Bill Maher on the teabaggers (again)

As I’ve said: I may not be a fan of Bill Maher for a number of reasons (his anti-vaccination lunacy and general penchant for quackery, his role in PETA, and etc.), but you just can’t fault him when it comes to comedy and political commentary. Here’s an all-too-brief except from his new comedy special, …But I’m Not Wrong, where he takes on wingnut Republicans and teabaggers (wait, is there a distinction to make?) with some great barbs, noted below.

‘I saw a recent poll: 58% of Republicans don’t think Barack Obama is an American – because he has a “birth certificate” that looks exactly like everyone else’s. But, no, he’s not an American, Hawaii’s not a state, and they’d like to give him a blood test; he might be a werewolf. You know what? I will show you Obama’s birth certificate when you show me Sarah Palin’s High School diploma, how about that?’

‘You have to understand the teabagger mindset. They have this nostalgia for this America that they think was stolen from them, that it used to be, that was better – it’s really the 1950s, okay? That’s what they think was Shangri-La, and what they never get is that it’s kind of insulting to a lot of Americans to pine for this era, ’cuz it wasn’t that good for a lot of people. It was good if you were a white man. It wasn’t that good if you were Mexican, or Black, or Jewish, or disabled, or gay, or a woman.’

‘And that’s what it always is; the cry from gubernation is always about, “We want our country back!”, you know, like it went anywhere, and, “Obama’s taking away our freedoms!”. What freedoms, exactly, has he taken away? I think, just the freedom to live under a White President; I think that’s the only freedom we’ve actually seen taken away. And ever since Obama came on the scene, there is a word that has been sticking in their throats that they would love to say, but they can’t because it’s not the 1950s. They would love to say this word; it begins with ‘n’ and ends with ‘r’, and it’s not “nation-builder”.’

Oh, good stuff. Why anyone would yearn for the McCarthy era is beyond me. But then, so it just about everything else about teabaggers, in the sense that I couldn’t warp my mind enough to understand their twisted sense of reasoning if I tried.

(via @todayspolitics)