Tag Archives: Bill Maher

Civility Isn’t Easy

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

This will be a test. A civility test. I want to talk about this Rush Limbaugh v Bill Maher business of using really bad words to describe people they don’t agree with.

This is not a discussion about contraception or Obama-care or Women’s reproductive rights or free speech.

It will be a discussion about civility. Of which we are in dreadfully short supply these days.

Those of us who are professional political hacks – Republican and Democrat – have been taught since kindergarten that the way to win is to draw the starkest possible distinction between your candidate and your opponent.

If your opponent says it’s dawn, you claim the man was probably up partying until all hours and can’t tell day from night. If your opponent says it’s a nice day, you turn it into a full-blown attack on his belief that global warming is killing baby seals. Continue reading →

Where’s the Outrage?

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

In one of the GOP Presidential debates the number of prisoners who had been put to death in Texas drew applause from the audience. In a subsequent debate, the issue of the end of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was being discussed and, during a short video of a Marine talking about being openly gay, two members of that audience booed.

None of the candidates on stage reacted to the boos which led to a week of projectile sweat outrage by Liberal commentators as to why no-one told the boo-ers to put a sock in it. Note, please that the moderator(s) didn’t ask the candidates about it after the fact.

During my tour de force performance on the Bill Maher show later that week, they showed the same clip with the two people booing and I said, “It was only two people. It wasn’t like the whole audience stood up and waved its collective fists at the screen” or, as Dr. Samuel Johnson was wont to say, “words to a like effect.” Continue reading →

Kicking Butt on Bill Maher

BY RICH GALEN

Reprinted from Mullings.com

Some of you may remember that I told you in Friday’s MULLINGS that I was going to be on Bill Maher’s HBO program, “Real Time.” I said that I was going to be on with, among other people, Keith Olbermann.

Then I typed: “Olbermann & Maher v Galen. I think that’s a fair fight, don’t you?”

Turns out it wasn’t. I kicked butt.

The show is produced at the CBS studios in Los Angeles, and I got to the Studio at about 4:30 Pacific (it goes on live at 7 PM), so I had plenty of time to poke around and look at stuff. One of the stuffs I looked at was flipping through the channels on the TV set in my dressing room and I came upon the closed circuit channel showing the camera rehearsal in the studio downstairs. Continue reading →