Bill Maher Tells Us What's What

Bill Maher is so smart, don'tcha think?

For God's sake, tell people to read a newspaper. Not just to save the newspaper industry - though Lord knows I'd miss my Daily Jumble - but because having a public that actually knows something is our best defense against ever again electing a President who knows nothing.

Read: tell people to get their news through Progressive Outlets so that never again will they elect a president who disagrees with the Progressive worldview.

There's a name for people who do the right thing for their country, even if it involves sacrifice. And no, it's not "socialists." It's "patriots." We all know the modern definition of a patriot: It's the person who pays the least taxes and listens to the most A.M. radio. But that wasn't what it always meant.

The country isn't the government. The Constitution put limits on Federal Government power that has been ignored for decades. A very large portion of that abuse has been by people with socialist ideals, slowly but surely making more and more people more and more reliant on government and less and less reliant on themselves and their immediate communities. If the people who pay the least taxes and listen to the most A.M. radio happen to be against this trend and for a return to limited government, then they are patriots -- not because of the former two traits but because of the latter two.

Patriots want their fellow citizens to be able to go to the hospital. They want to make sure no one sells them bread made out of Chinese skulls. They want a country where the deer and the antelope can still play - and not just so Sarah Palin can shoot them from a helicopter. Patriots want to burn less coal and buy less oil.

The country isn't your neighbor, either. The country isn't your Nanny. The Country was outlined in the Constitution. It's an ideal, and it says nothing about hospitals, skull bread, or wildlife management practices uninformed people may find distasteful.

During the campaign, Obama suggested that one simple thing Americans could do to help with fuel-efficiency was check their car's tire pressure. And Republicans freaked, because to them, every suggestion for the common good is a direct attack on their personal liberty, and it's unpatriotic to interfere with anyone's God-given right to be big, dumb and selfish.

Maher is convienently forgetting making up the context here. But that's what these people do. Re-state the "facts" so that they suit them. Obama was dismissing the effectiveness of drilling offshore by saying hey, all we have to do is inflate our tires and we save as much as we'd get by doing that. Republicans didn't freak or even talk about personal liberty. They just said "you're wrong." Wrong to dismiss our position with fictional numbers for trivial actions. And you know, we could import less oil if we used more of our own. Funny, that.

When the President suggests things that will help the greater good, that's not a slight against your fragile manhood. I know, you're a rugged individualist. But you're not - you're just a schmuck.

Ah, on to the belittling. And name-calling. You know, things you need to do to attempt to make it sound like you have an argument when you really don't. And history shows that every time someone goes on about government forcing people to do things for "the greater good" or "the common good" it seems to end up in tyranny and leaving massive numbers of dead people in its wake. So pardon us for flinching when that term gets used.

Going back to Reagan, all of our leaders have predictably and reliably told us that government is always the problem, never you my precious, perfect American citizen. You are always perfect just the way you are, like a precious little snowflake. A beautiful, precious, 350-pound, pig-ignorant snowflake.

And they told us why and gave examples with data to back it up rather than calling us more names or ridiculing our choices because you know better, Mr. Maher. Liberty is about choices. And people reap the rewards of their good ones, and suffer the consequences of their bad ones. It's not that we think all Americans are perfect and should never change. We just don't presume to tell them that we know they aren't and try to dictate how and when they will change.