If you’re wondering how my pathetic little phone call went,  watch Laura Flanders’ sorry attempt (video here) to confront Andrew Breitbart. Methinks that the moment Flanders learned she would be on national television seated next to Breitbart, visions of liberal glory popped off in her fevered mind as she plotted to publicly demand he apologize to Shirley Sherrod.

Train meet wreck. Ooh, that left a mark. But the truth usually does.

I was in the audience last night (pretty sure that’s Alex Marlow and I clapping all by our lonesome at the 11:05 mark), and while the crowd (who took our solo applause in stride) was obviously on Flanders’ side politically, her humorlessness eventually cost her their sympathy. Throughout the night, she tossed out one wet blanket after another with her joyless left-wing talking points that violated the spirit of the conservation. Eventually, in the “Overtime” segment, Breitbart turned to her and said:

“I think you need to apologize to the audience for making everything such a downer and political.”

If you listen, the left-wing audience almost applauds before remembering which side they’re supposed to be on. 

This is what you call great television.

As you can see from the full conversation, the left-wing “Racers,” as they’re appropriately being called now, have decided to double down against anyone who dares question Barack Obama’s background — these being the very same people who demanded to see George W. Bush’s National Guard records three years into his presidency. But don’t be fooled into thinking this is a Racer attack only against Donald Trump. This is a warning to us all.

What  Leftists and their media allies are now doing is sending a message out to anyone who’s even thinking about doing what the MSM should’ve done in 2008, and that’s properly vet the man who would be president. Bring up Bill Ayers, you’re a racist. Bring up Obama’s preacher problems, you’re a racist. Bring up this video the LA Times refuses to release of Obama at a dinner with Bill Ayers and Rashid Khalidi, you’re a racist.

Whoops, did I just do that?

Gee, you think if John McCain attended a dinner with Timothy McVeigh, Bill Maher and the MSM might be interested?

The real pleasure of last night, though, was meeting John Waters, a true iconoclast and a man who is as genuinely kind and hilariously vulgar as you hoped he would be. I’m a fan but Breitbart is an unashamed  fanboy and before and after the show the two of them got along like they’d been friends since childhood. I’ve already ordered his book “Role Models,” which sounds fascinating, and delighted in every second of his appearance last night.

I disagree with 95% of what Bill Maher says, but both he and his staff are never anything less than professional and genuinely gracious to all of us. They also give Breitbart a national platform and if you’ll notice, Maher always lets Andrew have his say and get his points across. 

If we could only say the same for the mainstream media.

An informative and intelligent discussion that desperately needed to be had outside the world of the news media and inside Maher’s world — the world of popular culture.

The most telling moment here is the audience reaction after Maher pulls no punches and says the following: 

“What it comes down to, is that there is one religion in the world that kills you when you disagree with them. And they say, ‘Look, we are a religion of peace, and if you disagree, we’ll cut your fucking head off.’”

The studio audience … applauds.

In the past, whenever Maher’s brought this truth up in this way, his audience has audibly gasped as the silent tension became thick and immediate. At this point, Maher was always on his own as his guests shifted uncomfortably in their chairs and the audience gulped for air to fight off a case of the PC vapors.

To his credit, though, Maher keeps on keeping on, keeps making this case and telling this truth as he sees it, and it appears now as though it’s finally penetrating.

Don’t get me wrong, Maher’s still Maher, but he’s righteous on this one — not only on the issue itself, but in his refusal to have his free speech rights cowed and shamed into silence by the PC fascists that infest his world on the Left. 

Better yet, if last night’s audience is any kind of indicator — and I think it is — he’s winning this debate.

Over to you, Jon Stewart…!

Only a studio audience of HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” could give self-described “socialist” Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., the lion’s share of applause. But when it came to the issue of vacation time at the workplace, both Sanders and “Real Time” host Bill Maher were crowd favorites.

On Friday night’s “Real Time,” Maher expressed confusion over why the public might feel a sense of indignation toward government employees, who have their salaries and benefits paid for by taxpayers.

—–

“Let me ask about this because there’s this pitting in this country now of public workers versus private workers that I really don’t understand,” Maher said. “We saw what happened in Wisconsin the last couple of months. Now in Ohio, the governor there has also passed legislation this week that bars public workers from collective bargaining. And I heard the argument from the other side is that these public workers get six weeks [of] vacation. And this infuriates private workers. Why? Because America, unlike every other country in the world, gets almost no paid vacation and somehow instead of being mad at the corporations and saying, ‘You know what? We want six weeks’ vacation too, they rather drag other people –’”

Sanders agreed and noted how other industrialized societies, particularly European ones, handle vacation time.

“That’s exactly right,” Sanders said. “Let’s be clear, the people in our country as the middle class declines are working longer hours for low wages. There are jobs now being offered that provide virtually no vacation time at all. And in America we should understand this. Our people are now working almost the longest hours of any other major country on earth. People are under stress. They’re exhausted. And you’re right. We should begin to look at other countries in Europe where people get by law five, six weeks paid vacation.”

Read the full post here.

Transcript courtesy of Mediaite:

And when I say Westerner, I mean someone who believes in the values that Western people believe in that a lot of the Muslim world does not. Like separation of church and state. Like equality of the sexes. Like respect for minorities, free elections, free speech, freedom to gather. These things are not just different from cultures that don’t have them. … It’s better. … I would like to keep those values here.

We’re not sure anyone but Bill Maher could get away with telling these truths without losing their job due to a Soros-funded jihad launched by those blacklisters over at Media Matters. That’s what they did to Juan Williams, and we are curious as to why Eric Boehlert and the rest of his lotion boys have been so quiet over this.

Not to mention CAIR.

And what about Jon –meet my fatwa-loving pal Cat Stevens but can’t we all just get along — Stewart?

We don’t want to encourage any attacks on Maher, but consider this Exhibit 11,412 in the open and shut case proving their stunning but always predictable lack of principle.

Cut to: Awkward.

Maher’s wrong about most everything but he’s obviously right on this, and this is the fight of our time, no? Maher is also smart enough to know that this moment of pushing back against the very foundation of liberal orthodoxy would come with the price of temporarily becoming the bad guy, and he did so anyway. He deserves credit for that and so does Margaret Hoover for wanting to have a discussion. But shame on Lawrence O’Donnell, Reihan Salam, Zach Galifianakis and the audience — not for disagreeing, but for doing something worse: throwing off a very clear vibe that there was no way in hell this discussion was going to take place.

And we already know how PC-Enforcer Jon Stewart would’ve reacted had he been in the room.

—–

Hitler promised health care, said that Germany’s business infrastructure needed a total government reform, and promised that all of the Germans would have jobs. Also, Hitler may have been elected by less than 40% of the people in Germany, but he was elected by 98.8% in Austria. After becoming Chancellor of Austria he took over the health care system, the car company (Austria had one major car manufacturing company at the time), and the business infrastructure.

Hitler did not sell fear and anger, he sold fundamental change of the nation’s infrastructure. He sold the hope of everyone having a job and that everyone had a right to be given medical treatment at the government’s provision.

That is definitely not what the Tea Party is selling. The Tea Party is selling a return to the constitutional principles that our country was founded upon. It is selling less government intrusion into our lives and that people can make better decisions for themselves than the government can. In other words, the Tea Party is selling the exact opposite of what Hitler promoted.

In the final homestretch to the elections, though, facts are dispensable to the left. It’s important in these last few days before the elections to smear the Tea Party as much possible because it’s all the institutional left has. The left has lost the intellectual debate of big government to the American people this election cycle, that is apparent by the choice of candidates on the right and the campaign ads coming from the left. Bad history or bad facts don’t matter to the left right now because they are in serious danger of losing their overwhelming power.

It’s not surprising to see people like Robert Reiner and Bill Maher promote bad history with the malicious intent to paint the Tea Party as the next Hitler. It is sad, though, because several people will actually believe their blatant revision of some very important history.

Looks as though the roundtable discussion will feature Dana Loesch with… Bill Maher, Obama-inspired musician John Legend, and Markos Moulitsas, founder of the Daily Kos.

Hrm. Dana Loesch all alone up against those three…

They’re gonna need more guys.

Details can be found here.

SEPT. 24, EXCLUSIVELY ON HBO;

ANDREW BREITBART, AMY HOLMES AND SETH MACFARLANE

ARE ROUNDTABLE GUESTS;

ANN DRUYAN AND RICHARD TILLMAN ARE INTERVIEW GUESTS

REAL TIME WITH BILL MAHER continues its eighth season FRIDAY, SEPT. 24 (10:00-11:00 p.m. live ET/tape-delayed PT), exclusively on HBO, with an instant replay at 11:00 p.m., following the live presentation.  Allowing Maher to offer his unique perspective on contemporary issues, the show includes an opening monologue, roundtable discussions with panelists, and interviews with in-studio and satellite guests.

The roundtable guests this week are journalist Andrew Breitbart, radio host Amy Holmes and “Family Guy” creator Seth MacFarlane; Ann Druyan, creative director of NASA’s Voyager Interstellar Message Project, and Richard Tillman, brother of Pat Tillman, are interview guests.

Other HBO playdates:  Sept. 26 (1:00 p.m., 2:55 a.m.), 27 (8:00 p.m.) and 29 (11:00 p.m.)

HBO2 playdates:  Sept. 24 (1:50 a.m.), 25 (9:00 a.m., midnight), 26 (7:00 p.m.) and 28 (10:00 p.m.)

It’s one thing that his last two films (“Capitalism: A Love Story” and “Slacker Uprising”) failed to haul in big bucks or the critical raves usually afforded his propaganda films. Some critics even started to call him out on his shaky grasp of reality – better late than never, gang!

Now, it appears Moore will say just about anything to generate press – assuming it will get him back in the public eye.

This week on “Real Time with Bill Maher,” Moore told the HBO show’s crowd that the McDonald’s restaurant near Ground Zero had killed more people than the 9/11 terrorists who brought down the World Trade Center.

Did he really say something that stupid? Yawn.

The filmmaker also went on record recently in support of the mosque planned for a site two blocks from Ground Zero. Moore would rather the mosque be built ON Ground Zero. Nothing else will do for him, and the failure to build said mosque means America as he knows it is no more. He even offered to put up as much as $10,000 of his own money to support the mosque project.

So, not only is Moore’s “vision” in sharp contrast with most of the country, he’s a cheapskate, too. Surely, he has more “Fahrenheit 9/11″ money to throw toward a cherished cause, right?

Once upon a short time ago such comments would have inspired headlines, op-eds and other cries of outrage. Instead, hearing another moronic Moore diatribe is like Lady Gaga tugging on an outrageous new hat. Been there, seen it, move on.

The filmmaker’s plight isn’t all his doing. The country has shifted, dramatically, to the right over the last two years after seeing the fruits of a liberal government in action. And having a far left Democrat in the Oval Office hurts Moore’s Everyman shtick. It’s hard to fight the Power when the Power’s ideology aligns closely to yours. President George W. Bush was a Godsend to Moore, the perfect “villain” for him to target. President Barack Obama, with his soak the rich tax strategies, class warfare broadsides and inability to speak of America without apologizing for its actions, sounds like a trailer for Moore’s next film.

Truly gifted people don’t need obvious adversaries.

Consider Rush Limbaugh. The righty talker is on a serious roll these days with Obama in office, but Limbaugh’s broadcasts were just as barbed before Obama’s ascendancy. The conventional wisdom suggested Limbaugh’s allure would fade after President Bush’s narrow election victory in 2001, but nothing of the sort occurred. In fact, the talker signed a massive new radio contract in 2008 while Bush still called The White House home.

So expect more outrageous comments from Moore in the days and weeks to come. Just don’t hold your breath waiting for said comments to spark much attention.

Moore’s impact on film – and our culture – is in serious decline.