Every Friday night, my Tivo fires up to save what is one of the best arguments for the existence of television, Bill Moyers Journal. As a human being and a journalist, Bill exudes the kind of  integrity that has all but disappeared from the practice of television journalism today.

This may explain my genuine shock to hear on his show this week that he is retiring as of the end of this month. His show will end then on PBS though he mentioned it will continue online.

He is too classy and too much of a gentleman to ever mention if this wasn’t his idea (there’s no indication it wasn’t as far as I am aware).

I have so many fond memories of his shows and discussions, he has been a voice of calm, reason, compassion and reality during difficult times. And he has never failed to astonish me with his even handedness especially when he’s had discussions with people who I find distasteful…I still don’t know how he does it!

One of my more recent favorite memories was when a Bill O’Reilly troll tried ambushing Moyers at a media conference in 2008. Using calm demeanor, his razor sharp mind and his unshakable persistence, Moyers took that little weasel to school and the journalists witnessing this followed the weasel hounding him as he had Moyers…of course the weasel could dish it out but not take it.

As far as my favorite interviews he’s hosted…it would be virtually impossible to choose one gem over another. So, I’ll just focus on his most recent show from last week, his penultimate episode, which presented a brilliant exploration into the reality of the banking and corporate domination of our nation, the machinations of Goldman Sachs in their fraud and other insights into the mercenary nature of our corporate system. One of his two guests, Simon Johnson, conclusively described America as no longer a democracy but an oligarchy. I can’t embed from PBS here so you can follow this link to view this enlightening and brilliant episode:

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04162010/watch.html

With the passage of time, so much is gained and so much is lost. In the case of Bill Moyers, what is lost is a little bit of what’s best in this democracy and this nation.

One of the things I admire most about Bill Maher is the ability he has to make one think. He has a way with words – he would, having been an English major – that at first infuriates or intrigues a listener, but which then implants a thought in one’s mind that simply refuses to go away until the listener strikes obedience and thinks about the sense (or lack of) in the remark. It provokes an almost dichotomous thought pattern, because if you initially agree with something he’s said, by the time the next Real Time rolls around, you’ll be thinking otherwise; conversely, if you initially disagreed with his opinion, after a week’s cogitation, whilst you might not agree, you’ll certainly understand how he arrived at a stated conclusion.

I look and contribute to both Bill’s MySpace and Facebook pages, and I read a lot of the comments and criticisms made by other fans, and sometimes, they make me think too. This is what happened this week.

A regular commentator on the MySpace page criticized Bill’s handling of an incident which occurred during the panel discussion.

Amy Holmes was one of the panel guests on Bill’s show last week. She’s pretty much a dependable regular on Real Time, appearing at least once per season. I definitely get the impression that Bill’s having trouble securing panelists this season; as much as he had the same problem last year, this year it seems to be worse. Already, we’ve seen faces so familiar they probably have personal possessions stored someplace in the Real Time studios.

I’ve never been able to stomach much of Amy Holmes. Five minutes of listening to her regurgitate what amounts to rote-learned rehashings of whatever the current GOP talking points happen to be, drive me to embedding my fingernails into the fabric of the nearest wall. I find her, at worst, to be a snooty, entitled, walking advertisement for everything that’s pejorative about Affirmative Action – at best, to be the poster girl for Republican diversity.

But I always felt she had a bit of a crush on Bill Maher and that he had a thing for her also. He’s got form for conservative women, after all, considering his long friendship with Ann Coulter and his mommy-fixation on Arianna Huffington. (Look, she’s as Rightwing as Rush, only she hides it better. Leopards never change their spots). Whenever she appears on Bill’s show, she gets her points across in a sing-song-y little girl voice which reduces Bill to soft-peddling a retort which always begins with the exasperated phrase, “But, Amy, you’re so bright …”

That phrase always niggled me, whenever he used it, and he used it almost exclusively with Holmes. I couldn’t put my finger on the reason why it annoyed me. She certainly is bright. She’s articulate. She’s got a more than decent education. The fact that he constantly felt the need to refute her party political rhetoric with an allusion to her intelligence just irritated me to no end.

And now I know why.

The panelists on Friday were Holmes, Gary Johnson, the Republican former governor of New Mexico, and the actor Hill Harper. Bill initiated a discussion about global warming, concentrating on the Right’s constant denials about this trend and illustrating it with the conservative magazine, The Weekly Standard, depicting  a cover cartoon with a nude Al Gore in arctic surroundings.

Holmes immediately took up the baton of the deniers, jumping into the fray with both feet, employing her usual tactic of talking points, emphasized with facts, figures and fiction – speaking loudly, interrupting and muscling in on anyone who dared to speak. The whole argument lasted around 8 minutes, and consisted mostly of Holmes going into meltdown (pun intended), Bill trying to get a word in edgeways, Hill Harper briefly making a point so sensible it was rendered forgettable by the Holmes machine in overdrive, and the ineffectual Governor just sitting in silence, only once interjecting a mild point in support of the denialists’ theories.

Inevitably, the subject green technology and job creation entered into the equation, which introduced China into the discussion and the fact that they were leading the way in both green technology and jobs, as opposed to the United States dragging its heels and bogged down in debates as to whether or not the actual condition of global warming existed. Holmes refused to admit China’s progress.

“I’m not seeing any of that,” she maintained.

Then came the killer punch from Bill: “Then you don’t read.”

That wasn’t the end either. Later, whilst speaking with the fourth guest, author John Heilemann, Bill relayed an anecdote about an altercation on a plane between Presidential hopeful and Mormon, Mitt Romney and a rap artist, which resulted in the rapper being asked to leave the plane before take-off. The story illustrated nothing more than a third-class dust-up in the First Class section of a plane between two first-class pricks. As Hill Harper opined, Romney probably should have been asked to leave the plane as well, but Bill played up the racial aspect of it, bringing in – as always – a pejorative religious stance.

Remarking on the fact that Mormons allegedly view the black population as morally inferior, being descendants of Cain, their black skin evidence of the infamous “mark of Cain,” Bill tried to imply that Romney’s confrontation with the rapper had its roots in the Mormon belief of black racial inferiority.

Holmes made a back-handed attempt to defend Romney, and Bill’s verbal machinations resulted in her awkwardly defending the politico against racism as well. When she protested that she wasn’t wantonly defending Romney or Mormonism, Bill prissily sniffed, “I would hope you’d be defending black people!”

He almost sounded like a disapproving, maiden aunt.

Whilst I’ve no liking for Holmes and, in a purely political sort of way, I enjoyed the smackdowns, I enjoyed them in the sense of watching an articulate conservative being deftly and effectively silenced by a more articulate, intelligent liberal. I even commented as such on Bill’s MySpace page, and another commentator, also a woman, made a similar remark.

But someone else saw it differently. A male commentator, an ueber-liberal, himself, saw Bill’s behaviour toward Holmes as rude, citing her intelligence as deserving of respect, whilst at the same time, reminding Bill of his own chivalrous defence, the previous year, of Meghan McCain, in the face of a smackdown by Paul Begala.

The commentator went onto shame Bill for his rebuke of Holmes, whilst castigating him defence of McCain, who – he said – really was stupid and deserved to have her ass verbally smacked by Begala for making what was, essentially, an immature remark.

And that’s when I realised that Bill had essentially patronised and disrespected both women on this occasion, and that it was wrong of the commentator to chide Bill for what was two cleverly exhibited facets of the same type of behaviour: misogyny. Equally, it was wrong of the commentator to deem one woman deserving of respect because of her alleged intelligence and the other deserving of scorn because of her stupidity. In a curious way, he was being patronising too.

First of all, both Holmes and McCain have Ivy League degrees – Holmes from Princeton and McCain from Columbia. In fact, I’d go as far as guessing that both women each probably graduated with grade point averages superior to any accumulated by Bill Maher at Cornell. Bill’s grammar, syntax and spelling in some of his writing are nothing short of disgraceful in someone who got a degree in English.

Secondly, Holmes is a good decade older than McCain, who – at 24 – was the youngest panellist to appear on Real Time. McCain’s nervousness was apparent for all to see; in fact, she twittered in the hour before the show that not one of the waiting guests bothered speaking to her, except for the journalist, Joel Stein. It’s easy to imagine Begala and Katty Kay, the only other woman on the panel, cosying in a corner of the Green Room, exchanging whispered bitcheries about McCain.

When she made a particularly puerile observation in her nervousness, Begala pounced, but Bill’s over-exaggerated defence of her from ‘that bad, bad man” was not only patronising, it was humiliating. In one instant, she’d become the kid at the adults’ table, whose presence was suffered with great patience and forebearing, but who needed, now and then to be reminded of her rightful place. She was the dumb blonde, the bimbo.

This is a woman, who is an Ivy League graduate, an author and a columnist in her own right. She may have got a leg-up from her old man’s name and political position, but having got the leg-up, she’s managed to stay where she is and hold her own.

With Holmes, the treatment meted was more openly meaner and just as undeserved. The remark about reading, whilst linked to Holmes’s party line defence of the climate change deniers, also implied a wider stupidity. It bought into the standard attitude assumed by the Left that anyone who is on the Right side of the political fence is ignorant, benighted; that that ignorance is willful and, therefore, deserving of disdain.

In her previous appearances on the show, Bill’s reaction to Holmes’s rhetoric was weary bemusement. He was the kindly, tolerant liberal guide trying to ease her into seeing the error of her ways. Now she was just another soulless member of the Dark Side, and her cack-handed attempts to respond to Bill’s assertion that because Mitt Romney was a Mormon, he must also be a racist (as assumption any other conservative would have treated with the contempt it deserved) resulted in her being tacitly identified and exposed by Bill as being an oreo, ashamed and almost admitting to bearing that ubiquitous mark of Cain.

The treatment meted both these women was derogatory and a mixture of pity, revulsion and condescension, a view that both were ignorant creatures who needed either protection from themselves or exposure of their inadequacies.

Neither of these women deserved this, and it’s difficult to imagine Bill treating Tucker Carlson or Michael Steele the way he reacted to both these women.

I’m not surprised at the level of misogyny prevalent today, either in the media or in politics. After all, Bill’s fellow Cornell alumnus, Keith Olbermann, was recently taken to task by Jon Stewart for referring to Michelle Malkin, another obnoxious conservative voice, as having a face “like a beaten-up piece of meat with lipstick”. And if Bill ever bothers to read John Heilemann’s Game Change, so prominently displayed on the bookshelf behind his desk, he’d realise that the two most intellectually astute people in the Senate recently, besides Ted Kennedy, were Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and the one most universally disliked and disdained was Clinton.

Pussy fear? More than just a bit all around.

Real Time with Bill Maher hit the boards running for its eighth season a couple of weeks ago, and I held out great hopes for my favourite fundit program, after a decidedly iffy season last year which ended in confusion.

However, I’m hoping I didn’t speak too soon, as it stalled in what it sought to deliver in the third episode of the season, which aired Friday evening.

A commentator on Bill’s MySpace page deemed the episode ‘caustic’, another friend of mine thought it was ‘quirky’ more than anything else. I thought it just oozed tension, and I’m at a loss to understand why.

To begin with, the guest list was a bit thin on the ground – three guests in the studio, including the one-on-one interview and a satellite interview with a dodgy connection. I think Bill struggles to get people to commit to appearing on the program, and whether that’s the nature of the host or the venue (Los Angeles is as long a flight time from the East Coast as New York is from London), I don’t know.

We’re three programs into the new season, and there’s yet to be a elected politician to appear. The result of this difficulty is that we keep seeing the same recurring guests, almost as ‘regulars’: most of the guests who’ve appeared already are repeat performers.

I approached this week’s installment reluctantly. Arianna Huffington was a panel guest, and to say I loathe this diehard neocon corporate media whore disguised as a Progressive voice only when it became openly fashionable to hate Bush is being kind. The last time she appeared on the show last season, in the cohorted company of fellow (open) Republicans Darryl Issa and Jack Kingston, that trio so railroaded the discussion sequence that Bill, the host and moderator, was reduced to looking like a cross between a bewildered child at the adults’ table and a confused spectator at a tennis match watching such a never-ending volley that he’d forgotten who had the serve.

I’m still at a loss as to why the media in the US continue to give this intellectual lightweight and parvenue airtime to spout her ridiculous talking points, made only to enhance her own publicity; but then, I remember when Mrs Huffington, minus the ex-husband’s divorce settlement and the Wall Street hedge fund, was merely Miss Stanisopoulous, the daughter of a corrupt Greek politician, trying desperately to be taken seriously as an arch-Right conservative by the truly Progressive, serious British media intelligensia.

They considered her a joke.

Bill’s guests this week, besides the Queen Mother of Media Whores, included Andrew Ross Sorkin, financial correspondent for The New York Times, Sean Penn and (from New York) Michael Moore.

Although his previous two monologues this season had hit the bullseye for which they were intended, Bill’s monologue this week fell curiously flat. He wittered on about Oscars’ week, with the inevitable Sarah Palin joke.

I know Palin was a particular target and bete noire for Bill during the campaign and he eviscerated her shallowness with brilliant panache; from time to time, she surfaced last season, but only when she’d done something to merit newsworthy comment – like resign.

This time, I’m getting the uneasy feeling that Bill’s baiting Palin, almost stalking her with continuous snarky comment and open ridicule, and for a curiously self-serving purpose. Of late, those whom Palin has targeted with her snide and ill-founded observations, have achieved almost victim status – Letterman, Rahm Emanuel, Seth McFarlane and Family Guy – all rose like phoenixes from the ashes of her ignorant remarks and misconceptions.

In short, Palin’s invective got publicity for both Letterman and McFarlane, and even Rahm was seen in a more sympathetic light as almost an arbiter for freedom of speech.

Bill’s not above promoting himself shamelessly, almost by any means. That he compromised himself greatly last season with a blatantly opportunistic editorial, slating President Obama for ‘not doing enough’ a mere six months into his Administration, was all too obvious, especially if one cared to remember that the week previous to that particular editorial (June 16th), he was roundly criticizing the GOP for saying the very same thing about the President. Still, it achieved the end Bill desired – he ran the gamut from Blitzer to Olbermann, starting the Obama-bashin’ fashion that the base of the Progressive Left adopted with a fervour unseen since they campaigned for the man during the election.

A lot of real Progressives today still blame Bill for sounding the hammer blow that created a very noticeable ructure in the Democratic Party.

I think Bill is baiting Palin for the same reason. He’s relishing a response from this woman. He wants her to target him, to point a finger, to Twitter a tweet or sully her Facebook page with a diatribe against big, bad Bill Maher, which would gain Bill a soupcon of sympathy and a gaggle of publicity. Thing is, I get the impression that Palin isn’t much of an HBO fan, and I seriously doubt she’s even heard of Bill. Were I he, I’d leave off Palin. He’s only feeding fuel to her fire, and besides, as a part of his monologue and stand-up, she’s becoming boringly predictable as a reference.

But after the monologue, the atmosphere began to become almost surreal.

Sean Penn was the first guest, booked to talk about his humanitarian effort in the wake of the earthquake in Haiti and to plug the relief organisation he had established for that purpose.

I found this odd, to say the least, especially since one of Bill’s ubiquitous tweets during his hiatus had criticised the continuous news emphasis on the disaster by the mainstream media, to the exclusion of any other news. I understood Bill’s complaint; he’d reiterated the media’s propensity to flog one news item like the proverbial dead horse, but the tweet did come across to many as the whiney complaint of a bored adolescent. The other thing I found odd about the interview was Penn, himself.

Penn, florid of face and neck, with a dull, dazed look in his eye, was clearly drunk. More than that, he was a woozy, rambling, incoherent drunk.

To Bill’s credit, his interview questions were flawless. Under normal circumstances, he would have been pushing the right buttons, with the questions he asked. but circumstances were anything but normal. The result was that Penn’s answers rambled on ad nauseam, and he never truly answered any question.

For example, when Penn finally got to the point of his first answer – that the United States needed to give more, more and yet more again to Haiti in an effort to rebuild a viable infrastructure there, Bill, rightly, countered by asking Penn why he sought to concentrate his efforts on Haiti, when there was ample evidence of infrastructural decay in the United States and a plethora of Americans suffering badly as a result of the dire economic crisis.

Valid question; in fact, one many people have been asking in light of this.

This elicited another incoherent and torturously twisted reply from Penn, the gist of which being that by giving – yes – more, more and more again to rebuild Haiti, the US would be a better nation and benefit and learn from the Haitian people. Learn what, exactly, he never specified, and it’s doubtful that he knew. By that point, Penn was just phoning in his replies.

The interview wasn’t without controversy, however. Finally, Bill brought up the subject of Hugo Chavez, a particular ‘friend’ of Penn’s and one whom the actor has defended vociferously. The ensuing reply on Penn’s part is a testimony to the fact that, just because one is an extremely talented actor and icon for a generation, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the person has any great intellect, or even basic common sense.

Bill referred to Chavez, the dictator.

Penn quickly took umbrage. Chavez, he replied, in a pique, was most definitely not a dictator, but a legitimately elected head-of-state. In Penn’s mind, that’s not a dictator.

I disagree. Hitler was legitimately elected. So was Mussolini. So was Bush, allegedly. And elections can easily be rigged to favour the strong man who wants to rule. Look at Italy’s Berlusconi. Again, look at Bush and the Republican techniques. I’m sorry, Sean, this dude’s a dictator and a dick.

Bill then pointed out the fact that Chavez had shut down television and radio stations and newspapers who were openly critical of him, but Penn would have none of that. In fact, he declared, anyone in the United States, and especially in the media, who insisted on calling Chavez a dictator, should be put in prison.

From where I’m sitting, it looks as though Sean’s close association with Hugo Chavez hasn’t been for nothing. That’s a blatant denial of First Amendment rights - so are we to infer that the humanitarian and Academy Award-winning actor approves of a suppression of Freedom of Speech? What a walking advertisement for the Left in the face of the Right. And a blatant one as well.

The other interview came midway through the panel discussion with Michael Moore. It was beset by satellite difficulties, as Moore was attempting to be broadcast from New York City, outside Goldman Sachs. Bill was clearly frustrated by the delay, and Moore was frustrated as well, although by what, it was unclear. It was a tetchy, almost irascible interview, from the beginning, done to publicize the fact that Moore’s latest cinematic offering, Capitalism: A Love Story, was now available on DVD.

As the impending Oscars ceremony served more as a veritable Banquo’s ghost than as a backdrop to this episode, Bill began the interview by reminding Moore that it was Oscars weekend and that Moore’s film hadn’t received a nomination – although he couldn’t imagine why, Bill added for good measure. Clearly a joke between friends, but Moore failed to see the humour and tetchily remarked that, for what it was worth, he thought Bill’s documentary Religulous should have won the Oscar the previous year. (It wasn’t nominated).

Moore then went into a diatribe about the evils of Wall Street and the sufferings of the ordinary citizen in the wake of that, which – for some reason – elicited an irritated response from Bill, in which he noticeably raised his voice. Thereafter, the four-minute clip tailed off with Moore remarking that he’d written a letter to President Obama – understanding that Rahm Emanuel was about to leave – offering him his services as Chief of Staff for the salary of $1 per year and a bed in the White House basement.

In the moments after the interview had ended, Bill made two rather snarky allusions to ‘St Michael’ and ‘the spirit of St Michael’, obviously on the tail end of what amounted to a locking-of-horns encounter, no matter how unintentional that was.

The surrealism of the episode was heightened by the fact that almost nothing of any newsworthy event referenced in the panel discussion. It was patently obvious that the panel was there only as a prop for Huffington to publicise her ‘Move Your Money’ movement in an effort to cripple the four big, bad lending banks.

I find Huffington faintly ludicrous at the best of times.  She usually manages to muscle in on any discussion and dominate the proceedings, and this time was no different. Bill began the panel discussion by singling out her ‘Move Your Money’ meme, adding a bit of self-promotion for himself, considering that she asked him to do the promotional video which was released on YouTube.

Now we get to the funny part.

Bill asked Andrew Sorkin, author of the book Too Big to Fail about what he thought of the idea of a mass movement of people taking money from the big four bad boys and placing it in locally-owned banks and credit unions. Sorkin remarked that he thought, in principle, Huffington’s idea was a good one; however, there were drawbacks to her idea:-

First, if everyone ‘moved their money’ from the big guys to the small fry, the banks that formerly had been too big to fail, would … fail, and that wouldn’t be good for the economy. Secondly, many of the so-called local banks weren’t actually independent entities, themselves. Many were part and parcel of the very organisation Huffington sought to scupper.

(Huffington’s always out to scupper someone or something which effected a perceived slight on her fragile ego. Her vendetta against Clinton in the late 90s came as a result of her husband having lost a Senate race to Barbara Boxer; her vendetta against Tim Russert came from Russert’s wife having outed Michael Huffington in an article years before his sexuality became common knowledge; her vendetta against newspapers arises from the newsprint media failing to consider her a viable and reliable journalist, in her own right. So I can only surmise that her vendetta against the big banks comes from some kind of cashflow problem, which they can’t help her remedy – or at least more from that than out of any concern for ordinary people).

Thirdly, Sorkin concluded, these small local banks and credit unions weren’t entirely clean, themselves – that they employed a stringently vociferous group of lobbyists, whose job it was to nobble Congress, and were, in fact, more opposed to the President’s idea of regulating the banking industry than the big guys were, themselves.

At that moment, Huffington chose to suffer from a bout of selective deafness, because later, in her internet newsrag, she trumpeted the fact that Sorkin had given a pontifical blessing to her ‘movement’ and agreed with her entirely, although he actually didn’t … such is her arrogance.

That moved the discussion onto the plight of the middle classes, where Huffington held forth on the fact that anger directed at Wall Street was a unifying factor between the middle class and the Teabaggers (and, in doing this, somehow managed to make Michael Moore sound like teabagging material). There followed a five-minute discussion between Huffington and Bill about the sufferings of the middle class and how the government and financial crisis was failing them.

I’m sorry, but I was mightily offended by what amounted to a dinner party discussion between two faux liberals talking about a demographic of people of whom one had actually forgotten he was ever a part  and of whom the other had no real contact in her daily dealings. It was a moment straight out of a grotesque Goya painting of two narcissistic egoists paying pithy lip service to the plight of the little people and giving themselves congratulatory pats on the back for having noticed that a problem exists.

Frankly, it was insulting.

This led further into an unusual discussion about an American reality television program, Undercover Boss, which Bill, in a rare moment of realising that he was born a son of the working middle class, found insulting to ordinary people, and which Huffington, surprisingly in her Zsa Zsa-plays-Lady-Bracknell mode, found enlightening.

The whole discussion was pointless, with respect to current events. It was an exercise in publicizing Huffington’s latest venture, an opportunity for Bill to reiterate and reinforce the fact that he really, really did like President Obama, but he wished he could have acted tougher last year – the same old same old complaint he’d whined about since June 2009, only not as forcefully. (Earlier last month, in an interview clip with Joy Behar, I noticed the best-seller Game Change on the shelf in Bill’s office. He’d do well to read and digest the content of this, because ‘No-Drama Obama’ is the President’s schtick).

The New Rules weren’t Bill’s best, and the editorial was a bit of fluff, which, in other circumstances, might have been funny; but in these current times, came across as Bill’s Marie Antoinette moment.

It was an extollation of  Hollywood’s virtues as an industry that was entirely American and didn’t come cap-in-hand to the government asking for help. (Of course, it never dawned on Bill that the film which won the Oscar last year was not an American film, or that most films aren’t actually made in Hollywood these days, mainly due to excessive costs). He excoriated the Republicans’ current triviality of promoting their two rising stars (yet another reference to Sarah Palin) as having been a local beauty queen and a nude male centrefold. Hollywood deserved the big party that accompanied the Oscars, as ribald, rambunctuous and excessive as it could be, and the public be damned in its criticism. (‘Let them eat cake, anyone?’)

One of the core messages of the editorial was the fact that any celebrity in the town who openly admitted to being a Republican, was usually of the naff, z-list variety: the late Sonny Bono, Fred Thompson or Fred Grandy, whose chief claim to fame was having played Gofer in The Love Boat.

Amongst the ueber-cool A-listers, only Democrats could be found.

Forty-eight hours later, that left me wondering on what list Bill, whom I love dearly as a fundit, when he’s thinking for himself and not aiming to please others for his own plaudits, could be found … not the ueber-cool A-list, if this tweet, made in the early hours of Monday morning, whilst moving amongst the exalted at an Oscars’ after-party:-

“Actors are just the bestest people in thw world! We are so lucky to be sharing the earth with them!! Fuck!!!” (Typos are Bill’s).

Sarcasm? Heavily laced. Bitterness? A smidgeon. Jealousy? More than just a bit.

Billy, I love the bones of you, and for that, I’ll rate this episode 7 out of 10, but – damn! – it must be a heavy chore being Arianna’s Gofer. You’re much better than that.

“An honest politician is one who, when he is bought, will stay bought.”

- Simon Cameron US financier & politician (1799 – 1889)

The utter timelessness of that remark, made by this 19th Century East Coast political boss, has never been made more obvious than by recent events in our current government, and it seemed to be the underlying theme of Bill Maher’s return to HBO on Friday night with the eighth season of Real Time with Bill Maher.

I must admit, I’d been awaiting Bill’s return with dread – seriously, since I’ve been a long-time fan of his and considered (or did, until recently) him a hero of mine, a voice of my generation, as he and I are almost of a similar age. Last year, Real Time was, more than once, a bit slow off the mark. Bill ended Season 6 in November 2008 on the high of the Election, and every episode from the second half of that year (from his return at the beginning of September until the finale on November 14, 2008) got stronger each week. The pinnacle episode from that season was the one which aired on Hallowe’en, when Bill completely demolished the Wall Street Journal’s John Lund’s lame defense of Sarah Palin’s qualifications to be Vice President of the United States.

Bill used a totally unforgettable zinger, and one I never fail to remember each time this woman’s face and mouth pop up on the television screen.

“Come on, John,” Bill said. “This is a woman, who – under normal circumstances – you wouldn’t even want to have lunch with.”

But last year’s 7th season began shakily and didn’t take off until June, when the infamous anti-Obama editorial surfaced. I’d always viewed that surprising editorial with dismay and more than a bit of skepticism, especially since, the previous week, Bill had used his complaints about Obama as a critique of the Right who were, essentially, complaining about the same things. I was tetchy about that, wondering more and more, if the motive behind that as a bit of attention-seeking in a media world suddenly over-populated with political pundits.

The season ended awkwardly in mid-October, with Bill looking tired and a little bit jaded and tying himself up in knots regarding remarks made about doubting the efficacy of vaccines, first to Bill Frist, then to a panel consisting of Chris Matthews, Alex Baldwin and Martin O’Malley, which ensured that the final episode of the season ended in uncomfortable confusion.

Bill kept his presence known through various tweets during his hiatus, few of which made for made for anything less than uneasy thinking. The tweet made at the time of the President’s West Point speech, pithily and pettily remarked that ‘Barry’ sounded just like Bush. The one made when Obama spoke about the underpants bomber was, again, another ‘Barry’ remark, rather snottily implying ‘same old same old’ yet again. And then there was the tweet made two days after the Haiti earthquake, complaining about this story’s domination of the news.

Whilst I understood the sense of what Bill was trying to say about the last tweet – the fact that the news media in America today takes a story and obsesses it, literally, to death from all angles – the first two stuck in my craw heavily. I didn’t like the ‘Barry’ references. Too many ‘Barry’ remarks are made regularly about the President, and they always seem to come from disaffected, disenfranchised, Rightwing, bitter, old white men; plus, six months earlier, Bill was whining about wanting Obama to be more like Bush, and once he did what Bill perceived to be Bushian, he was demanding the contrary. That Bill perceived Obama’s remarks about the would-be terrorist to be more of the same-thing-different-day scenario, dismayed me, and made me wonder if, indeed, we’d both been listening to the same speech. He’d heard nothing at all about what I called ‘the Obama doctrine’, about engaging with these young men, who are captured in such attempts, treating them within the legal tenets of our civil law, and trying to make an effort to understand their distrust of the West and their unease with Western society.

Besides, it was during Bill’s hiatus that the peculiar “fashion for Obama-bashin’” reached its height, especially during the healthcare arguments, which resulted in a deep crevice being forged within the Democratic Party by certain elements of the Progressive Left, some of whom naively united with hard Right activists to try to kill off the proposed healthcare bill for their own agendae. Add to that, the fact that Bill had used most every media opportunity to brag about the fact that it was he who showed various Democrats that it was, indeed, all right to criticize and criticize strongly various of the President’s actions. In fairness, it wasn’t Bill’s fault that various people who make up the Progressive base took this criticism to a pejorative art form, in complaining about everything the President did or didn’t do, say or didn’t say, even thought or didn’t think – as if they’d know.

Suffice it to say, with all that in mind, I was not looking forward to this week’s debut.

Suffice it to say, I was wrong.

I’d been mad at Bill many times before, but this time, he’d been away on hiatus for such a time this time, with so much happening, that I’d forgotten Bill has a distinct way of making me think about the things he puts so controversially, that by the time he endeavours to explain himself, it’s I who’s kicking myself for failing to see the sense in the situation anyway.

And, blimey, he’s only done that again.

I got a soupcon, earlier this week, of Bill’s Real Time mood when he appeared on Larry King Live on February 16th. I watched the feed online the subsequent night and fell under the Maher spell yet again. This was the Bill I’d loved and admireds as a great wit and voice of reason, interlaced with humour. Everything he discussed with King, he did so with verve and panache, but made points cogently laced with a strong dose of good, old common sense. He derided the Teabaggers and their new golden boy, Scott Brown – ‘the guy with a truck’. Let’s see, Bill reckoned, how quick the guy with the truck is to side with the blatant corporate interests and the banks too big to fail now he’s seated in the Senate. He rightly bemoaned the fact that the Democrats’ poor showing regarding healthcare reform came from their singular inability to sell the product to the American people as something extremely beneficial for them.

Pass the Senate bill, Maher urged. It’s not perfect, but it contains some good things, and he proceeded to list them. Besides, he urged, pass it, and build on it with amendments and reconciliation. This sounded interesting, I thought at the time. He’s speaking sense again.

He nailed it for me with a zinger of an observation about Rush Limbaugh as a voice of the Right:-

“Rush Limbaugh!” Bill scoffed. “What does he do for a living except scare white men as they climb into their trucks at lunchtime.”

Bingo! Bill’s back.

Living in the UK, I can’t get to see Real Time live, as most people can in the US. The show airs at 9pm EST – 2AM here in the UK – and for some reason, none of the British networks seem aware of Bill. The Daily Show airs from Tuesdays to Fridays here, a day late in transmission, on one of the free cable channels affiliated with one of the five main networks; so everyone is aware of Jon Stewart; but for some reason, Bill’s a non-starter on this side of the Pond. So I usually don’t get to see the show until one or two days after the Friday airing, depending on when Graboid put the download of the show online.

Playing it safe, I always ask a friend in New York, who’s a fan of Bill’s to precis the show for me. She gave me a cautious thumbs-up this week, so I settled down to watch the proceedings Saturday evening.

Well, the Brits have a saying: “Start as you mean to finish,” and if this is any indication of the way Bill means to finish this year, I’d say he’s punching up and aiming high.

This was easily the best episode of Real Time I have ever seen.

Bill kept his monologue brief, centering it mostly on Tiger Woods’s escapades during the past few months, with remarks about ‘Tiger’s wood’ and wondering if the sexual counselling he’d receive in Mississippi meant he’d have to have sex with his cousin. There was also a mention of Joe Stack, the kamikaze pilot who ploughed into an IRS building in Austin; but the monologue was kept brief because Bill had scheduled a longish interview with TARP’s Elizabeth Warren, making her second appearance in six months on the program, in order to talk about regulatory reforms in the banking industry.

This interview showed Bill at his best. I’d not seen him so incisive and focused in an interview since 2008. He even managed to inject some timely humour in the situation by revealing that he’d had some money invested with Lehman Brothers and asking Warren to ‘hold him’ in comfort for his loss, which she, good-humouredly, obliged.

The ethos of this interview was Warren’s talking about proposed reforms in the banking industry and how singularly difficult this was proving, how Congress was basically tied up in knots due to the fact that there were still so many politicos so intrinsically tied to lobbyists.

“The lobbyists aren’t coming to Capitol Hill once a month or once a week or even once a day,” Warren said. “We’re talking about K Street people visiting various lawmakers several times daily.”

It was imperative that the Consumer Financial Protection Act be passed and passed soon, she intoned, although she admitted she didn’t know in what form or how watered down the act would be.

I was absolutely flummoxed to find that the US didn’t have any sort of Consumer Financial Protection Act. This sort of thing has been in force in the UK since Thatcher’s day; indeed, it was instigated by Thatcher, as a means of consumer protection when she so ‘wisely’ deregulated the banks in the 1980s. But then I thought that, until the late 90s, we really had no need for anything like that. After all, we still had Glass-Steagall in force, until Bill Clinton so ‘wisely’ signed its repeal.

Very good and strong interview, with a good rapport between Bill and Warren.

The panel for the season debut consisted of former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, MSNBC’s Norah O’Donnell and Family Guy and The Cleveland Show’s Seth McFarland.

They were all good panellists. Spitzer and McFarland had been on the show the previous season, and it was easy to surmise why they were there again – Spitzer for the upcoming emphasis this year on the deficit and matters Democrat, and McFarland for being the latest head demanded by the de facto Republican Presidential nominee for 2012, Sarah Palin, for an alleged slight against her and her family, in particular the youngest child she uses as a sympathy fixture and a prop, Trig.

One subject flowed seamlessly into another, as a good conversation should, with little or no interruption in applause from the audience. If anything, this lack of audience participation was indication that they were there to listen, and that they found what was being said interesting and provocative.

Spitzer used his position as a former elected official, a name-and-rank Democrat without a particular constituency to please to level criticism in the appalling stalemate in government of the past year squarely at Congress’s feet. He was quick to interject that, although the President has tried, Congress hasn’t tried hard enough; and that the deeply-ingrained partisan atmosphere had been ripening for the past thirty or forty years at best, until coming into rank fruition during the first year of Barack Obama’s administration.

Furthermore, Spitzer reiterated, the Democrats – and he included himself amongst that equation – just weren’t good at communicating a message in terms that the general public would understand. This is something I’ve been tearing my hair out about for ages, and something Laura Flanders alluded to a couple of years ago in her book “Blue Grit.” The GOP learned earlier on, through studies done by operatives like Frank Lutz, that the average American – i.e. the one who’d stand to gain most from a Democratic Administration – has the mental and reading comprehension of a 10 year-old. So, the GOP printed campaign literature and manifestos in language a fifth-grader could understand; it worked with its operatives to train them to speak simply and plainly to get a basic message across. Flanders observed people at Republican gatherings and noted how all or most of them, afterwards, would marvel at how clear and concise the speakers or the literature was – in a language they could understand.

In a nutshell, it’s as I’ve perceived for the better part of the last six months: Obama’s treating us like a nation of adults. He’s speaking as he would his intellectual equals, but the majority of Americans, satiated with faux wealth and plastic greed of the Bush years, augmented by the fear nurtured by the neocons in the wake of 9/11, still want that Big Daddy President who talks tough and isn’t ‘afraid’ to ‘fight.’

The image of perceived weakness led into a discussion, first centering around the threat of filibuster and how the minority Opposition party can hold the majority, ostensibly in control, by the proverbial short and curlies, simply by the threat of one Senator to filibuster – and the threat doesn’t have to be made in person; a Senator can simply phone in his displeasure, and the Democrats will run for the hills.

The solution, according to the panel (and, indeed, according to any reasonably intelligent citizen pleb watching this kerfuffle), is obvious: use the old gambler’s ploy of calling the Opposition’s bluff.

Make them filibuster. They threaten, Harry Reid and co sit back, put their feet up on their respective desks and say, “Fine. You do that.” And you follow the time-honoured Senate tradition of filibuster – no meal breaks, no drinks (except water and milk), no bathroom breaks. The Senator filibustering reads the newspaper, reads the phonebook, reads the Bible – hell, reads the Koran! – he just keeps talking and labouring his right to filibuster in order to delay the legislation impending.

And, taking advantage of the 24/7 cable news saturation, the whole damned thing should be televised, allowing everyone of any doubtful persuasion to see, in real time, what willful obstruction of government looks like.

It wouldn’t be heroic, like James Stewart’s idealistic Mr Smith, who was protesting something viably bad …

Instead, it would be a supreme act of cowardice, laced with cynicism, solely for the purpose of de-legitimising this Administration.

Spitzer is sharp, and his talents should be being used by the party in power; but McFarland has the makings of a statesman, as well, in his mettle. The filibuster discussion morphed into how Republican spin had cleverly managed to convey to the public the ‘weakness’ of the current Administration, especially regarding terrorism and terrorist suspects. Norah O’Donnell deftly pointed out that the Obama administration had actually managed to secure and prosecute more terrorist suspects than the Bush administration had done, and, indeed, they carried on the practice, begun under Bush, of according most of these suspects civil trials. There had been three military trials for suspects, O’Donnell pointed out, and two of those suspects had been released back to their home countries.

Of course, Cheney’s name came up, as did the fact that he admitted on last week’s This Week what amounted to an open admission of favouring torture, and this brought up the proposed terror trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and its venue of New York City. If there be any criticism I have to make about the discussion in general, it’s here. Bill still insists that the reasons behind removing the trial from New York City is all about the Democrats bowing to the will of the Republican spin machine. Sorry, but I distinctly remember Mayor Bloomberg, initially, being in favour of Holder’s intent to hold the trial in New York City, and Bloomberg is a Republican. But once  he and Democratic Senators Schumer and Gillibrand had been assailed by various and sundry residents local to the venue, as well as various city departments concerned with the costs and the logistics of the trial, it was they who suggested a change, and Holder who is obliging. That other Republicans cynically took advantage of this situation to proclaim a security alert or whatever, is pure grandstanding and posturing of the worst partisan degree.

The blatant hypocrisy behind the Republican spin machine and its total irrationality was the reason for Seth McFarland’s appearance, and this was linked, indirectly, to the White House Chief of Staff’s recent controversial comment picked up by one Sarah Palin. It was the use of the word ‘retarded’ and the portrayal of a character in McFarland’s Family Guy series who has Down’s Syndrome.

Bill was at pains to remind the audience and the panel that he’d got into a spot of bother some years before on Politically Incorrect when he compared mentally challenged children to dogs. There’s liberal use of the word ‘retarded’ in this clip from about a decade ago, included its use by an actress whose young nephew has Down’s Syndrome.

But, as McFarland reiterates, this isn’t really a term by which anyone should describe people with Down’s Syndrome, rather it’s a word which has entered colloquial vocabulary meaning an act which is less than intelligent or backward, retrospective in outlook.

As good as this part of the discussion was – and I applaud Bill for using the word ‘retarded’ twice during the broadcast, first, to illustrate the context of actual freedom of speech, and, secondly, to show how this word can be effectively used to describe certain situations which have nothing to do, whatsoever, with any mentally-challenged person – I felt it lacking to a certain extent.

The panel could have driven home the point more forcefully in two ways:-

1. By reminding everyone that the Emanuel remark was taken out of context to the extent that it actually ended up being a lie, picked up by Palin, but handed to her, indirectly, by one of the most Progressive members of the Democratic Party, Jane Hamsher. Hamsher was present at a White House meeting between Rahm Emanuel and various members of the Progressive media, when someone disclosed to Emanuel, that certain Progressive groups were entertaining running television ads were being commissioned by and paid for by these groups to run against Blue Dog Democrats who were more than a bit iffy on healthcare reform. In other words, Democrats would be running negative adverts against other Democrats. For real.

Emanuel went ballistic and termed such action “fucking retarded.” The action, not the people proposing it. But by the time Hamsher had returned to her Firedoglake blogosphere, she’d connivingly managed to convey to all and sundry who comb the internet that Emanuel had referred to liberals, to the Progressive base as “fucking retards.”

For Palin, mistress of the victimised spin, it was a gift that keeps on giving. In a fair and balanced way, which would have made Fox News look silly, and which would have enhanced Bill’s independent credentials, Hamsher should have been called out for this naivete. Not only did it give the likes of Palin a necessary weapon, it made the Democratic Party look divided, to say the least.

2. Bill’s often made no secret of his correspondence with Levi Johnson. In this instance, he should have pointed out forcefully that Palin, herself, as disclosed in Johnson’s interview in Vanity Fair and his interviews on CBS, often would refer to Trig as “the retarded baby.”

Bill’s fourth panel guest (and the inevitable celebrity) was comedian Wanda Sykes.

Wanda was brilliant and showed astutely why sometimes in the course of modern conversation, crudity can be blazingly essential.

As everyone familiar with her knows, Wanda is a black, gay woman. I must admit, I thought the reason for her appearance would have something to do with the recent hearings initiated on Capitol Hill regarding the repeal of DADT. It did, but Bill’s first question was anticipated by Wanda and answered succinctly.

In attempting to ask her how she gauged Obama’s first-year performance in Office, she cut the question short and stated shortly and definitely that everything levelled at Obama in the way of criticism during his first year as President had everything to do with one thing: race.

I stood up and applauded at that point. That needed to be said and needed to be heeded – by the Left as well as the Right. That Sykes didn’t directly allude to the Left in particular, rather keeping the criticism within the realm of the Right’s nuttery, didn’t mean she wasn’t aware of the criticism emanating from the Left regarding Obama or the fact that, at more times than not, it was unduly excessive. There were loads of names with which various groups and individuals had seen fit to label the President during the course of the year – socialist, communist, conservative, nazi – but they all conspired to be various disguises of the same ugly word. As Sykes aptly pointed out, “nazi” is just an n-word substituted for another n-word, just like the racism claims levelled at the Right is euphemistically defined as the cognitive dissonance of the Left. Sykes isn’t just witty, she’s canny.

In the ensuing and inevitable debate about the repeal of DADT, something Eliot Spitzer said niggled me a bit. Spitzer opined that he didn’t see why Obama didn’t just do what Harry Truman did when he de-segregated the army: do so by Executive Order. That shocked me, simply because Spitzer, as a lawyer and the ex-Chief Executive of a major state (who would have, on occasion, made use of the Executive Order facility, should have known better.

Executive Order legislation can only be repealed by another Executive Order, and legislative acts can only be repealed, likewise, by other legislative acts. Therefore, as DADT is an act of Congress, Obama could not repeal this with an Executive Order. It simply wouldn’t be Constitutional. Clinton, whose Administration cobbled together DADT with the collusion of Congress, could have and should have issued an Executive Order allowing LGBT citizens to serve in the military without discrimination due to sexual orientation. That this would most certainly have been repealed by the ueber-faux religious Bush regime is a given, but how easy it would have been to reinstate in the Obama administration, although it could have risked becoming a political yo-yo, I suppose.

The panel discussion ended on the topic of the Teabaggers and how, in their wake, the Democratic Party seemed to be losing momentum, thus bringing the discussion full circle to the original topic at the beginning of the segment and touching briefly on the mainstream media coverage concerning the Haitian earthquake, for which Bill had received considerable criticism during his hiatus because of the tweet he’d made.

Although Bill tried to link the events in Haiti with the way the evening news broadcasts focus chiefly on the main news event of the day (after day after day) to the exclusion of all other things, Spitzer and the rest of the panel demurred and disagreed, especially in relation to this tragic event. I would have rather seen more emphasis given to the irresponsible 24/7 cycle’s role in heightening the attention and importance given to the Tea Party movement, which – as Bill stressed in his first New Rules editorial of the season – is little more than a cult and should be treated that way.

I don’t know if this pass on the media’s role in over-emphasizing certain newsworthy items was due to O’Donnell’s presence or not, but one of the more consistent features of Real Time last season was Bill constantly chiding the news media for giving excessive attention to things which clearly didn’t deserve it – flogging a dead horse, if you will, for the sake of ratings and bums on seats – but it deserved to be mentioned, O’Donnell or not, because as much as Fox aided, abetted and supported the Teabaggers throughout the year, their inception can be credited solidly to a subsidiary of NBC: CNBC and the hedge fund trader-turned-commentator, Rick Santelli.

The best line of the night was found in the season’s first New Rules segment, in response to this picture, posing this question:

Bill’s response? “No … and the only person who misses you is the guy who threw the shoe.”

This is Bill at his acerbic best – sharp and off-the-cuff quick wit, ending with a prescient observation of the Tea Party movement as a cult who projected a particular image on the President as something and someone he’s clearly not:-

Brilliant, perceptive, humourous and to-the-point in an often biting way – if Sarah Palin were capable of really understanding satire at its best and most provocative, she would be well advised to watch any of the repeats of this season premier HBO are offering this week; but this would well be above and beyond her ken, when compared to the crudity and ‘rudity’ of Rush.

Based on a few minor omissions and slight mis-statements in the broadcast, I should give it an 8 or a 9 out of 10, but I’m so glad to see Bill back, on form and at the top of his game, I’ll give Real Time’s season opener a full-on 10 out of 10 and keep my fingers crossed that he keeps the standard high and aims higher for the rest of the season.

This is the Bill I like and trust. Welcome back. You’ve been sorely missed.