Poor Pope Francis, cast into eternal darkness by comedian Bill Maher, host of Real Time and unofficial head of the Church of the Latter Day Snarks:
“I was starting to really like this pope,” Maher said during his monologue on Friday. “He’s dead to me now. Oh yeah, f*ck the Pope. Look, George Bush said it: you’re either with us or against us. Apparently the Pope is not with us.”
Maher was disappointed that the Pope said religion should be off-limits for insults at the same time that he condemned the attack against the French newspaper Charlie Hebdo that left 12 staff members killed.
I say, f*ck Bill Maher. He prides himself on being politically incorrect but his knee-jerk rejection of ideas that clash with his point of view is just the opposite — politically predictable. His snarky act has gotten old.
I don’t agree with Pope Francis on this one — no institution should be “off-limits for insults” — but most of his other social criticisms are on target. Bottom line, he always takes the side of the poor against the obscenely wealthy, the oppressed against the oppressors. Which is more than you can say for Maher and his fellow limousine liberals, who have more in common with hardcore Republicans than with progressives.
Credit where it’s due: Swamp Rabbit just reminded me that Maher’s golden moment as a social critic came soon after 9/11, when he told Middle America that people who crash airplanes into skyscrapers are anything but cowards — that we were the cowards for “lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away.” “Now that was politically incorrect,” the rabbit said.
Correction: When Francis became pope, I thought he’d turn out to be another corrupt figurehead who wore funny hats. I was wrong, except for the hats.
Bill Maher has gone badly off the rails. His rank Islamophobia and religious bigotry has become a personal crusade on every show now.
While it’s true that no institution should be spared from insults, it’s one thing to insult in an intelligent way and quite another to insult for the sole purpose of inflaming passions knowing that the response you get will lead to a violent backlash.
OXFAM released a report today that showed the richest 1% in the world soon owning more wealth than the other 99% of us. It also showed that the wealthiest few hundred people in the world will soon own more wealth than the poorest 3.5 billion of us.
http://www.stltoday.com/news/world/oxfam-richest-percent-sees-share-of-global-wealth-jump/article_6497f1ez-c4oe-554b-abde-66e387be