This was pointed out in the G. Gordon Liddy episode of the Behind the Bastards podcast. Sacrificing your life for a terrorist act is probably the opposite of cowardly! Evil, certainly. But cowardly? No, it takes a lot of guts to die for a cause.
I’m surprised anyone got away with pointing that out in the aftermath of 9/11, though.
I think maybe they just thought it was cowardly because they didn’t have to face consequences for what they had done. I kind of get that. I think Epstein was a coward.
I do think there’s a difference between, “terrorists are anything but cowardly” and “Americans are the real cowards here!” The latter is pretty dickish. Even if true, it’s a dick thing to say right after a bunch of Innocent people died.
I think there’s just a problem of unrealistic expectations here, where it’s presumed that any controversial guest Maher has on the show (and especially one from the far right) is going to result in major fireworks. Maher is always congenial to his guests, or else he wouldn’t have any, and Cruz is just being a smiling hypocritical politician. The reality is that Maher does push back when he strongly disagrees with a guest, but I’ve never seen him get heated about it, although he’s come close a few times with a few oddball panelists. I see nothing at all unusual in this interview, unless a civil exchange of pleasantries can be called a “love fest”.
I remember one episode of Politically Incorrect where Mahr apologized to one of his guest. It was a conservative, and him and the other three guests spent the enitre show disagreeing with him. And Mahr apologized because it wasn’t his intent to invite someone onto the show so everyone else could gang up on him. He’s usually fairly decent to his guests.
So be rebutted his guest, but then apologized out of empathy. That sounds collegial.
What is quoted in that article doesn’t sound like that. It sounds like Cruz came on and kissed Maher’s ass, and Maher returned the favor. I don’t think it’s wrong to expect that Maher wouldn’t do that when he supposedly disagrees with Cruz.
The reason to have someone like Cruz on would be to disagree with him. Otherwise you’d just be promoting him.
Of course, I suspect that Maher agrees a lot more with Cruz than he used to. It’s partly because of how Cruz kissed his ass, but also just because I’ve seen the similarities in the way Maher approaches “woke” stuff. He’s been courting the type of Republican who follows Cruz for a while.
Specifically, there was a video where he presented a year-old story as if it were new about a college professor who lost his job after a racially charged statement. He conveniently left out that it turned out the guy had been much worse in the past, and instead used it to prove that wokism is the equivalent to the Cultural Revolution in China. And then, for no apparent reason, he takes a swipe at trans people at the end.
That’s the type of garbage you’d see on a right wing anti-SJW anger-mongering site. I said at the time that, absent his one sentence about how Republicans can be even worse, it could be a segment on Tucker Carlson’s show.
I find it disappointing that Maher didn’t seem to realize what Cruz was doing. Or, worse, did realize it, and was okay with it. Because that exchange definitely sounds like the type of thing that would rehabilitate Cruz’s reputation, proving he doesn’t have “a stick up his ass.”
And that is not the sort of thing I would expect from Maher even a few years ago. At best it’s a Jimmy Fallon move. And, at worst, it’s him supporting the guy.
I can’t speak to the expectations for Maher’s show specifically, I don’t watch it enough, but in general my expectation for any show with political commentary is that they will ask tough questions and address major controversies. Even with guests that they like and agree with.
This would be completely the norm in most of the Western world. America is quite an outlier in its media that generally allows politicians to avoid the actual question or repeat talking points that are actually baseless.
In Maher’s defense (???!?!?!), he always seems under-prepared to deal with his right-wing guests’ bullshit. He could have engaged him with his definition of “woke” as “Marxism” but he didn’t want to, and probably doesn’t disagree with Cruz that much, which is scary.
Maher seems to have absorbed lessons of the popularity of Joe Rogan, and decided that being a trendy scourge of his former allies and defier of sound science is the way to high ratings.
“Rogan gave most of his credit to Maher on the issue of modern woke ideology, claiming the HBO host should be celebrated for his rebuttal to many contemporary left-wing policies.”
YES, this exactly! Maher is an absolutely lazy researcher. The opposite of this would be Jon Stewart, who has an amazing knack for anticipating the bullshit that the right-winger he interviews are going to spew and is an expert at rebutting them.
I don’t know what gives you that impression. Some specific examples, maybe? I thought he generally handled his interviews quite competently. The one instance I can think of when Maher had no immediate rebuttal is when Rick Santorum suddenly declared, out of the blue, that a recent study showed that something like 97% of climate scientists don’t believe that CO2 is a dominant cause of global warming. Of course Maher could have no prepared response to that since it was a pretty obscure study, so he just said (correctly) that he was sure that Santorum was spouting bullshit as usual.
What impressed me was that Maher and his staff researched the issue (as did I) and came to exactly the same conclusion, which Maher took the the time to explain on his next show. Which was that not only was the paper deeply flawed, but even so, Santorum had managed to misrepresent it anyway. IOW, Santorum’s statements were a pack of lies on several different levels, none of which Santorum apparently understood.
On a different note, for those who only watch Maher occasionally and wonder whether he’ll be on the air longer than usual this season due to the interruption of the writer’s strike, yes he will! He’s off this Friday, Thanksgiving weekend, but will be back December 1. I don’t know when he’ll knock off for the holidays, but I’ve never seen Real Time in December before – the season always ends at least a week or more before Thanksgiving! Hopefully John Oliver will have an extended season, too.
One example I can think of off the top of my head occurred a few years ago when Maher had David Frum and Anthony Scaramucci on the same show. Frum has made his intense dislike of Scaramucci very public and, when they were on together, Frum began asking Scaramucci a number of very specific and pointed questions regarding his shady business dealings. Scaramucci had no answers for Frum and was stammering like a hooker in a confessional booth.
Maher then interrupted and shut it all down, clearly because he didn’t have the first idea what Frum was talking about and couldn’t control the conversation.
That’s hardly clear at all. Let’s first of all take your example to be accurate as stated, or just consider it a plausible hypothetical, and let me offer an alternative explanation that I think is much more likely in such situations.
While Maher is happy to mock politicians and celebrities, he generally makes it a point to be respectful to guests who are actually on the show. In fact he’s been criticized for being too “nice” to controversial guests. But if he bullied them as some seem to want, he’d soon no longer have interesting guests, and pretty soon thereafter, he’d no longer have much of a viewership, either. The show’s vibe has always been that of a pleasant and informative late-evening chat, with occasional civil arguments. Maher does push back against incorrect facts or outrageous beliefs, but always politely. Sometimes when the audience boos a controversial panelist or interviewee, Maher quiets them down.
So I’m suggesting that the reason that Maher shut down the hostilities is for the same reason that he treats his guests with a certain measure of deference. In his 21 years of doing the show, Maher has developed a polished sense of what works and what doesn’t, and one thing that does NOT work in this type of show is overt hostility. One other time I saw Maher shut down this sort of hostility is when he sensed himself losing his temper in an argument with a particularly obtuse panelist, so with a smile and a chuckle he deftly changed the subject – i.e.- Maher shut down himself to preserve the peace.
Secondly, with respect to what actually happened in that particular incident, it was not quite as you described it and actually much simpler than my hypothetical analysis. Frum brought up, out of the blue, some obscure incident involving the failed sale of one of Scaramucci’s former companies to a Chinese entity. Up until this point Maher had been having a back-and-forth with the Mooch about topics of general interest (in the course of which, I might add, you can see Maher, while being congenial with Scaramucci, pushing back a lot on things he disgreed with).
So what actually happened here is that Maher was just trying to get the discussion back on track from what he considered an irrelevant and uninteresting sidetrack, a sidetrack that Frum seemed unable to let go.
What tends to happen on Maher’s show is that he enables or even fawns over guests whose way-out views he sympathizes with, while some guests who disagree don’t challenge him for fear of not being invited back on the show.
The above-linked article describes favorable treatment antivaxers RFK Jr. and Marianne Williamson got from Maher, who by contrast turned on Dr. Atul Gawande when Gawande defended influenza vaccination.
Shouldn’t that be 100% of climate scientists? Does anyone disagree that water vapor is a bigger contributor to the greenhouse effect? I’m guessing that the bogus nature of the claim is that, while water vapor is dominant, it’s also in saturation at a given temperature, while CO2 is not in saturation. Is that about it?
I which case, the use of ‘global warming’ is wrong. Water vapor is the biggest contributor to the greenhouse effect, but that’s static. ‘Global warming’ would be the recent increases in temperature, and that’s not water vapor, it’s CO2.
As for Maher, I think he’s just as prepared as Stewart used to be. People may forget, but Stewart had his share of mistakes or guests who suyccessfully out-debated him. The one that comes to mind was John Yoo, a white house lawyer trying to defend the decision for determining where questioning ends and torture begins. He pretty much handed Stewart his hat, so badly that on the next show Stewart apologized to his audience for not being able to ‘get’ Yoo.
No, it was more subtle and much more convoluted than that. Unfortunately it’s been a while since I looked at the details and my long SDMB post on the subject was made on the old vBulletin and can no longer be found. I did find an old post that contains a link to it, but the link is broken. However, courtesy of Factcheck.org, here’s a summary of why Santorum’s claim was bullshit (his number was 57% of climate scientists not believing in CO2 as the dominant climate driver, not 97%, but it’s still total bullshit; he also attacks the 97% consensus number, which turns out to be more bullshit).
On the subject of water vapor, it’s in the paradoxical position of being very important to climate (so that it must, for instance, be accurately represented in climate models) but at the same time is rarely if ever considered to be a “greenhouse gas” in the usual meaning of the term. The reason as I’m sure you know, and have pretty much already described, is in the distinction between a forcing and a feedback. CO2 and other gases like CH4 constitute climate forcings because as greater quantities are added to the atmosphere, they incrementally and proportionately increase the power of the earth-ocean-atmosphere system to retain more heat, and the effects persist for years or (in the case of CO2) potentially even centuries. Whereas directly adding more water vapor accomplishes nothing, since relative humidity on average is fairly constant and excess water just condenses as rain. But absolute humidity is directly a function of temperature, so as temperature rises so does the absolute amount of water vapor in the air on average, and therefore water vapor is a powerful feedback that roughly doubles the forcing of CO2.
Maher has been described as “fawning” over controversial guests, but as I just explained, Maher has successfully cultivated the style of a congenial interviewer over many decades of experience on Real Time and earlier shows. He’s generally respectful of everybody who comes on the show. When that individual happens to be an anti-vax lunatic, then yes, one can sometimes see some mutual admiration going on, but we already knew that Maher has crazy views about medical science. It doesn’t detract from the quality of the vast majority of his interviews and panel discussions.
I’ll also say in passing that I think that article was unduly harsh in some respects. Maher did not “turn on” (your words) or “challenge” (article’s words) Dr. Atul Gawande about the flu vaccine. He asked him a question. It’s an interview; you ask questions. I’m not fan of the flu vaccine myself. It’s not that I suspect some hazard, it’s that the relative lack of efficacy makes it hardly worthwhile, unlike the COVID vaccines, which I considered crucially important.
I also don’t know why the article singled out Marianne Williamson for a special pillorying. Sure, she’s some kind of “spiritualist” author, but she’s also a solid progressive on all the major political issues including abortion rights, climate change, gun control, and universal health care. Her “skepticism” on health care issues mainly seems to center around a well-placed distrust of Big Pharma, a distrust that I shared even before seeing the heartbreaking docudrama Dopesick, about Purdue Pharma and the FDA-sanctioned high-pressure trafficking of Oxycontin.
As for Marianne Williamson, her “progressive” views including saying that depression “is such a scam”, telling AIDS patients that “sickness is an illusion and does not actually exist” and claiming in her book *A Return To Love" that “cancer and AIDS and other physical illnesses are physical manifestations of a psychic scream.”
She’s milked that distrust re vaccines. When she issued an “apology” for her antivax views in her previous Presidential campaign, she said “I understand that many vaccines are important and save lives”. “I also understand some of the skepticism that abounds today about drugs which are rushed to market by Big Pharma."
Clearly, her implication was that vaccines are “rushed to market”, which is total nonsense.
Liking some of a candidate’s opinions doesn’t allow me to overlook their batshit crazy beliefs that cause serious harm.
