I’m sitting here in my hotel in Charlottesville watching Bill Maher’s new show, and I’m kind of stunned. As I keep mentioning, we don’t have TV in the house, and so this is all new to me.<\/p>\n
Reading about the show, the common theme that I saw was that Maher’s wit and intelligence would bring back a certain kind of intelligent discussion abut politics.<\/p>\n
The only intelligent discussion I saw was from actor Sean Astin – the guy from the LotR series. WTH??<\/p>\n
Maher is the guy (and you all probably know this better than I did) who stepped in it when he said on his old show that Atta and the other 9\/11 attackers were “brave” in the form of their attacks, while Clinton had been less so for just lobbing over some cruise missiles.<\/p>\n
The show tonight has comedian Larry Miller – an old friend of Maher’s, a young woman (who never got a name label) who is a Republican strategist, and actor Astin. <\/p>\n
The crowd – or the laugh track – cheers and laughs loudly at whatever Maher says – while groaning whenever one of the panelists disagrees with him.<\/p>\n
Maher has some mildly witty comments on Administration foibles, attacks the Iraq invasion, using the relatively typical arguments – and overall, my response to him is, I’ve heard it all before. I’ve heard it at a thousand dinner parties in West Los Angeles, and Maher is a perfected example of the model.<\/p>\n
The guy I want to have dinner with is Astin – hobbit Sam – whose comments are surprising, personal, and somehow feel genuinely thoughtful. I have no idea what his politics are, but I’d like to find out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m sitting here in my hotel in Charlottesville watching Bill Maher’s new show, and I’m kind of stunned. As I keep mentioning, we don’t have TV in the house, and so this is all new to me. Reading about the show, the common theme that I saw was that Maher’s wit and intelligence would bring […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=328"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}