Last updated on March 14th, 2013 at 09:22 am
Bill Maher used the frothing with anger of the right at the very sight of Michelle Obama to tell people who have to politicize everything to get help.
Here is the video:
Maher said,
If seeing this nice lady on TV saying she likes the movies, or nutrition, or exercise fills you with rage, get help. The appropriate response to seeing Michelle Obama on TV isn’t who does she think she is? Being on TV is for people who have done something with their lives like ice road truckers, the Amish mafia, or swamp people. You think because your husband is the leader of the free world it makes you all that? Come back when he run a pawn shop.
But look, I’m not here to talk about the First Lady. I’m trying to get to a bigger point, and that is, since when does everything in America have to be political? It’s exhausting. Eating a corn dog used to just be a guilty pleasure. Now it is a blow for freedom against the radical Obama nutrition agenda. I will exercise my God given right to pump our children full of salt and corn syrup until we can’t even tell which part to put the sneakers on. Not everything has to be seen through the lens of politics. If you hate Obamacare, you eat at Papa Johns. If you hate gay marriage, you love Chick-Fil-A. Big portions, conservative. Knowing where your food comes from, liberal. It’s exhausting.
…
How is it that a nation that was never even interested in politics that much, has now made everything political? I believe in science didn’t used to be fighting words. Climate scientists weren’t suspected of being scheming hoaxers, and gynecologists of being a bunch of liberal agenda activists. There we things we didn’t used to pick sides on. Like getting raped is bad. That didn’t used to come up in debates. Neither did the weather. Everybody was anti-hurricane.
You know, back in 2004, Barack Obama told the Democratic convention that there is not a liberal America, or a conservative America. There is the United States of America. And everyone wiped away a tear, and said, ‘God, that Will Smith is good.’ But boy, that some bulls**t right there. Walter Cronkite used end his broadcast every night with, and that’s the way it is. Because back then, we all at least agreed on what was reality. Not now. There’s Fox News for conservatives. MSNBC for liberals, and CNN for airports.
And get this, a poll last month found that Fox News is both the least trusted news station in America and the most trusted. And that’s a problem because as Lincoln once said, ‘A government can not endure half slave, and half free.’
Bill Maher bemoaned the fact that everything has become politicized, but his examples demonstrated that most of politicization seems to be coming from one particular direction. The politicization of our entire culture went into overdrive after Obama was elected. Republicans have not only created their own reality. They have politicized everything from pizza to the weather. To an extremist right wing movement, everything is a chance to express their Obama hate.
As right wing billionaires have come out from the shadows, the left has used boycotts to push back against their funding of an attempted corporate conservative takeover of our politics. Seeing an opening, some companies have followed the Fox News model of catering to the partisan divide and they market their products to one side or the other.
The greatest irony of all is that the very people who claimed to embody the legacy of the Founding Fathers have ignored George Washington’s warning about the dangers of political parties, “The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge … is itself a frightful despotism. … It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another. … A fire not to be quenched, it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest, instead of warming, it should consume.”
The right’s behavior has led to push back from the left that has trapped this nation in a partisan spiral. President Obama has spent much of his presidency trying to overcome the self feeding inertia of political polarization, but it takes two to tango. As long as there are forces on the right, and to a lesser degree the left, who continue to profit from the current environment things will not change.
Facts are no longer agreed upon. Reality is now up for debate, and every movement towards an inch of progress is an epic struggle. It doesn’t have to be this difficult, but until the right leaves their bubble and joins the rest of us, it’s the way that things will continue to be.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
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