Journalist Glenn Greenwald reflects today in his Guardian column on his experience as a guest on last night's airing of Real Time with Bill Maher.
In short, the leftmost boundary of Maher's position on international affairs came into view. On the subject of the Middle East, Maher tends to skew orientalist and nationalist in his commentary. In other words, he adopts a kind of imperial arrogance, where the woes of the region are solely an expression of Islam and the culture, not due to foreign manipulation - of which his country has played an immense role.
Greenwald does well to speak up, takes Maher on, and makes good points. (Greenwald in general does very fine work, which might explain why he, an American, has a column in a British newspaper.)
I too sometimes enjoy Maher's cavalier, sarcastic humor; like Jon Stewart, he can be very effective at lampooning and exposing the absurdities that issue from the far-rightwing. That said, because he is taking the far-right to task does not mean he is located far-left of center. He (like Stewart) resides somewhere around the liberal center, if not a bit to the right. (I would argue Stewart is closer to the liberal center than Maher.)
However, in approaching the different media personalities categorically - i.e., liberal, conservative - there is a risk of missing the nuances and possibly not hearing, in this case, a "liberal" commentator adopting a political line of argument that is consonant with the worst savagery carried out by Western Europe and the United States in foreign lands - all in the name of progress.
And to give his ideological views the image of historical, intellectual legitimacy, he argues that it's about religion. Of course, it isn't.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/11/bill-maher-muslims-islam-benghazi
