Bill Maher is on a roll

Bill Maher may have been off all summer, but he's certainly making up for lost time... in a hurry.

Maher's teeing off on Sarah Palin is well deserved, and dare I say it less than two weeks after she was declared as McSame's running mate, already long overdue.

At the beginning of the clip above, we are treated to Palin's characterization of our troops as "on a mission from God," which I find despicable and highly distasteful. Isn't that sort of justification for violence something that most Americans chastise (Read: HATE) Middle Eastern Muslims for? Just a thought.

Even more amusing is Michael Steele, the GOPAC chair, defend Palin - that her experiences as a "small town mother" are good enough to be vice president of the United States. An indignant Maher asks, "Are you kidding me?!?" and that's exactly what I was thinking when I heard Steele say it.

Maher was probably over the top when he characterizes Palin as a "Jesus freak," but I do agree with him when I hear people in this country running for elective office talking about our troops being on a "mission from God," I find that wholly offensive. What mission exactly would that be? To go to Iraq, kill people who were no threat to us, and cause one of the biggest refugee problems in the world, currently at over four million people.

And by the way, Dan Savage is brilliant - I love him. And don't believe the spin for one second that Bush wasn't at the convention because of Hurricane Gustav - that crisis had largely passed by the time it was his turn to speak in St. Paul and he very easily could have attended, but McCain's people didn't want him there, making Bush the first sitting president in 40 years to not attend his party's convention.

One other thought - when I heard Steele say with a smile on his face while pumping his fists, "Drill baby, drill!" I let out a mongrel yelp - GOP and Big Oil are so in bed with each other, sometimes it's hard to distinguish between the two, and evidently Steele has little awareness of just how much of a jackass he looks like when he does and says things like that. .

Of course, no discussion of an episode of Real Time is ever complete without mentioning and including his infamous New Rules, and this one was particularly funny. One of my favorites from this week was his lampooning the plastic Fred Thompson for his speech at the convention. In it, Thompson criticized Obama for trying to make a difference with a teleprompter, and, as Maher notes, that's pretty stupid to do when you're reading a speech off of a teleprompter. I guess Thompson is about as familiar with irony as he is with running a presidential campaign that lasts longer than an episode of Law & Order.

And Maher's final New Rule ? It stands on its own - watch it! I can think of nothing to add other than how funny was it for Karl Rove to paint Barack Obama as an "elitist at a country club"? This leads me to believe that Rove has never actually been to a country club.