HBO host Bill Maher often gets under conservatives’ skin. He’s blunt, at times—crude, and unabashedly against religion. He mocks the GOP. He mocks conservative politics, but there are areas of agreement. He’s sick of the political correctness virus that’s infecting young progressives and college campuses. He’s right about the threats posed by Islamic extremism and especially the political correctness that has infested that debate. Now, he’s set his sights on the Democratic Party itself and he was quite blunt in his assessment of the party that he supports: we suck. We suck and because we suck, we’re not winning elections.
He spoke eloquently about the over-regulation ethos that is the hallmark characteristic of liberalism. He mentioned the latest bill in Congress: the Hot Cars Act of 2017. Yes, it’s self-explanatory; it’s mandates that cars be equipped with a sensor that goes off if you leave your kid in a hot car. It’s common sense that’s now becoming a regulation. Maher added that over 17 million cars were sold in 2016; are we seriously going to force all of them to get this sensor installed?
[Warning: some strong language]
“The cost of which will be passed onto the consumer,” he said. “And should reminding you not to forget your baby really be Toyota’s problem?” he added. He tore into California’s regulatory state, specifically the sign in Los Angeles warning residents that chemicals were detected in the vicinity that could cause cancer. Maher responded, “no s**t, we live in LA; it’s called air.” He commented upon Honolulu making it a crime to look at your phone while crossing the street.Maher added when it comes to preventing child deaths, we’re never going to get that number to zero, even if we wrap every kid in bubble wrap. Where he starts to veer into his typical HBO Real Time-self is when he says that this all feeds into the GOP talking points about Democrats, regulation, government, and freedom. He made quips about how we’re all pretty much in a hot car right now: it’s called Earth. He wants Democrats to do big stuff on regulation, like with the environment and firearms, but the Democrats go-to on regulation, like with this little stuff about hot cars, is how we get Scott Pruitt to head the EPA. Now, of course, I, and the rest of the right-leaning America, have zero problems with Mr. Pruitt, but Maher nails it: this busy bodying, hyper-progressive crap is how we got Donald Trump.
“It makes people hate us. It makes me hate us,” he said. It’s these sort of antics that allows conservatives to own freedom as an issue.
“People want to drain the swamp, not ban Big Gulps," Maher added. "Yes, I understand you [Mr. or Mrs. Progressive] have 1,000 good ideas on how I should live my life, reject my privilege, and sort my recycling. And we’ll get to that, but first we need to get some Democrats elected and that’s hard when the movement to childproof the world had made Republicans the party of freedom and Democrats the party of poopers."
Nothing will be done on firearms and global warming right now. And Maher is right that Democrats have a horrendous messaging problem and focusing on this stuff is making it harder for them to reconnect with voters, especially those who had backed Democrats before. From the looks of it, it doesn’t seem that trend is going to end any time soon. Maher is liberal. He’s not a friend of conservatives, but at least he’s honest about how he sees the forces of the political persuasion he aligns with are acting. He knows Democrats suck and that Trump can and probably will at this point be re-elected in 2020. His fellow Democrats still thinks that they have a shot at 2018 and 2020. Not at this rate by any stretch of the imagination.