First of all - Bill, you are so right. I've come across many people on the web who've said that the only thing that gives them hope for this country is the comedy of people like yourself, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, et. al. It's really true that our reputation around the world has been so thoroughly trashed that we as people are now often seen as no better than the yokels running the show. It's a sad thing, but true. And although I and others may think you're pretty snotty sometimes, your comments about our "government" are usually right on the money.

But now to another thing.

Is anyone else bothered by the subtle semantic objectifying that exists when the word "troops" is used? Has anyone noticed that other countries have soldiers while we have "troops"? This has started to bug me, and I think I've figured out why. The word "troops" reduces that mass of individual people to an amorphous mass that can be moved around, sent here and there, run straight into hopeless situations, with impunity. They're not David, Jake, Brian, Marianne, Connie, Willis, Emory - men and women who consciously risk their lives, rightly or wrongly, for this country - they're "troops", a word that (for me, at least) conjures an image of faceless masses ranked like ants, pointed towards an equally faceless mass of enemies - "terrorists", a word that also denies that the ones wiring themselves to explode and throwing bombs are people as well.

This practice of taking oddly flat, meaningless (and easily changeable) words and embuing them with extreme emotional connotations is a trick of the neo-cons that we all know very well. It's a disturbing use of the language, and one that bears resisting. If we want the public, all us Americans, to pay more attention to the needs and welfare of our soldiers, we could do worse than drop the use of a word that so distances us from their individual selves.

Re-read the paragraph I quoted, boy, and tell me how *you* interpret it.

But you don't seem to want to accept that there a Christian fundamentalists who will never stop also. What makes a Christian fundamentalist any better? Do you think that being Mulim means you deserve to have a bomb dropped on your house when you did nothing to the Christian dropping the bomb? Hating Muslims is the reason you accept the invasion of Iraq, because there has never been any real justification for it. You know they had no weapons. You know they weren't part of 9/11. You know they weren't a threat to us. AND you know the real terrorist, Bin Laden got away. Your hate of Muslims has blinded you into beleiving that America is completely justified in killing anyone they want and invading anyone they want. That's evil, and above all, stupid, because we are the ones who will have to pay for it for generations to come.

I have watched Bill Maher's HBO show many times, and while it's encouraging that an unabashedly liberal comedian has such a high-profile show and is able to attract noteworthy guests, I'm always left unsatisfied. Unlike Jon Stewart, who is very well-informed on the issues of the day, well enough to discuss them intelligently and in detail, Maher throws out generalizations, platitudes and jokes that are just vaguely liberal and anti-Republian without doing what the humor of the Daily Show does: making a point. Maher's unfamiliarity with the details and nuances of issues means that his one-off "Bush sucks, Republicans are only for the rich" statements don't have the ideal effect. They just sound like partisan complaining.

A couple weeks ago Maher had Spike Lee on via video. While interviewing Lee, Maher read a quote from a recent Bob Herbert column and asked Lee for his take on it. It was a very vague quote and totally out of context, so understandably Lee asked "What's the context?" Maher said, "You know the context better than I do," and Lee still was struggling to know what to say, since he had no idea what the column was about. He asked Maher, "Is it about ____?" and Maher said, "Yes, I think so." Having read the column myself, I happened to know that he was totally wrong. How hard would it have been for Maher to read the column (takes 10 minutes tops) so he could at least appear to know what he's talking about, instead of looking like just a talking head whose researchers and writers prop him up?

And as someone already mentioned in these comments, Maher constantly invites Ann Coulter onto his show, and he doesn't challenge the malicious lies she spews. Legitimizing that disgusting harpy's insane rantings is the worst thing any so-called liberal can do. I saw her on there saying that Democrats in 2000 said that black people were too stupid to figure out the butterfly ballots in Florida. Maher just smirks or says, "Well, I don't know..." "Gee whiz" or whatever, instead of saying, "Name one Democrat who said that. Name one." It's easy to challenge someone like her on her ridiculous statements, because they have zero credence. But he doesn't really try.

Poking fun at that diseased asshole chosen to lead us all to retard hell is just too easy. It's like pointing out that filthy muttering homeless people "have problems". No one who doesn't regularly stick their head in a garbage can full of uncapped highliters believes that Bush isn't the biggest goddamn failure since Nero. And no one doubts that that we're not as a nation squeeling with delight as the whole ship of state crashes on the rocks, sinks and drowns everyone. That's just too easy. But I suspect that your SQ (snark quotient) will get in the way of you fleeing for your own life when this whole thing goes horribly horribly horribly wrong. What pains me is that all the so called opposition is like the cast of Caberet not fully understanding what's just around the corner.

Yeah, Golden Boy you're swinging a little wild on this one. First of all Islam and/or Muslims are not the problem. They can be the problem, but more often than not, they aren't. This is because there are a lot of them, you see you're loosing on scale here. You got to get used to throwing a world out there like “extremist” or “terrorist” or the wildly popular "fascist" after you name the religious group you hate. Otherwise the net is cast a little too wide and you come off as more than a little dim. It's like saying Christians are the problem in the US. Yes! they are often the problem, but they are more often not. Let’s get our evil doers demographied correctly! Now I'm all about sending off the religious right for a cage match with militant Islam in some neutral venue, (like maybe Bali?) but until then hating all Muslims is just too exhausting, we obviously can't handle too much so lets just take a little bite for now. Secondly, Bush doesn't need your help he's got the savoir on his side...

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