HBO Real Time's Bill Maher took the right wing blowhards to task during his New Rules segment who lashed out at President Obama for daring to say something about the consequences of professional football injuries this week.
MAHER: Finally, New Rule, conservatives must be told that President Obama saying he wouldn't let a son of his play pro football, is not controversial. It's common sense, like telling your kids not to play in traffic. But on the right, any critique of our holy religion football is blasphemy, because real men don't point out facts, or consider consequences and brain injuries are fun.
That's what makes a Terry Bradshaw such a character... and a Sarah Palin interview so entertaining.
As Maher pointed out, the president had the National Review going after him, and conflating military service with playing football. And then... there's Rush Limbaugh.
MAHER: I don't know where Republicans get this weird delusion that they're the party of manliness, but this is Rush Limbaugh's bedroom. Talent on loan from god. Furniture on loan from Liberace.
And yet somehow conservatives, who boast by far the bigger list of non-serving chickenhawks, see themselves as the tough guys.
But it's rarely a real manliness. It's more the pathetic bluster of a blogger in his bathrobe, demanding that Obama “man up” and bomb Iran... while his mother fixes his macaroni and cheese.
After asking that Democrats “be the party that redefines toughness as restraint” and quit allowing Republicans to taunt them into feeling they have to look tough on national security, Maher pointed out what is that conservatives are really enamored with.
MAHER: Because it's not really masculinity conservatives love anyway. It's bullying. Somehow we've gone from Teddy Roosevelt, “speak softly and carry a big stick,” to Chris Christie's “speak loudly and be a big dick.”
Maher went on to lay into the rest of them from Brit Hume, to Rush Limbaugh, to Glenn Beck and their ridiculous narrative that “they're the ones who will keep you safe” because they're not afraid to send your kids off to die in their wars of choice.
He wrapped things up by going after former Defense Secretary Robert Gates and his criticism of President Obama that he “wasn't enthusiastic about our war in Afghanistan and for him, it was all about getting out.”
MAHER: That's bad? Gates said George Bush was a good president because he “had no second thoughts about Iraq.” Right. Because to have second thoughts, you first have to have first thoughts.
