I was about ready to throw my shoe at the TV when MSNBC’S Steve Kornacki dredged up Megyn Kelly’s interview with Tara Reade and showed the clip where she says Joe Biden should drop out of the 2020 presidential race. And that followed Chris Hayes’ much criticized segment on the Reade allegations a few days earlier.
Then I caught Friday night’s “Real Time With Bill Maher.” I often find myself disagreeing with Maher’s opinions, but this time got it right and put the whole Tara Reade case in the right perspective.
Maher began by noting that Donald Trump has one move — “accuse you of the very thing he’s guilty of.” And he added that “the liberal media and the liberal party is doing … exactly what Republicans want.”
Then he pointed out how often Reade had contradicted herself and quoted from her strange “love letter” to Vladimir Putin. In it he called the Russian strongman “a compassionate, caring, visionary leader” whose “obvious reverence for women, children and animals, and his ability with sports, is intoxicating to American women.”
WTF. “We’re letting this person change the subject from Donald Trump lethal incompetent to Joe Biden sex monster,” Maher observed with incredulity.
Maher then said that while we should “take accusations seriously,” Democrats had left themselves “gullible.” Republicans don’t care about such stuff, he said, but had turned it into “a unilateral weapon that is used only against Democrats.”
“Trump rides the bus with Billy Bush. We throw Al Franken under it,” he added.
There are much bigger problems he noted. “America has turned into a failed state that does a worse job of keeping its citizens alive during a pandemic than Cambodia.”
“She says Biden attacked her, and he says he didn’t. Those are their positions. How about this for yours: ‘Don’t know, never will, don’t care.’”
And then for icing on the cake he said “I’m with Bogey,“ referencing the closing airport scene in “Casablanca” in which Rick insists that Ilsa get on the plane with her husband, the resistance leader Victor Laszlo: “I’m not good at being noble but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”
Maher didn’t show it, but here’s that scene — one of the most famous in film history.
So let’s not let this whole matter distract us from the main task at hand — getting rid of Donald Trump by electing Joe Biden.