The poor butterfly was “Real Time’s” Bill Maher, making his maiden voyage as a member of the political show’s roundtable, and the merciless wheel of torture was the ever-anatomizing mind of George Will. There’s no need to recount the incident—odds are you’ve seen it by now. And if not, you can read about it—and relive it—in this excellent analysis by Brad Schaeffer on this very website. 

To be honest, Mr. Maher’s talent for self-immolation is so highly developed that Mr. Will had little to do other than ask two clarifying questions and watch Maher try to free his flailing self-pinned wings. The logorrheic Maher had fallen prey to his own intemperate mouth. Hoisted on his own petard, Maher forgot that vanity is not just a character flaw—it’s one of the Seven Deadly Sins.  You can put vanity ahead of truth in the comedy arena with near-certain impunity, but you’re bound to pay a heavy price when you relegate truth to hind teat in the Sunday morning political ring with heavyweights like George Will punching back. 

What lesson can be learned from the Maher meltdown? Or in the parlance of today’s telespeak, what’s the “teachable moment” in all of this? Let’s get out our Maher microscope and take a look. 

Of Maher’s two ridiculous statements, the first was the less offensive and, though wildly absurd, the more innocuous. His patently false assertion that Brazil has “gotten off oil” was ludicrous on its face and would have been refuted by any halfway economically-savvy commentator willing to challenge Maher’s Brazilophilia. George Will, in characteristic laconic fashion, did so in one succinct query: “Bill, can you just explain to me in what sense Brazil ‘got off oil’?” 

Clearly, Maher was attempting to bang the Left’s beloved drum of American non-exceptionalism, America-the-evil-oil-consumer, America-the-evil-ecology-wrecker, America-the-evil-period. The one small flaw in Maher’s argument was a sticky one—more viscous than the sludge at the bottom of a crude oil tank—the truth. As Schaeffer ably points out in the aforementioned piece, Brazil is one of the world’s leading suppliers and consumers of oil. In November of 2007, its national energy company Petrobras announced the discovery off the coast of Rio de Janeiro of one of the world’s largest new oil fields ever. 

Perhaps we can forgive Mr. Maher this blithe dismissal of economic reality in his quest to assert South American primacy over North American imagined imperialism. But the really revealing, soul-baring comments made by Maher were his theme and variation on conservatism and racism.  These two unfortunate musings are statements that cannot easily be forgiven nor should soon be forgotten.

Government intrusion, you know, government power’s something that really bothers conservatives unless it’s directed towards people who aren’t white, you know… nowadays if you are racist, you’re probably a Republican.”

First, the preposterous implication of the first statement—to paraphrase Maher, that government intrusion is championed by conservatives when directed against non-whites—is that all conservatives are white. Any need to elaborate on the lucidity of that statement? Res ipsa loquitur. And of course, the concomitant claim of conservative’s hunger for governmental control of non-whites is on its surface offensive and absurd. Any decent man would have apologized for such a statement. Maher chose to elaborate. 

The second half of Maher’s “Race in Twenty-first Century America” dissertation—after George Will forced him to explain his explanation—is even more elucidating of the workings of the Maher soul: “If you’re a racist, you’re probably a Republican.” Does bigotry get any balder than that? Does it get any bolder? Vanity is one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Another is pride. Let the ABC viewer decide for him or herself to what degree Mr. Maher is invulnerable to these transgressions of character. 

Maher’s accusations about race are not only odious, racist, and repugnant on their face, they are characteristic of the wholesale and relentless attempt by the left—and many in the media—to brand the Tea Party movement and, on a wider basis, any critic of the current administration as racially motivated. Those who watch Maher’s Real Time and enjoy his brand of political chatter would do well to examine its loose-lipped host for the very kind of bias he accuses the conservative movement of so blithely and so blanketly.  

One can infer from his 2008 film Religulous that Maher is, if not a denier, at best agnostic regarding the crucifixion of Christ. Regarding his own political crucifixion, however, there can be no doubt. It’s on videotape for all to see. What remains in doubt is the likelihood of his resurrection as a political pundit at the ABC Sunday morning roundtable.  

They say cats have nine lives. How many does a butterfly have?

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The acerbic Maher is used to making outrageous and factually empty statements on his HBO talk-show and getting nothing but an approving nod from his guests and howls of affirmation from his unwashed peanut gallery in return. But when he made this claim: “I could criticize America in general for not attacking this problem [dependency on fossil fuels] in the Seventies. I mean, Brazil got off oil in the last thirty years we certainly could’ve,” he was woefully ill-prepared to be called out on it by the acutely observant Will who pressed him: “Bill, can you just explain to me in what sense Brazil ‘got off oil’?”

It was an uncomfortable moment of reality TV as Maher played the proverbial deer in headlights. “Uh…I believe they did. I believe they, in the Seventies they had a program to use sugar cane ethanol and I believe that is what fuels their country.” A Ralph Kramden “hamana-hamana” could not have betrayed less command of the issue. Will promptly reminded the comedian: “They still burn a lot of oil and have a lot of it off-shore.”

In case Maher needs some help, EIA statistics show that Brazil produces 2.4 million barrels of oil per day and consumes roughly 2.52mm bpd–ranking it #8 on the list of oil consuming nations. It is true that they may soon be a net oil exporter…but this because their production capacity has steadily increased as new fields are tapped while consumption has remained steady, not because they are “off oil.” In fact, the largest oil discoveries in recent years have come from Brazil’s off-shore, pre-salt basins in which Brazil’s state oil company Petrobras is investing $220 billion to explore. Off-shore exploration rights have also been sold this year to BP for $7 billion. That’s a far cry from “off oil” eh Bill? But why let reality and data stand in the way of a good liberal rant? And what was Maher’s final defense in this case? “I want to make sure I read that, I know I didn’t just dream that.” (Try to imagine if Andrew Breitbart said that when making a conservative argument on Maher’s show. One can hear the scoffing hoots from the crowd.)

The beads of sweat must have been popping on his high forehead as Maher’s public skewering at the hands of Will painfully continued when the topic turned to Arizona’s new immigration law. First when asked by moderator Jake Tapper what he would suggest Arizona citizens do Maher replied: “Well I would hope that the Constitution of the country is a little more important to them.” George Will swooped in: “What Constitutional provision does this violate?” Maher again stammered: “I mean nobody has been able to articulate a scenario where the police are sopping people for any other reason than they are Mexican and poor.” In short, Maher really couldn’t say so he whipped out a John Edwards handbook.

Still, the battered Maher valiantly pressed on despite by now clearly having demonstrated he had no place in this forum. Apparently again thinking he was on Real Time where his far-left screeds go unchallenged, he went on to offer up this hateful gem: “Government intrusion, you know, government power’s something that really bothers conservatives unless it’s directed towards people who aren’t white, you know…” Enter Mr. Will again: “Mr. Maher just said, if I heard him right, that conservatives basically are racists and only like government intrusion against people who are not white. That’s their level of argument?” Far-left doyenne Katrina vanden Heuvel rushed to his defense: “I didn’t hear that.” Really? Then what did you hear?

Bill tries to moonwalk his words back a space: “I would never say…that all Republicans are racist. But nowadays if you are racist, you’re probably a Republican.” That is quite an indictment from a man who lives in a 6000-square-foot beverly Hills home on a 2.5-acre gated compound, safely ensconced in a neighborhood that is 83% white and a whopping 1.7% black.

By the time he tried to change his tune, the damage of Maher’s hate-speechifying was already done and his credentials as a bona fide far-left loon with no command of the facts were firmly established for all to see. One gets the feeling that Maher himself is just smart enough to paradoxically understand how much of a fool he looked at the hands of Will–who in turn actually appeared to be enjoying helping Maher self-destruct.

So thank you Bill Maher for exposing yourself on a national stage as the ideologically pompous but intellectually vacant pontificator you are. It must have been a gut-wrenching moment when you were actually challenged to back up your outlandish assertions and accusations against the right you make so freely on HBO. George Will showed that, though you may be a star in the far-left sky, you are not even ready for the minor leagues of informed (key word) political discourse…let alone “the show.” Your rants against conservative ‘ignorance’ have been revealed today for what they are: the pot calling the tea kettle black! And one thing is for sure. George Will’s beloved Chicago Cubs have a better shot at winning the World Series than he does of ever being invited to appear as a panelist on Real Time.

Do you remember that NEA phone call? I think it was back in August, the 21st or the 25th, and it featured basically a coordination from the White House to the National Endowment for the Arts to promote Obama’s health care and parts of his domestic agenda. One of the artists on that call got hold of Breitbart and said they’re turning the National Endowment for the Arts and www.Serve.gov, the latest website out of the White House, into political instruments, and there are four pieces written on this at BigGovernment.com. But all it really exposes up ’til now is that the NEA was lying about their coordination with the Obama White House on spreading propaganda. This is the thing that George Will had a comment on This Week, said some laws were broken in this call. Then after some attention was focused on this they announced that the National Endowment for the Arts director of communications Yosi Sargent had been reassigned. They said he was fired but he was actually just reassigned. (more…)

On August 25th 2009, Big Hollywood’s Patrick Courrielche broke the story of a conference call he attended with other “rising artist and art community luminaries”:

On Thursday August 6th, I was invited by the National Endowment for the Arts to attend a conference call scheduled for Monday August 10th hosted by the NEA, the White House Office of Public Engagement, and United We Serve. The call would include “a group of artists, producers, promoters, organizers, influencers, marketers, taste-makers, leaders or just plain cool people to join together and work together to promote a more civically engaged America and celebrate how the arts can be used for a positive change!” 

The email invite came directly from Yosi Sergant, then-Director of Communications at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and it advised this hand-picked group that the call was about laying “a new foundation for growth, focusing on core areas of the recovery agenda – health care, energy and environment, safety and security, education, community renewal.” 

Courrielche describes the call this way:

Backed by the full weight of President Barack Obama’s call to service and the institutional weight of the NEA, the conference call was billed as an opportunity for those in the art community to inspire service in four key categories, and at the top of the list were “health care” and “energy and environment.” The service was to be attached to the President’s United We Serve campaign, a nationwide federal initiative to make service a way of life for all Americans. 

It sounded, how should I phrase it…unusual, that the NEA would invite the art community to a meeting to discuss issues currently under vehement national debate. I decided to call in, and what I heard concerned me. 

Within 48 hours of this phone call, 21 arts organizations endorsed President Obama’s health-care reform plan. Within days, Rock the Vote started an all out blitz that included a “health care design contest.” 

The NEA’s Yosi Sergant

On August 27th, two days after Courrielche’s piece published on Big Hollywood, the Washington Times picked up on the story, contacted Sergant and asked him about the call. Sergant claimed to be only a “participant in a call” and then lied outright claiming the conference call email invites were sent by a “third party,” not the NEA.

Courrielche’s  August 31st follow-up piece, which included copies of Sergant’s email invite, proved the complete opposite was true.

The next day, September 1st, the Washington Times posted copies of Sergant’s invites from Courrielche’s Big Hollywood piece along with their own transcript of Sergant denying he sent the invites. They titled their piece: “Official Dishonesty From the NEA.”

On September 6th, columnist George Will brought the story into the mainstream media when, on “This Week,” he wondered aloud  just how many laws the August 10th conference call had broken.

On September 10th, the Washington Times followed the money trail and published the explosive news that of the 21 arts organizations who endorsed President Obama’s health care reform plan…

“…16 of the groups and affiliated organizations received nearly $2 million in grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in the 150 days before the conference call. According to a Washington Times analysis of NEA records, more than $1 million of that total came from the stimulus package.

September 10th was a rough day for the NEA. The same day the troubling money trail was revealed, Yosi Sergant was “reassigned.” The NEA has yet to explain why Sergant was “reassigned.”  This is the only statement they released:

“On August tenth, the National Endowment for the Arts participated in a call with arts organizations to inform them of the president’s call to national service. The White House office of public engagement also participated in the call, which provided information on how the Corporation for National and Community Service can assist groups interested in sponsoring service projects or having their members volunteer on other projects. This call was not a means to promote any legislative agenda and any suggestions to that end are simply false. The NEA regularly does outreach to various organizations to inform of the work we are doing and the resources available to them.”

That same day, the Washington Times looked at this statement, looked at the evidence, and declared “The NEA Lies Again.”

Patrick Courrielche, who was a participant on the call, agrees:

It just goes against my core beliefs to sit quietly while the art community is used by the NEA and the administration to push an agenda other than the one for which it was created. It is not within the National Endowment for the Arts’ original charter to initiate, organize, and tap into the art community to help bring awareness to health care, or energy & environmental issues for that matter; and especially not at a time when it is being vehemently debated. Artists shouldn’t be used as tools of the state to help create a climate amenable to their positions, which is what appears to be happening in this instance. If the art community wants to tackle those issues on its own then fine. But tackling them shouldn’t come as an encouragement from the NEA to those they potentially fund at this coincidental time. 

In his September 18th Washington Post column, George Will sides with Courrielche: 

“The NEA is the nation’s largest single source of financial support for the arts, and its grants often prompt supplemental private donations. He who pays the piper does indeed call the tune, and in the four months before the conference call, 16 of the participating organizations received a total of nearly $2 million from the NEA. Two days after the call, the 16 and five other organizations issued a plea for the president’s health-care plan. …

“[T]he Obama administration is tightening the cinch on subsidized artists, conscripting them into the crusade to further politicize the 17 percent of the economy that is health care.

That Obama administration officials would make even tacit suggestions about potential artistic output to a collection of federal grant recipients is, itself, troubling. That these suggestions matched-up with very specific and time-sensitive legislative priorities should give us all pause.

Buffy Wicks

But, there is even a larger issue that hasn’t yet received much attention in the press. Among the Obama Administration officials on the call were Buffy Wicks, Office of Public Engagement and the lead White House official on the President’s Serve.Gov initiative to promote national service. Also on the call was Nell Abernathy, Director of Outreach for Serve.Gov. One of their main goals on the call, it seems, was to encourage artists to produce works that would reinforce the President’s call for service; specifically through the Serve.Gov web-portal.

As Dana Loesch recently reported at Big Government, the Serve.Gov portal funnels citizens to volunteer or service projects connected with ACORN and other leftist groups. The taxpayer-funded website is evolving into a cyber-recruitment tool for the progressive movement.

So what did happen on that call? Was the NEA coordinating with the White House to push their agenda on a group of artists eager for and reliant upon the NEA for grants, or is the NEA telling the truth that this call “was not a means to promote any legislative agenda”?

Tomorrow at noon ET, explosive new information will answer that question and raise many others.

“Did the White House initiate the conference call-cum-political pep rally? Or, even worse, did the NEA, an independent agency, spontaneously politicize itself? Something that reads awfully like an invitation went from Sergant’s NEA e-mail address to a cohort of “artists, producers, promoters, organizers, influencers, marketers, tastemakers, leaders or just plain cool people.” …

“The NEA is the nation’s largest single source of financial support for the arts, and its grants often prompt supplemental private donations. He who pays the piper does indeed call the tune, and in the four months before the conference call, 16 of the participating organizations received a total of nearly $2 million from the NEA. Two days after the call, the 16 and five other organizations issued a plea for the president’s health-care plan. …

“[T]he Obama administration is tightening the cinch on subsidized artists, conscripting them into the crusade to further politicize the 17 percent of the economy that is health care.

“Time was, artists were proudly adversarial regarding authority, the established order, etc. “Epater le bourgeois!” and all that. Now they are just another servile interest group seeking morsels from the federal banquet. Are they real artists? Sure, because in this egalitarian era, government reasons circularly: Art is whatever an artist says it is, and an artist is whoever produces art. So, being an artist is a self-validating vocation.”

You can read the piece in full here.

From the Washington Times:

Yosi Sergant has been asked to resign from his post as Communications Director for the National Endowment for the Arts[.]

Big Hollywood’s  Partrick Courrielche broke the story of these – to say the least – controversial NEA conference calls on August 25th, calls obviously designed to promote President Obama’s domestic agenda, especially health care.  

The Washington Times picked up on the story, contacted NEA Communications Director Sergant and asked him about the calls. He denied the NEA was responsible for sending out the conference call email invitations:

WASHINGTON TIMES: Hey, I understand that there was a conference call on August 10th that the NEA invited producers, artists, marketers, etcetera.

SERGANT:  The NEA didn’t invite…We were a participant in a call.  It was a third party that did the invitation. 

WASHINGTON TIMES: I see.  I was wondering If you could send me, if possible,  a copy of the invitation?

SERGANT: Umm…It didn’t come from us, so I don’t have it to distribute.  You’d go to them for that.

Courrielche’s follow-up piece proved the complete opposite was true. Not only had the invites come from the NEA but from Sergant himself.

During all this Glenn Beck picked up the story:

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This past Sunday on “This Week,” George Will wondered if the NEA hadn’t broken a few laws. Coerrielche followed this up on Tuesday with a post complete with contradictory audio with Sergant claiming a filmmaker named Michael Skolnick was the “third party” responsible for the conference call, and Skolnick matter-of-factly stating he was asked by “folks” in the White House and NEA to “bring artists together.”

Predictably, the Huffington Post spin on today’s resignation announcement is to make it look like this is some kind of right-wing witch hunt led by Glenn Beck:

Beck attacked Sergant and the NEA on his Fox News talk show, accusing the agency of propaganda efforts similar to those used by Nazi Germany. And now Sergant has been tossed overboard, making him Beck’s second victim in his campaign to rid the administration of perceived radicals, socialists, communists, fascists, anarchists and all other manner of nefarious influences. …

Sergant is, by all accounts, a highly-talented grassroots organizer and promoter, but communications director for the NEA is a position that requires a high level of political dexterity: the arts agency is constantly under fire from extremist activists who see it as propagating a liberal, libertine agenda. The day the culture war is finally declared over, there will still be skirmishes over the NEA.

No one’s arguing there’s a culture war, but if Sergant wanted to be a General on the front-lines he should’ve kept his story straight and not arrogantly assumed every artist puts partisanship above principle.

SECOND UPDATE: Patrick Courrielche responds to the news of Sergant’s reassignment here. END UPDATE.

Lee Rosenbaum, a blogger for Artsjournal.com, posted her experience with a meeting that occurred on August 27th and confessed that she also felt “uneasy” about the government’s arts effort.  The meeting invitation (viewable here) went out to all “member local, state, and regional arts agencies, community-based arts organizations, and national partners of Americans for Arts.” Americans for Arts is a non-profit arts organization that has received substantial grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.

As with my conference call, the art group was invited to the meeting to work together to “tackle some of the nation’s toughest issues: education; health; energy and the environment; community renewal; and safety and security.” Also like my call, it included a private citizen moderating the phone call with key White House representatives participating. Kalpen Modi, Associate Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, was to represent the White House and key representatives from the National Endowment for the Arts were also to participate.

Even more disturbing than learning that the White House and NEA are using the arts to address specific issues, is to learn what was discussed on this new conference call. Rosenbaum mentions that there was much talk of “leveraging federal dollars” to get artists and cultural organizations involved in social-service projects. 

Leveraging federal dollars? This is the problem with marrying issue specific topics, like health care and energy, with a group that is funded by tax dollars; it increases the potential of taxpayer-funded propaganda.

As mentioned in the invitation, the NEA was to be on this phone call. However at the last minute, as Rosenbaum blogged, “Modi informed us that ‘unfortunately our colleagues from NEA and NEH [the National Endowment for the Humanities]’ were tied up in meetings and couldn’t participate, as had been planned.”

Could it have anything to do with the article I posted two days earlier? We can only guess but Rosenbaum also hopes that they might have been “having second thoughts about commandeering their constituents for this political adventure.”

What appears to be emerging is a concerted and deliberate effort by the White House and the NEA to encourage the art community to create issue specific art. This new conference call shows the same modus operandi, including a “third party” individual moderating the call to apparently distance the NEA and the White House from initiating the meeting.

The National Endowment for the Arts has yet to comment regarding their involvement with this effort, except for one small, but damaging, comment by their Communications Director Yosi Sergant.

When asked by Kerry Picket of the Washington Times about the NEA’s involvement in inviting artists to my conference call, Sergant said that “the NEA didn’t invite, we were a participant in a call, there was a third party that did the invitations.” When asked for a copy of the invitation, Sergant responded that the invitation “didn’t come from us…so I don’t have it…” He went on to state that Michael Skolnik was the “third party” and that the Corporation for National and Community Service was the party who set up the conference call. This dialogue can be heard here:

We’ve already proved there are two dishonest remarks in this statement from the NEA in a previous post, namely that the NEA did have the invite and they did send it out to the art community.

When the “Corporation” (referenced by Sergant) was asked by Josh Miller of Foxnews.com about my conference call, a representative stated that “the call was organized by an ‘individual interested’ in the group…”

Interesting. Because this same interested individual, Michael Skolnik, contradicts both of these federal agency’s statements in his opening remarks of the conference call I was on.

Skolnik states that it was the White House and the National Endowment for the Arts that asked him to bring together this independent art group. Skolnik’s statement can be heard here:

These obvious contradictions, as well as the documented dishonesty on the part of the National Endowment for the Arts, support a conclusion that the NEA may feel their involvement with this effort is outside of their mandate. George Will, Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper journalist, appears to agree with my conclusion. On this past Sunday’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, George Will referenced the NEA’s involvement in the conference call and stated, “I don’t know how many laws that breaks but I’m sure there are some.”

With the building evidence of bad behavior by the NEA, you’d think this federal agency would have issued a statement explaining their position on this “brand new” direction for the arts. But as the cliché goes, the silence has been deafening. This taxpayer funded agency and their civil servants haven’t even returned phone calls from legitimate press outlets such as the Boston Globe, Foxnews.com, or the Washington Times.

Even more deafening is the silence on the part of the mainstream media. Documented dishonesty by White House appointed officials should easily draw the ire of our media watchdogs. But the liberal media, historically a protector of the arts, has turned its back on the community of which it adores. Like the Van Jones story, it appears that the blogosphere and conservative media are the only two forums that break news anymore. And the news that they break has dire consequences for those involved regardless of the mainstream media’s blind eye.

We need the National Endowment for the Arts to respond to these issues immediately. The NEA needs to issue a statement explaining the agency’s involvement in encouraging the art community to create art on issues being vehemently debated, contradictions made by their Communications Director, and lack of response to the inquiries of both the concerned public and press outlets.

As the former deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Lynne Munson, stated in a recent post, during her tenure as deputy chairman “any action resembling this call would have triggered immediate dismissal.” I think we’ve shown action resembling this call.

Bad behavior must have consequences, or else that behavior becomes the norm. The actions of the National Endowment for the Arts are leaving the agency vulnerable to attacks on its credibility and rationale for existence.

The NEA needs to address this issue.