Now his phrasing may be a bit inarticulate, but from the context it's clear that he's not talking about the Constitution, Bill of Rights, or any of the other documents this country was founded on. He was talking about the American voter.
Now Bill O'Reilly got wind of this comment and it cheesed him off so much that he busted out his "pinhead" insult. When Bill-O brings out the "pinhead," you know he's all business. Unfortunately, very little of that business was responding to what Bill Maher actually said. Much of the clip is him defending Sarah Palin's intelligence, and somehow equating that with the "fact" that everything hunky-dory in Alaska. Conversely, a so-called "smart-guy" is running Massachusetts, and that place is just hell. Therefore, intelligence sucks. Flawless argument!
To his credit, Bill-O actually did cite that more Americans graduated from high school than our counterparts in England and France. If you were to falsely assume that our schools are equivalent, perhaps that would me something.
To his credit, Bill-O actually did cite that more Americans graduated from high school than our counterparts in England and France. If you were to falsely assume that our schools are equivalent, perhaps that would me something.
On Friday, Bill Maher expertly responded to the controversy on his show Real Time:
Some highlights from the clip:
- It was amazing - in the minute or so between my calling America stupid and the end of the Cialis commercial, CNN was flooded with furious emails and the twits hit the fan. And you could tell that these people were really mad because they wrote entirely in CAPITAL LETTERS!!!
- And before I go about demonstrating how, sadly, easy it is to prove the dumbness dragging down our country, let me just say that ignorance has life and death consequences. On the eve of the Iraq War, 69% of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was personally involved in 9/11. Four years later, 34% still did. Or take the health care debate we're presently having: members of Congress have recessed now so they can go home and "listen to their constituents." An urge they should resist because their constituents don't know anything. At a recent town-hall meeting in South Carolina, a man stood up and told his Congressman to "keep your government hands off my Medicare," which is kind of like driving cross country to protest highways.
- I'm the bad guy for saying it's a stupid country, yet polls show that a majority of Americans cannot name a single branch of government, or explain what the Bill of Rights is. 24% could not name the country America fought in the Revolutionary War. More than two-thirds of Americans don't know what's in Roe v. Wade. Two-thirds don't know what the Food and Drug Administration does. Some of this stuff you should be able to pick up simply by being alive. You know, like the way the Slumdog kid knew about cricket.
- Sarah Palin says she would never apologize for America. Even though a Gallup poll says 18% of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth. No, they're not stupid. They're interplanetary mavericks. A third of Republicans believe Obama is not a citizen, and a third of Democrats believe that George Bush had prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks, which is an absurd sentence because it contains the words "Bush" and "knowledge."
- And these are the idiots we want to weigh in on the minutia of health care policy? Please, this country is like a college chick after two Long Island Iced Teas: we can be talked into anything, like wars, and we can be talked out of anything, like health care. We should forget town halls, and replace them with study halls. There's a lot of populist anger directed towards Washington, but you know who concerned citizens should be most angry at? Their fellow citizens. "Inside the beltway" thinking may be wrong, but at least it's thinking, which is more than you can say for what's going on outside the beltway.
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