long time as Maher sinks lower and lower into racist crankery.

Maybe Bill Maher wasn’t endorsing all of Wilder’s views. Maybe he was just endorsing the spirit of his views in that there needs to be some sort of debate within the European community as to how to tolerate one another. It would be nice if we could give him the benefit of the doubt. But Maher has made it clear, time and time again, that when one subscribes to a point of view, only the most fundamentalist and unwavering devotion to the words suffice. We should hold him to his standard.

To his support of Guantanamo as something “that works”:

This is the system that Maher believes works- a system that is designed to maintain the power of the state to the detriment of the powerless, irrespective of their crimes- because it reliably returns the result he believes it should.

It’s the same logical fallacy that maintains inequality of power, access, and justice, promoted by the same kind of person the fallacy requires: An ignorant, well-to-do blowhard, untouched by the reality of the inequity, all too ready to trumpet it to his receptive audience.

Like Bill Maher.

Recently I wrote a piece for Paste Magazine on Maher.

I found that instead of being an interesting villain, he’s just another careerist hack. A boring, uninspired shill with nothing to offer but mildly profane defenses of the status quo without an original — or daring — bone in his body.

You can check out the whole article over at Paste, but here’s a small sample:

Profanity and adult subject matter reigned supreme (the show is in its 14th season). But what the show has never focused on, at least from the host, is challenging the dominant narrative of the Global War on Terror.

Maher learned his lesson. Defying the conventional wisdom on the United States’ war-making in the Middle East was a no-go. Instead, the comedian tilted towards an atheist evangelism that is more and more an obvious smokescreen for his xenophobic bigotry towards the Global South and support for American hegemony.

Bill Maher is worse than bad — he’s weak and boring.