I mean I know he’s single and likes to get laid but I don’t know if that qualifies him as a misogynist. I know he’s said some f’d up shit before. But is it on the same magnitude as Rush?
Not at all. He says mean things about Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, but Palin and Bachmann are public figures who make their livelihood saying outrageous things themselves. Ridiculing public figures for their moronic and inflammatory statements is far different than calling someone a slut and a whore because they testified about a womens’ health issue.
FWIW, here’s an interview with Maher where he defends himself and contrasts his comments to Limbaugh’s:
I post this for informational purposes, I am not taking a side here, at least not yet.
I think looking for the Left’s ‘Rush Limbaugh’ is a wild goose chase. The Left is not as prone to the kind of unanimity-seeking groupthink as the Right.
Have any government officials ever taken back their words to to appease Mr. Maher?
This point is the key difference.
Limbaugh is, IMHO, rarely funny, more often offensive and often a complete looneytune crackpot. Politicians listen to him and fail to kowtow at their peril because he has a huge influence over a whole segment of the base of the Right.
Maher is sometimes funny and sometimes offensive and often a complete looneytune crackpot. But there are no politicians who feel the need to listen to him or to appease him. Nobody is afraid of losing the support of “The Left”, “Progressives”, or any other group because he may badmouth them. Instead those groups consist of various different individuals some of who agree and disagree with him with different things that he says, each of who think the others are idiots.
Rush and Maher are both entertainers with various political POVs. Each has a right to say what they want up the legal edge of slander or hate speech. Each can be made fun of for the idiocy they spout. One though has more idiots listening who take what they say seriously and vote accordingly. That one is not Maher.
Limbaugh is one of the most hated pundits by both Liberals and Conservatives (saw a poll somewhere very recently that had him listed at #3 behind Nancy Grace and maybe Bill Maher?). The people that love him though, really love him, and let him do their thinking for him (thus the name “Dittoheads”).
No. Bill Maher doesn’t have that kind of pull. It’s not close, and it’s silly to even bring it up. People who watch Maher may agree with him on some issues or many issues, but they understand he’s speaking for himself and not setting or echoing lines of political attack. He does not influence politics in any significant way and people don’t have to cater to him. And when you compare their audiences, maybe you can see why this is no comparison:
Rush is on the radio for 3 hours a day and he’s had the highest rated radio talk show for almost 25 years. He has something like 15 million listeners a week. Maher does a show on a subscription network, HBO, one hour per week, 24 weeks a year. (Maher’s is also partly a panel discussion, but nevermind that.) The latest ratings I could find said that Maher had 1.1 million viewers for his latest show. So it seems to me that more people listen to Rush in any given two week period than watch Bill Maher in a year.
Jon Stewart does 168 half-hour show a year I think he has around 1.5 million viewers a night, and I assume his clips get more widely disseminated on social media (I don’t know how to measure that). I think he does a lot more to shape people’s opinions than Bill Maher does, not that I can measure that either, and politicians do sometimes make overtures to the show. Certainly his advocacy made a difference for the Zadroga bill, although the bill itself was pretty nonpartisan. So I think that’s a more sensible comparison, but still, look at the difference in the amount of content and the size of the audience.
If you want to compare the offensiveness of particular remarks, that’s more a matter of opinion. I will say that the insults that conservatives started complaining about as they failed around trying to defend Rush were insults of specific politicians as individuals even though they were crude. Rush’s comments about Sandra Fluke implied that any woman who thinks her health insurance should cover birth control is a prostitute and they implied (a little less directly) that a woman on birth control is a slut. Perhaps you can see where some people would consider one more offensive than the other.
I compare Rush to more of a Michael Moore. Both have big egos, are willing to bend the truth and lie when it fits them, and neither are really that smart.
They’re a couple of wind bags who offer no solutions or critical thinking and just like to point the finger and blame the other side for EVERYTHING that is wrong with the world. I can’t stand listening to either of them.
Maher at least seems to think his opinions through when he’s being serious and you can tell when he goes into comedienne smartass mode when he cracks a smirk.
I didn’t realize Maher had a sex change!
Olberman or Shultz is more of the Democrat equivalent to Limbaugh. Maher is just a leftist comedian dong a comedy show about the news of the day. Olbmerman and Limbaugh are both doing political shows that use humor to entertain listeners but they emphasis is on the politics. They have much different shows because they are on different mediums, but the style is similar.
Listeners to Rush are not called dittoheads because they agree with him. They are called that because the callers to the show used to spend the first minute gushing about the show and how great it was to be on it instead of talking about the point they were trying to make when they called in. At some point callers were instructed if they wanted to repeat the standard formula of “Thanks for taking my call, I love your show, it is an honor to speak to you… etc” to just say “Dittos” in order to move the show along.
(daguumit!)
Even so, I don’t think that they (nor any other liberal commentator / talk show host) has anywhere near the audience, or political pull, that Limbaugh does. I’d agree with Marley23 that Jon Stewart probably comes closest, but even that’s not very close at all.
Olbermann (when he was with MSNBC) and Shultz have these novelties called “editors” that check every word they say for accuracy. They just don’t say things that are factually incorrect. Shultz was suspended for an inappropriate comment about a woman, for which he profusely and genuinely apologized. To compare these two to Limbaugh is a grave and inaccurate insult. Rush has no editors and answers to nobody.
I’m aware of the history of the term dittos and megadittos and the occasional “ottid”. The point remains that a huge segment of Rush’s audience are completely incapable of forming independent opinions and rely on him to tell them how they think. You don’t have that personality cult with any left-leaning radio or television personality.
Maher is leftist? I don’t see his show ever, but I always thought him more on the libertarian side of things.
I agree that Limbaugh seems to be a lot more influential than Maher so that his stupidities tend to have more impact.
Let’s remember though that it was Bill Maher who posed a threat to public health with his antivaccination nonsense. From his show where he interviewed Bill Frist:
"Mr. Maher: Why would you let them be the ones to stick a disease into your arm?* I would never get a swine flu vaccine or any vaccine. I don’t trust the government, especially with my health.
Dr. Frist: On the swine flu, I know you really believe that. And let me just …
Mr. Maher: (interrupting) You say that like I’m a crazy person.
Dr. Frist: Well, here you are. I think here you are."
Dr. Frist then told the story of a healthy 30-year-old man who recently died of H1N1 flu in his hospital.
Mr. Maher interrupted with skepticism.
“Mr. Maher: This is not a very serious flu. Let’s be honest. There must be something more to this. I cannot believe that a perfectly healthy person died of this swine flu. That person was not perfectly healthy. Western medicine misses a lot.”
Yeah Bill, all those doctors are wrong and you picked up on it. :rolleyes:
*influenza shots involve killed virus. In no way are you “sticking a disease into your arm” by getting a flu shot.
I don’t pay attention to either, but I do know that Maher has guests on his show who disagree with him and he doesn’t simply hang up the phone. As far as I know, Limbaugh has never had a caller or guest on who disagreed with him that he wasn’t able to simply hang up on. In short, he has never done anything like debate someone. But my knowledge is limited.
Yeah, this is one thing that bothered me about Bill.
To his defence though, he talked about this on his show and basically got his ass handed to him by the guests that night. One of the guys said: “Man, Bill, just let it go. You sound like that bitter old girlfriend that can’t stop talking about her ex boyfriend.” (The guest said that because Bill kept trying to argue his point despite the fact his guests kept telling him why his axioms are completely off base.)
So Bill humbly let it go. And further more showed to me an admirable quality by not editing that part out of the show. I can’t imagine a whole lot of talk show hosts (like him) that would be big enough to let the whole world see his own buffoonery. On his own damn show.
I watch his show regularly and can’t recall him talking about it since. And that was two years ago if I recall correctly.
He started out libertarian, but I don’t see it anymore. He has his pro-legalization side (yeah!), but he also backs gun control (boo!). I would consider him a leftist libertarian personally. I realize this gets into no-true-Scotsman territory, but he certainly embraces government power when it suits him (environment, homeschooling, government regulation of industry).
He started out as liberal and then during the late '90s and early 2000s, he started calling himself a libertarian, but during the Bush administration, he swung back to liberalism and now happily denounces libertarians as idiots. I think there was even a point at which he said that he had been wrong about the whole libertarian thing.