Great new rules from Bill Maher

I never miss Bill Maher every Friday night, ever. If we are not home, I always TiVo it and catch it over the weekend. My favorite part of every episode, his show-ending "New Rules," were particularly spot-on last Friday night. As Mahablog sagely puts it: "Sad that the best political commentary is from comedians, on cable, and not the free airwaves." Amen. Anyway, the following passage from the video above really struck a chord with me:

And finally, new rule... This Halloween, when you see something that's supposed to scare you, like a skeleton, or a severed head or a gay wizard [Referring to to gay wizard from Harry Potter, Albus Dumbledore], take a moment and think about fear - what are you afraid of, and what should you be afraid of? What's really scary this Halloween - is that the same idea-free losers who won the last presidential election, may very well win the next one, by making us afraid of the wrong things. Which is why this Halloween, I'm going as something truly horrifying - a melting polar ice cap.

It's so exceedingly rare to get any sort of reasonable, thought-out, rhetoric-free political commentary these days - I'm glad that Maher is providing it (Okay, with some rhetoric, but still...) Of course, many/most on the right would vehemently disagree with me - no surprise there. The most frequent "argument" I hear is the feckless witticism that "Maher is a comedian!" [I used to hear that same thing about Al Franken, too - and he's going to be elected to the Senate a little over a year from now.] As if making someone laugh while making a powerful political point is some sort of sin, thereby disqualifying someone from having valid political opinions.

The only thing I can conclude about Maher's many critics on the right - it's jealousy. Still don't believe me? Listen to, read or watch what the right is serving up these days - Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Sean Hannity, Bill Bennett, Glenn Beck and Bill O'Lielly - Yea, that group is a barrel of laughs. I mean, the Half Hour News Hour, Fox News' "answer" to The Daily Show, lasted about as long as a bad case of chicken pox.

And Maher is absolutely right about the "idea-free losers" possibly prevailing in '08 - as much as all Americans should be concerned about homeland security, our totally out-of-whack tax policies, health care for every American, and a whole host of other issues (oh yea, the War in Iraq) - what we'll get is a whole bunch of wind-blown b.s. from the right, and we all know the good 'ole stand-bys now - gay marriage, abortion, stem cell research, "family values" (I have to put that in quotes when Repubes us it), and of course, the well-worn page out of the Karl Rove play book - "Scare 'em to death with the war on terror. Lather, rinse, repeat."