Why Does Bill Maher Get A Pass?
June 3, 2010 by blackgirlgrown
Filed under black women, featured articles, race
I don’t care if you’re well-meaning, think you’re cool or hip, or are a flaming liberal. This is unacceptable and the silence in the response to Bill Maher’s rhetoric is deafening! I guess everyone would have been cool if Bill Maher said what Glenn Beck did about President Obama’s daughter too. Someone explain to me why Bill Maher gets a pass.
Investor’s Business Daily writes:
Comedian Bill Maher stereotypes black people as ghetto hoodlums and there’s no outcry. The long-standing racial double standard always shields the left.
‘I thought when we elected a black president we were gonna get a black president,” HBO’s Maher told viewers last week. “You know, this is where I want a real black president. I want him in a meeting with the BP CEOs, you know, where he lifts up his shirt so they can see the gun in his pants.”
Is this really what TV audiences picture when they think of “black people”? In 2010?
Wasn’t this country, which has suffered so much in its race relations, supposed to have transcended caricatures like this long ago?
Hasn’t Maher ever heard of the Cosby Show’s Dr. Cliff Huxtable and his lovable, affluent, furthest-thing-from-dysfunctional family, who ruled prime-time television for five straight years — some two decades ago?
How could a nerdy white guy like Maher get away with something like this? Where were the Revs. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, who usually seem so quick to demand apologies for racial insults? And where are the “mainstream” media?
Virginia Republican George Allen, once considered presidential timber, saw his career derailed by the media in 2006 after he called a nonwhite operative for an opponent’s campaign a “macaca” — a cryptic remark no one to this day has deciphered.
Former Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., was forced from Senate leadership in 2002 after an open mike picked up an offhand remark at former segregationist Democrat Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party. Lott said Thurmond should have been elected president in 1948.
But Joe Biden, who during the presidential campaign described Barack Obama as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean,” got a pass and ends up vice president.
And when John Heilemann and Mark Halperin’s recent book, “Game Change,” brought to light Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s 2008 statement about Obama being “light skinned” with “no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one,” the whole hullabaloo blew over in a matter of days.
So Republicans pay the price and liberals like Maher get a pass. This isn’t Maher’s only offense, either. Last month he called Obama “President Sanford and Son” — yet this guy gets invited onto ABC’s “This Week” to assure the millions watching that “nowadays, if you are racist, you’re probably a Republican.”
Damn. I missed the Sanford and Son slight. Shaking my head….
blackgirlgrown
