In case you didn’t know, I’m unilaterally declaring this cranky Monday. But that’s not important right now.
I’m often asked if I have any regrets about my book. I’ve got a few, but usually not the ones people have in mind. Perhaps my biggest regret is that I agreed to appear on Bill Maher’s HBO show. I broke a 7- or 8-year moratorium on all things Maher-related. The reason I did it is that I didn’t want to say no to anything my publisher asked me to do to promote the book. Giving the publisher a reason not to promote your book is just a bad practice. So, I said yes. The show went fine, I guess. But I felt dirty nonetheless. You see, I think Maher is a bully. I also think he’s got the values of a Belgian pimp. He’s a libertine socialist who calls himself a libertarian. I’ll take prudish capitalists over libertine socialists every time. Oh, and worst of all: He’s not all that funny.
Anyway, I bring this up because I don’t want people to think I endorse watching his show. But I managed to catch a few minutes the other night in my hotel room. He and his guests were talking about Afghanistan and Maher said something like (I’m quoting from rough notes), “The idea — and it’s really just an idea — that 9/11 came from Afghanistan . . . if we only cleaned that up everything would be fine, it’s ridiculous. . . . I’m sure if there was a conservative here he would say we need to be in Afghanistan because that’s where they plotted 9/11.”
Now what bothered me about Maher’s comment wasn’t that he was attempting to speak for conservatives, which would be akin to Gandhi trying to speak for the Texas Beef Council. Nor was it that he butchered the conservative case for winning in Afghanistan. Nor was it his assumption that there is a single conservative position on Afghanistan (there quite obviously is not). No, what bothered me is that insisting that Afghanistan is the central front of the war on terror is exactly what liberals, including two Democratic presidential nominees and, I have no doubt, Bill Maher have been saying ever since the Iraq War entered the equation. “Why are we fighting in Iraq when we were attacked from Afghanistan?” was the number-one rhetorical trick of the Democratic party from the moment the Iraq War started going south. Kerry, Dean, Obama, and countless others insisted that the “central front” of the war on terror was in Afghanistan. Indeed, it was such a staple of liberal argumentation that Barack Obama has gotten himself into the mess he’s in precisely because he acted like he believed what he was saying. And now he has to figure out what to do now that it’s become clear that this was a cynical talking point masquerading as political conviction.
Maher’s tactic here is to simply assert that the “bad” position must be held by conservatives when the position he’s describing is precisely the position he and others held — and used against Bush — just a few moments ago.