Outrageously Outraged

Bill Maher, the self-styled "politically incorrect" sorta-comedian, has lately been getting some attention he'd rather not have. In the mostly contrived outrage over Rush Limbaugh's recent, ahem, commentary, Maher has found himself on the defensive for his penchant for referring to certain female politicians as, ahem, pejorative terms for specific body parts. Maher penned an op-ed for the New York Times that has a request that actually makes a certain amount of sense:

I have a better idea. Let’s have an amnesty — from the left and the right — on every made-up, fake, totally insincere, playacted hurt, insult, slight and affront. Let’s make this Sunday the National Day of No Outrage. One day a year when you will not find some tiny thing someone did or said and pretend you can barely continue functioning until they apologize.

Over at Hot Air, Allahpundit makes an important point about the inherent dishonesty behind "civility," especially in the modern political context:

 Maher is a target of opportunity to some extent because he just dropped a cool mil on Obama’s Super PAC, which they accepted without a second thought, so from his perspective the reaction may very well look contrived. Why, he’s been doing “c*nt” gags for years and only now, when dear Rush is threatened, is there a sustained outcry about it. Obvious fakery.

But it’s not fake. People have grumbled about him all along, as he’s no doubt well aware. There just hasn’t been any sustained attention to him because ultimately who cares? His job is to tell the left they’re superior to the right; he’s just a little nastier and a little more entertaining about it (emphasis on “a little”) than MSNBC is. To some extent, in fact, precisely because he’s a provocateur, getting too angry at him plays into his hands by stoking his self-styled image as a bad-boy truth-teller who knows how to wound the other side. No one wants to feed a preening troll by showing him how much he irritates you, so usually we all just grumble for a day and move on. Doesn’t mean the irritation’s not real, though, and it doesn’t mean that wearily letting him slide time after time somehow waives the right to revisit that sincerely-felt irritation later. 

Allahpundit is 100% right in the observation about what Maher's job really is, which is bias confirmation. Personally, I don't pay a lot of attention to Maher because he rarely merits any attention, which makes honoring Maher's request pretty easy, actually. But the larger point is this: even in asking people lighten up, Maher is really just trying to do the same thing Media Matters tries to do -- control the terms of the debate. So while I get the point, and even agree, forget it. Game on.