Bill Burton runs Barack Obama’s super PAC, the one to which Bill Maher donated $1 million. Burton doesn’t want to give that money back. His defense of Maher doesn’t pass the laugh test.
MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell asked Burton, a former Obama campaign press secretary, if that was a double standard, a charge Burton deflected by arguing that Maher was a comedian, not a political commentator.
“First of all, obviously, some of those things were vulgar and inappropriate and said over the course of years of a comedian’s life. It’s not language I would use or language we would use at Priorities USA,” Burton said. “But the notion that there is an equivalence between what a comedian has said over the course of his career and what the de facto leader of the Republican Party said to sexually degrade a woman who led in a political debate of our time, is crazy.”
What? Bill Maher, former host of a show called Politically Incorrect, and whose entire schtick these days consists of hosting roundtable shows about politics with a mix of media and political figures, isn’t a political commentator? Really? That’s what you’re going with?
Maher’s remarks weren’t “over the course of a career.” They were made in a specific place and time, targeted at a specific person, and they were awful.
And if we were to do a blind comparison on the language used, Maher’s foul, obviously misogynistic language would earn him FCC fines if he was on broadcast. Rush is on broadcast, and even the Obama FCC knows it can’t touch him for the words he used. If it could, we all know that it would.
What Rush said was bad, and he has apologized. What Maher said was far worse, and he has not apologized. The president’s super PAC and the Alabama Democratic Party have embraced Maher — comedian, political commentator, whatever — and are raising money with him.
There’s a lesson to be learned in all this: The Democrats’ fealty to feminism is nothing but show. They don’t really care about advancing women. Their support of womanizer and alleged rapist Bill Clinton was a strong hint, but their embrace of Bill Maher is a shout: Democrats are just using women to help themselves.
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