Oooh, hyperbole fever! Catch it!
Who cares what Bill Maher thinks about China. Is he an epidemiologist? Does he work for the State Department? DoD? Has he lived in China? Has he studied Chinese politics? Can he read Mandarin? Does he bring any expertise greater than someone who more or less follows the news?
Why Bill Maher: “We should blame China.”
Why not Random guy at the bar: “We should blame China.”
What extra weight does the proposition get by attaching Bill Maher’s name to it? He’s just some dude with no particular expertise.
I haven’t follwed Maher since the 90s, when I realized I had better things to do with my time than to hate watch Politically Incorrect. But he was an utter colossal fool. He really believed that charlatans like john Edward and Williamson could speak to the dead. He defended them passionately and had them on the show multiple times. He talked about his own story involving a ghost moving pool balls around, and when Penn pointed out the many plausible explanations how a set of pool balls may have changed position he got insulting and condescending.
He was an early anti-vaxxer and a big fan of PETA. Time has mercifully erased most of his BS poitical opinions from my memory, but one sticks out: his defense of the Vietnam War. His defense literally amounted to “We had to fight them somewhere.” (This got Ann Coulter nodding vigorously. I don’t understand why people are baffled they are friends. They overlap on many issues.) That was all he had to say and he repeated it without expanding.
I mean if this had been your something Uncle Bob–the one who fought at Ia Drang and passed away from agent orange related cancer ten years ago–used to say at the VFW bar, OK. But from some guy with intellectual pretensions, come on. It was arguably the worst foreign policy disaster in US history (We could debate it versus Iraq, but this isn’t the thread.) with 55,000 dead American soldiers and Millions of dead Vietnamese, and all he could say was “We had to fight them somewhere?” Why, Bill, why did we have to fight “them” “somewhere?” No answer was forthcoming.
GAH ! Something your. Shouldn’t type angry.
Because he’s a vegetarian. As he reminds everyone, ad nauseam.
Game of Thrones has over a hundred and twenty. Donald Trump personally has two. I don’t think “How many Emmy noms do they have?” is evidence of anything other than being entertaining on the TV. It certainly doesn’t speak to any particular insight or intelligence.
I don’t know if you read through the whole thread but this and some related matters have already been addressed. But let me try to clarify and amplify.
First of all, this thread is about the merit of whether “China” is to blame for the pandemic, and I’ll get to that in a moment. I just felt obliged to defend Maher against what I thought were unfair criticisms. But to address your immediate objection, in some cases you’d be right – it depends on what the Emmy is for. The Television Academy unfortunately created a category for “reality shows”, so the two that Trump was nominated for were essentially for “best show in the category of ‘worst drivel on television’”.
Maher was nominated under a variety of different titles which sometimes changed from year to year, but they were mostly similar to the most recent, “Outstanding Variety Talk Series”. One would assume that the “talk” part would imply a meritorious level of “insight or intelligence”. Hannity’s show, for instance, and all its precessors, have, AFAIK, exactly zero nominations. It’s also worth mentioning that Maher’s work as executive producer on the HBO series VICE has garnered him many nominations in the category of “Outstanding Informational Series or Special”, and that another category in which Real Time gets a lot of nominations is outstanding writing. All subject to interpretation, of course, and if you don’t like Bill Maher, you’re entitled to your opinion, just don’t change the channel on Friday nights when I’m watching. 
But perhaps a better insight could be had by taking a quick skim of Bill Maher’s guest list on Real Time over the years. It’s an eclectic list, to be sure, and critics will inevitably zero in on the occasional crackpot (Ann Coulter was on too often in the early years, because Bill apparently enjoys sparring with her and it’s probably good for ratings). But notice the large number of serious thinkers, writers, journalists, and influential politicians who are the more typical guests, and often multiple times. Joe Biden has been on four times, Bernie Sanders several times, Barack Obama once while still president, Nancy Pelosi and Elizabeth Warren several times, Noam Chomsky at least once, and a great many others.
Now back to the topic of China. I put “China” in quotes above because it can only be rationally interpreted to mean the Communist Party of China, and its leadership and policies, not any particular individual people either here or anywhere else in the world. They’ve allowed unhygienic dangerous practices and engaged in false information, deception, and coverups. This does not in any way absolve the US federal government or various incompetent state administrations for their own culpability and lack of preparedness, particularly the federal dismantling of pandemic monitoring and response teams.
Finally, turning to the most recent developments, I’d like to juxtapose two posts I made recently; the bolding here has been added for emphasis:
Jesus fucking christ.