I don’t think it is common for Bill Maher to be trumped in absurdity by his antiwar guests.
But his recent deer-in-the-headlights reaction to Michael Scheuer was worth watching. After saying he appreciated being cited by bin Laden, the former CIA operative responsible for capturing bin Laden assured us that we are being defeated in both Afghanistan and Iraq. And then he had nothing to say when Maher, of all people, reminded him that bin Laden’s approval ratings are way down across most of the Middle East.
But even Maher then was apparently stunned when Scheuer intoned that democracy abroad is of no interest to the U.S. and the existence of Israel was not worth an American dollar–as if we haven’t spent billions in aid and military assistance for 60 years to ensure a democratic path for Europe, Japan, South Korea, and others. The strange nexus between the broad antiwar Left and the paleo-con, libertarian right gets stranger when the two sides actually start to swap views that veer even slightly off the shared antiwar mantra.