I have mixed feelings about Bill Maher.

Let’s start by describing them as 75 percent positive. When Bill Maher comes forward and says things like this – that America is stupid – he is absolutely my hero. Because this shit has got to be said; by someone, in some way, and an articulate and talented comedian saying it makes it all the better. His recent documentary, Religious, is another example of Bill Maher being kick ass awesome. Very few people, I have observed, speak truth to a cultural consensus of stupid more than Bill Maher.

However, I realize that Maher’s truth telling is deeply satisfying to me because well, I already agree with him. So here is someone spouting what I understand to be the plain truth in a fashion more witty, and more smart than even I could hope to manage. Alright, that makes me want to do cartwheels in my living room. But of what use is this to moving the broader, more mainstream debate in the right direction? It’s easy fodder for the right wing pundits, who can quote Maher as ample “proof” that the left is anti-American, elitist, etc. And who is Maher convincing other than those who already lean in his direction? Well, as always, I hold out hope for the third party, the youngster or politically neutral that, although they’ve never really thought about this before, find themselves laughing with Maher and hey, they like this guy. They have enough cultural knowledge to get his jokes and, impressed by his intellect and charisma, start to ponder these larger questions and tend to fall in his direction. However, how large is this audience and, how much will commentators and comedians like Maher help it grow? These are all open questions for me at the moment, and they speak directly to my own process of trying to figure out what kind of pubic commentator I want to be.

However, despite these doubts about the efficacy of Maher’s commentary, I still cannot imagine that the country would be better off with a softer, more moderate Maher. Someone needs to be saying these things, if only to preserve the intellectual dignity of this citizenry and to ensure that future historians will not look back on the record and conclude in dismay that simply no one was critical enough to see America for what, in many respects, it really was.

My second complaint is more clear cut. It is about women. Maher strangely does a complete one-eighty from his usual insightfulness when it comes to women. Whereas when observing religiosity in America, Maher sees how traditional culture keeps people from questioning and challenging the religious status quo, when it comes to gender he reproduces a host of old patriarchal stereotypes with no sense of how reactionary he is being. Women, in the mind of Maher, are always emotionally dependent on men*, and always looking for someone to impregnate them. Men, on the other hand, are biologically designed to cheat on their wives after a certain period of time.** Maher never wonders whether these images, and certain current realities, have less to do with some inherent aspect of womanhood, and more to do with  centuries old cultural pressures and conditioning. After all, if I grew up in a culture where I was informed that how I looked mattered more than how I thought, and that if I wasn’t eminently fuckable to the modern American man, I wouldn’t be loved, Christ, I think I might I have some emotional dependency issues. Oh wait, I did grow up in such a culture. It has always been clear to me, since elementary school, that the fact that I do not significantly suffer from these disabilities is the exception rather than the rule.

Do not get me wrong. I do not think Maher is a misogynist – he clearly has great admiration and respect for women and, I imagine, informs all of his partners honestly that if they are looking for a romantic, two-way relationship they’re looking in the wrong place. However I suspect he has extrapolated his personal experience with women to all women generally, with no idea of how statistically unreliable that is. If too many women piped up after sex, asking him, “what are you thinking?”, perhaps that is because Maher is desirable enough to make women fascinated with him, but is himself not quite capable of seeking out women who will defy such stereotypes.***

But no one is perfect. At the end of the day, Maher’s swallowing of the cultural consensus of stupidity – when it comes to women – is tolerable when compared to his insightful and fearless criticism of some of the more immediately harmful tendencies of American culture.

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* For a taste of this, see a clip of Bill Maher’s otherwise commendable “The Decider,” standup. Elsewhere in the same program, Maher jokes about the apparently universal tendency of women to ask “what are you thinking?,” right after sex, which would be a funny joke for the element of reality it touches upon if it was not coupled in Maher’s comedy with such unexamined and banal generalities about women.

** Please consult the last 15 minutes of the podcast of the May 8^th broadcast of “Real Time,” where Maher describes asking a male to be monogamous as equivalent to asking him to eat nothing but toast for the rest of his life.

*** Consult footnote one.

Please stop saying the idiocy of the Republicans is going to turn the party into a minuscule minority.

It’s not. What it is going to do is galvanize the already sizable right, and seduce a good chunk of the “moderates” that are supposedly so turned off by this circus of stupidity.

Liberal pundits, I’ve noticed, seem to be fond of declaring the internal combustion of the Republican Party. They’re losing their minds, they say. They’re desperate, they say. They’re imploding all over the place because they don’t know what else to do, they say. True, true, true. But then they assume that this is all very bad for them; that the supposedly mostly moderate American public is able to discern between reasoned debate and ignorance on display.

There are two major problems with this. Firstly, anyone on the right does not view such spectacles as Joe Wilson insulting the president on Wednesday as a serious reason to reconsider their own opinions. The connection between the shameless tactics of those opposed to health care reform, and the content of their opinions, will not be made. If anything, it will be made in the opposite direction – such behavior is called for because we are on the brink of the beginning of socialism in the United States so, why would you expect anything less?

Secondly, I wonder why the liberal columns I so often read, talking about how the Republican Party is going to have to compromise some of its hard lines if it wants to win at the ballot box, ignore the implied meanings of the word “moderate.” Sure, a majority of Americans could possibly be described as moderate, insofar as they are neither vehemently opposed to everything possibly described as liberal nor are they Godless liberal elitists, like myself. But the very meaning of the word moderate is operative here – of medium quantity, calm or mild. Moderates are not going to get all worked up about conservatives showing themselves for the intellectual frauds that they are. Moderates aren’t going to draw those conclusions in the first place. Moderates are going to shrug their shoulders, and say “Well it looks like a lot of heated debate is going on here, and I’m not sure what I think,” but then when someone tells them their taxes are going to be raised, they’ll quickly make up their minds about what they think. And then they’ll vote Republican, if they vote at all.

Why this persistent faith in the power of the moderate American voter? Don’t these pundits understand how primaries work, how lobbies work, how campaign contribution works, and who votes? Don’t they know that indeed, probably the weakest voice in a center-right country where “it’s socialist” suffices as a knock-out argument is this pathetic excuse for a moderate voice?

These pundits are merely looking in a mirror; they like to think of themselves as moderate, reasonable, open to compromise and capable of discerning truth from bullshit. And thus in a moment of severe although unintentional self-flattery, they tell themselves that this is the true America, the silent better angles of our nature. Perhaps some much needed introspection will occur when their optimistic forecasts turn to showers two and four years from now.

But then again, I really hope I’m wrong.