The Lies of Bill Maher — And the Epic Struggle Between Good and Evil in the Aftermath of Tucson, 1/8/11

I saw this trending earlier on Memeorandum. But I caught the second half of last night's "Real Time with Bill Maher" on HBO's 9:00am rebroadcast. It's even worse in full. Michael van der Galien has the essential background: "Bill Maher to tea partiers: The Founding Fathers would’ve hated your guts."

The tea party bashing and atheist ravings are at the clip:

But early in the show Maher launched into a round of vicious blood libel:

"I thought the mantra of this administration coming in was never let a crisis go to waste. You know, if not now, when do we talk about this?," Bill Maher said on his HBO program.

"Are we going to do anything, are we going to use it?," he added.

"There is every way to connect this to partisan politics and talk radio and cable TV except evidence, there's just none of that," Democratic operative James Carville chimed in.

Maher said it should be politicized because the shooting was at a political rally with a politician speaking.

Maher continued his idea to "use" the shooting by blaming a certain ideology and political party.

"There is one side that deserves more blame. There is one side that has been fighting, has been fighting for the right of Americans to have assault rifles. That side deserves more blame," Maher declared.

God bless James Carville for attempting to slap some reality back into Bill Maher. But the "Real Time" host was having none of it. He's got his blood libel smear and he's going with it.

We've had this all week, and it's been debunked repeatedly. But blood libel is so powerful it's irresistable, and progressives will never acknowledge they were wrong from the start.

I can deal with that, as horrendous as it is.

But it's this second batch of lies this morning that's really loathsome, the libels against the faith of the Founders. Maher claims that the Founders "thought the Bible was mostly bullsh*t." Michael van der Galien calls him out:

I hate to break it to you, Bill, but the majority of the Founding Fathers were religious. And those who weren’t orthodox in their beliefs, at least had a healthy respect and appreciation for religion.

Precisely.

But I want to elaborate a bit more on that. Readers should get a hold of Newt Gingrich's, Rediscovering God in America. The introduction is a powerful refudiation to the atheistic libels on the religiosity of the Founders, "Defending God in the Public Square":

There is no attack on American culture more deadly and more historically dishonest than the secular Left’s unending war against God in America’s public life ....

For two generations we have passively accepted this assault on the values of the overwhelming majority of Americans. It is time to insist on judges who understand the history and meaning of America as a country endowed by God.

The secular Left has been inventing law and grotesquely distorting the Constitution to achieve a goal that none of the Founding Fathers would have thought reasonable. History is vividly clear about the importance of God in the founding of our nation. To prove that our Creator is so central to understanding America, there is a walking tour of Washington, D.C. that shows how often the Founding Fathers and other great Americans, and the institutions they created, refer to God and call upon Him. Indeed, to study American history is to encounter God again and again. A tour like this should be part of every school class’s visit to Washington, D.C.

Religion is the fulcrum of American history. People came to America’s shores to be free to practice their religious beliefs. It brought the Pilgrims with their desire to create a “city on a hill” that would be a beacon of religious belief and piety. The Pilgrims were but one group that poured into the new colonies. Quakers in Pennsylvania were another, Catholics in Maryland yet a third. A religious revival, the Great Awakening in the 1730s, inspired many Americans to fight the Revolutionary War to secure their God-given freedoms. Another great religious revival in the nineteenth century inspired the abolitionists’ campaign against slavery.

It was no accident that the marching song of the Union Army during the Civil War included the line “as Christ died to make men holy let us die to make men free.” That phrase was later changed to “let us live to make men free.” But for the men in uniform who were literally placing their lives on the line to end slavery, they knew that the original line was the right one ....

At America’s Founding, religion was central. The very first Continental Congress in 1774 had invited the Reverend Jacob Duché to begin each session with a prayer. When the war against Britain began, the Continental Congress provided for chaplains to serve with the military and be paid at the same rate as majors in the Army.

During the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Benjamin Franklin (often considered one of the least religious of the Founding Fathers) proposed that the Convention begin each day with a prayer. As the oldest delegate, at age eighty-one, Franklin insisted that “the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth—that God governs in the Affairs of Men.”

Because of their belief that power had come from God to the individual, they began the Constitution “we the people.” Note that the Founding Fathers did not write “we the states.” Nor did they write “we the government.” Nor did they write “we the lawyers and judges.”

These historic facts pose an enormous problem for secular liberals. How can they explain America without getting into the area of religion? If they dislike and in many cases fear religion, how then can they communicate the core nature of the people in America?

Look, even Charles Blow of the New York Times has denounced the left's relentless "witch hunt" in the wake of tragedy. And I've remained focused throughout the week on the left's blood libel especially as it goes against everything they claim to represent: human goodness and scientific truth, all bundled together in a benevolent "reality-based community."

Not.

It's the big lie of the new decade. I've cried at the losses, and we can never minimize the evils wrought last Saturday. And thinking about this, perhaps in some respects the scale of the Tucson massacre pales next to the monumental horrors of the September 11 attacks a decade ago. That said, of course an enormous comparison is to be made here to the left's politicization of both of these evils. Not only do progressives desecrate the lives and memories of the fallen, they dishonor Gabrielle Giffords' noble efforts at a politics of deliberative democracy. And if regular Americans can break through the lies and distortions of the mainstream (lamestream) press, we will be at a turning point that will consign progressive-Democrats to the dustbins of political relevance for a generation or more.

RELATED: "Accuracy, Civility, and the Violent Fantasies of the Progressive Left."

And check these search tags for more of my commentary: "Tucson, Arizona" and "Progressives."