Benghazi and the October Surprise

By Bill Maher
 
A new e-book came out this week called A Bad Day On The Romney Campaign: An Insider’s Account. It was written by Clint Eastwood’s chair. No it wasn’t, it was written by some whiny grifter named Gabriel Schoenfeld, who was a “senior advisor” to the campaign. The book focuses on the day of the Benghazi attack, and how Mitt Romney tripped over his dick.
The mission in Libya was still on fire when Mitt issued a statement — based on the Twitter feed of someone in Cairo — claiming it was all Obama’s fault, because we apologized for that internet movie that insulted Allah. It was stupid, tone deaf, inaccurate, half-hearted, phony and entirely beside the point, or what’s now known as The Full Romney.
Schoenfeld writes:

“The Romney campaign’s statement of September 11, 2012 had left the candidate naked, embarrassed, and disarmed.”

Try getting that image out of your head.
But I think it’s important because it helps explain why Republicans are such crackheads about Benghazi: It — or something like it — was supposed to win Romney the election. His campaign was designed to stay competitive, sing “God Bless America,” and wait for Obama to screw up. Benghazi happened and Mitt booted it. That’s why they’ll never let it go.
Remember the “47%” video? Romney is asked about the October Surprise, when Reagan got elected and Iran magically gave us the hostages, and why Romney can’t “duplicate that scenario.”

Romney: I appreciate the idea…(blahblahblah Russia, Iran, nukes, China, Jimmy Carter)…if something of that nature presents itself, I will work to find a way to take advantage of the opportunity.

Something of that nature presented itself — four brave people dying violent deaths — and Mitt tried to take advantage of it, but he couldn’t. Because that bastard Obama cheated and rewrote the memo.
And that’s how you understand Benghazi: Work backwards from “Republicans are supposed to win.” Don’t follow the money. Follow the entitlement.

Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough

By Bill Maher
 
“Please sir, I want some more.” -Oliver/The Jackson Family

Michael Jackson’s mother is suing a concert promoter for employing a doctor whose reaction to seeing his patient OD was to call a doctor. She wants $40 billion. Because right up until the end there, everything was going great.

Now, my feelings about Michael Jackson are best summed up by an exchange between FBI agents in ‘Red Dragon,’ the prequel to ‘Silence of the Lambs’:

JACK CRAWFORD
You feel sorry for him.
WILL GRAHAM
My heart bleeds for him, as a child.
Someone took a kid and manufactured
a monster. At the same time, as an
adult, he’s irredeemable. As an adult,
someone should blow the sick fuck out
of his socks.

The people my heart really bleeds for are the 12 jurors and six alternates who are going to have to sit through this endless legalized shakedown as this horrible old lady tries to suck one more drop of toxic watery blood from her son’s putrefying corpse.

He was 51 years old. You don’t have to pay his mommy if you were negligent and didn’t do enough to prevent him from being a junkie.

Why is this trial happening? Why are those 18 poor jurors being held hostage? If Somali pirates took them instead of the Jackson family legal team, we’d send the Seals to blow their brains out.

The Truthers Out There

By Bill Maher
 
It’s often said that you can measure the health of a society by how readily it believes in conspiracy theories. …OK, maybe it’s not often said, because I just made it up, but it should be. Because it’s true.

Now, our fair country has its share of conspiracy theories, and we may have just added another: that the Boston Marathon bombing was a false flag operation designed to frighten the citizens so the government can take away our rights and our guns. Or something like that. I try not to click on those links so my IP address doesn’t get “pinged” in the FBI’s PND — Potential Nutcase Database.

But when anything major happens in America, you can set your watch and within 48 hours someone will be explaining to you how some nefarious group wanted this to happen, and also planned it. These are usually fringe, Alex Jones-type groups, but not always. The 9/11 Truther movement wasn’t exactly tiny, probably about the same size as the Ron Paul movement. Because they’re the same people. Then there are the Roswell/UFO conspiracy types, the U.N. black helicopter conspiracy people, those who think the moon landing was faked. Not to mention the people who think all the fat black women in Tyler Perry movies are actually Tyler Perry.

But nothing compares to the Middle East, where conspiracy theories are so pervasive you’d think the whole region was entirely backward and overly religious or something.

For instance, a 2011 Pew survey showed that 75 percent of Egyptian Muslims don’t believe that Arabs were behind the 9/11 attacks. They believe it was…oh, I’ll let you guess who they think did it. But it rhymes with “Da Blues.”

But there’s a reason people in the Middle East believe in so many conspiracy theories — because their governments are often so corrupt and evil, they are working behind the scenes to screw their people. And then blame it on America and the Jews. In the Middle East, people are also usually confined by a state press and have no history of not being lied to.

Also, we’re now in an era where, in addition to porn and bomb-making guidelines, you can see any amount of crazy information you like on the internet, whereas before you could only communicate with like-minded losers via ham radio or at a Star Trek convention.

But we should be way ahead of societies where everything the government does is greeted with automatic suspicion, and I’m not sure we are. In America, there seems to be a very thin wall separating those of us who are being critical and skeptical and those who are just being conspiratorial and crazy.

Isn’t that, you know, bad for democracy?

Tanks, But No Tanks

By Bill Maher

With the advent of Netflix, Blockbuster video stores all over America are closing their doors. People simply don't need their services anymore. That's the free market. But what if President Obama said, "You know what?  Blockbuster employs a lot of people, so I'm going to earmark billions of taxpayer dollars to keep these franchises open. Sure, they have no real customers, but hey, there's no work like busy work."
There would be an outrage. The Drudge Report banner would scream, "Socialism!" and Fox New would have a permanent graphic that says "Blockbuster-gate."

Well, this type of thing is going on. But it's not President Obama that's doing it; it's Congress. The Army doesn't want any more Abrams tanks. They have plenty. More than they need. They've, in fact, told Congress, "We're good." But Congress keeps ordering up more Abrams tanks to the tune of half-a-billion taxpayer dollars just over the last two years. And they're asking for $436 million more in funding.
Why? Jobs. General Dynamics (who spent nearly $11 million on lobbying last year) builds the tanks using more than 560 subcontractors strategically placed in congressional districts throughout the United States. Forty of those companies are in Pennsylvania where Democratic Senator Rob Casey keeps demanding funding for tanks the Army doesn't want or need.

The main Abrams tank plant is in Lima, Ohio which is why this unwanted and unnecessary funding is championed by Republican deficit hawks Rep. Jim Jordan and Sen. Rob Portman, as well as liberal Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown. In the name of jobs in their districts, Congress keeps dumping more Abrams tanks onto the Army's plate like an Italian mother serving unwanted third helpings to a dinner guest who's already full.
Isn't this socialism?

Gappy Days Are Here Again

By Bill Maher

Great news: According to the Pew Research Center, the wealth of American households (the sum of all assets and holdings, including car, home, possessions etc., minus household debt) rose by 14% in the period between 2009 and 2011. We're back, baby! We are all a whopping $5 trillion richer. And by "all," I mean not you, but rich people.



The reason America got 14% wealthier on average is because the household wealth of the richest 7% shot up from about $2.5 million to about $3.2 million during that two-year period, while the bottom 93% of households saw their wealth dip from $140,000 to $134,000. So fuck you, takers.

Looking at it another way, in 2009, the average household in the richest 7% had roughly 18 times the wealth of the average household in the lower 93%. Just two years later, they enjoyed 24 times the wealth of those same less affluent households.

Shouldn't we be doing something about wealth inequality?

The Police Spate

By Bill Maher

My usual friends on the right can’t believe that I said that, during the hunt for the Tsarnaev brothers, Massachusetts looked like a “police state,” just because it was a state full of police. But Fortune just did its own review of homeland security spending, and here are some of the highlights:

• Post-9/11 federal spending on homeland security exceeds $790 billion. That’s larger than TARP and, adjusted for inflation, the New Deal.
• Last year, Massachusetts received $4 million in homeland security grants, ranking it 34th in homeland security grant spending per capita.

In short, homeland security is a money pit. And Boston looked like District 9 two weeks ago, when the black tanks and the body armor came out, but it’s actually under-porked, compared to most places in America that got on the homeland security tit and sucked hard.
Two examples from Fortune of homeland security graft in Nowheresville:

• An Indiana county bought a $300,000 “Electronic Emergency Message Boards” system and used it to advertise the volunteer fire department’s fish fry.
• Western Michigan counties bought thirteen $900 Sno-Cone machines.

Since 9/11, “homeland security” has been “open sesame” for federal money. It’s cops (it’s impossible to spend too much on cops) and the military (again, too much ain’t enough). And the result is Grand Rapids gets a sno-cone machine and Watertown, Mass can’t catch an unarmed bleeding teenager without looking like the Battle of the Bulge.
And, because it’s Fortune, there’s always a kernel of investment advice in any article, even one decrying government waste. See if you can pick it up from these clues:

• The video surveillance market was slated to grow from $11.5 billion in 2008 to $37.5 billion in 2015.
• There are 4,000 security cameras in Manhattan.
• Chicago has 10,000 linked public and private security cameras. London has a half-million.

The answer is that we’re under-photographed compared to London. So invest in closed circuit camera companies. You have nothing to lose but your shame.

Background Check, Please!

By Bill Maher

Recent polling suggests that some of the senators who voted against background checks are taking a hit for it, and Joe Manchin, one of the sponsors of the bill, is saying he's going to bring it back up. But here's the problem: it's not a great bill in the first place, and even if it were, it could never pass the House of Representatives.

If the anti-gun people really want to get guns off the streets, they have to start thinking more like the anti-abortion people. Part of that is getting states and localities to restrict guns more -- that's already happening in places like New York and Colorado. But there's something else they could do: go after providers and make it unbearable for them to be in the killing machine business. This is essentially what the anti-abortion movement has done with abortion providers. The results? Today, 48 states have fewer abortion providers than in they did in 1978.