Wednesday, October 16, 2013
Bill Maher believes that President Obama keeps his policies "centrist" due to fear of assassination.
BILL MAHER: It seems like the people like that, Kennedy, they just seem to always, at the end of the day, somehow get cut out of the picture -- violently, or otherwise -- and maybe that is why Barack Obama is a little more of a centrist than we want him to be.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: You think that?
MAHER: Well, I think he knows that if he goes a little too far to the left --
MATTHEWS: Really?
MAHER: Well, yeah.
MATTHEWS: I'm just really curious that you think that.
MAHER: Well, if I were Barack --
MATTHEWS: That's an extraordinary statement.
MAHER: What? You don't think --
MATTHEWS: I'm just saying that's an extraordinary statement. I'm amazed -- I'm impressed you think that.
MAHER: Think what?
MATTHEWS: That his policies are driven by fear of assassination.
MAHER: Well, not by fear of assassination.
JAMES GLASSMAN: Is that what you said?
MATTHEWS: Then by what?
MAHER: Well, I'm saying that yeah --
MATTHEWS: I thought you just said that.
MAHER: I didn't say it in those words.
MATTHEWS: Well, I would try and clarify.
MAHER: Well, I'm saying that, yeah, I think that's something that probably [Obama] thinks about at night, yeah. Wouldn't you?
MATTHEWS: That he has to change his policies for that reason?
MAHER: No! But I think that he is a centrist. I think people saw him as what they wanted to see him. They saw a liberal, and he was never really that much of a liberal. And to call him a socialist, is completely --
CAROL ROTH, CNBC: I don't think that anybody who is in the center or at the right would think that he is a centrist. You might think that, but everybody else doesn't think that.
MAHER: I don't think that is an insult to say to somebody that he may modulate his policies because he is afraid of all the hate that he sees.
MATTHEWS: He probably gets reports constantly about threats, though. That must unnerve him.
Now you might dismiss this as simply Maher being provocative, except there was also this recent post from Andrew Sullivan:
I’ve been doing some reading about John Kennedy, and what I find startling, and even surprising, is how absolutely Wanted_for_treasonconsistent and unchanged the ideology of the extreme American right has been over the past fifty years, from father to son and now, presumably, on to son from father again. The real analogue to today’s unhinged right wing in America is yesterday’s unhinged right wing in America. This really is your grandfather’s right, if not, to be sure, your grandfather’s Republican Party. …
Reading through the literature on the hysterias of 1963, the continuity of beliefs is plain: Now, as then, there is said to be a conspiracy in the highest places to end American Constitutional rule and replace it with a Marxist dictatorship, evidenced by a plan in which your family doctor will be replaced by a federal bureaucrat—mostly for unnamable purposes, but somehow involving the gleeful killing off of the aged. There is also the conviction, in both eras, that only a handful of Congressmen and polemicists (then mostly in newspapers; now on TV) stand between honest Americans and the apocalypse, and that the man presiding over that plan is not just a dupe but personally depraved, an active collaborator with our enemies, a secret something or other, and any necessary means to bring about the end of his reign are justified and appropriate. And fifty years ago, as today, groups with these beliefs, far from being banished to the fringe of political life, were closely entangled and intertwined with Senators and Congressmen and right-wing multi-millionaires.
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| A famous handbill circulated on November 21, 1963 In Dallas, Texas. One day before the assassination of John F. Kennedy. |
Yes I would like to dismiss the words of Bill Maher. I just can't.
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