Bill Maher to voters: If your hands are not dirty you are not helping
Bill Maher did a great job in admonishing those that believe it is OK to not vote for various reasons. He first pointed out that the 2014 midterm election had the lowest turnout since 1942. Bill Maher acknowledged that it would be great if election day was a holiday, that one could vote online, or that one could vote without a picture ID. He reminded voters that you can only demand or have those conveniences effected if one voted for those that would effect those changes.
He subsequently had some very harsh words for Russell Brand. “Russell Brand is in the news. He’s a funny guy,” Bill Maher said. “But he just wrote a book that’s more laughable where he tells young people not to vote because the system is so awful and so dirty that the only solution if to bring it down — not by violence, but not by voting either. No, by some sort of spiritual awakening. Oh for fuck’s sake, fine. You know what? Don’t vote. But don’t dress it up as something noble or sophisticated. The fake excuses offend me.”
Bill Maher then goes through the litany of excuses. “Like, politicians, they’re all the same. No, you’re thinking of The Lord of the Rings movie,” Bill Maher said. “Or, it doesn’t matter who wins. Well, in Florida last Tuesday, the Democrat lost the race for governor by 66 thousand votes and if he’d won, 700 thousand poor Floridians would have gotten health insurance under the Obamacare Medicaid expansion that Republican governors blocked. So, it would have mattered to them.”
Bill Maher continues with a funny enumeration of what American would have been with a mythical President Mitt McCain. Mitt McCain is the fusion of John McCain and Mitt Romney.
He ended with the most quotable quote. “But keep telling yourself,” Bill Maher said. “that because politics is dirty, so very dirty, that you precious, by not voting or informing yourself or participating in anyway are clean. Yeah, that’s it. You’ve kept yourself pure because you haven’t gotten your hand sullied by the gutter that is American politics. Well you can keep telling yourself that. But the truth is if your hands aren’t dirty, it’s not because you are pure. It’s because you are not helping.
This is a message that should have been given ad naseum pre-election. It is however not too late for 2016.