Bill Maher wound up his New Rules segment on this Friday evening's Real Time by going after today's crop of Ayn Rand worshiping Libertarians in a rant where Maher basically said he didn't leave Libertarianism, it left him. As he noted, even though he's expressed support for the philosophy in the past, it was because it "meant he didn't want big government my bedroom, or my medicine chest and especially not on the second drawer of the nightstand on the left side of my bed."

I'm sure he'll have all of the Ron and Rand Paul supporters mad at him after he lumped them in with their fellow Ayn Rand fan, Paul Ryan, for basically taking the movement and turning it into a “creepy obsession with free market capitalism.”

Maher thinks the movement has basically lost its collective mind these days, and I would argue you could say the same for the Republican party as well, which as a whole has adopted these very same "principles" if you want to be generous enough to call them that.

I was glad to see them being called out for the fact that they don't appear to have one iota of concern for most of their fellow citizens. As Maher pointed out in his rant, they seem to have no regard at all for what happens if you eliminate every government regulation which protects our food supply and the air we breath among a host of other things. They'd be happy to destroy Social Security and Medicare. They don't want the government to help after natural disasters and want to eliminate FEMA.

While I'm glad to see that all of this and the way the Republicans have governed is a bridge too far for Maher these days, I'm not so sure that the Libertarian philosophy of the past he pines for was ever that much better than the strain we see now. I think their guiding principle has always pretty much been, I've got mine and am going to live forever and screw you if you think I should contribute to making sure we've got a civil society.

Republicans have been worshiping at the alter of Ayn Rand since the days of Ronald Reagan and Alan Greenspan. It's so nice of Bill to finally notice the movement he was caught up in years ago did the same.