[Our thanks to Crooks & Liars. The commentary below is by Heather.]
Bill Maher had a few words for wingnut Michele Bachmann and her counterpart on the Supreme Court, Antonin Scalia during his New Rules segment on Real Time this Friday evening, and I particularly enjoyed this bit on Bachmann:
And finally, New Rule, I know we can't establish a religious test for office, but if you believe we're living in the end times, like Michele Bachmann does, we get to take away the car keys. Yes, let Jesus take the wheel.
If you think the world is about to end, that's your right, but you don't get to vote on next year's budget, because it doesn't concern you!Don't we wish. She's finally going to scurry out of office now that she's under investigation and might not have been reelected anyway, but not before she's got a chance to inflict more damage on the American public.
He wrapped things up by going after Scalia and his remarks about the devil being "a real person running around, getting people not to believe in god." As Maher noted, a lot of "reasonable people" see Bachmann as a "total lune, but Scalia as a serious intellectual, when actually, they're the exact same idiot." Maher cited some of Scalia's idiocy about the devil making pigs run off of cliffs before letting him have it.
MAHER: Pigs running off cliffs? Hey, leave the debt ceiling deniers out of this. And what is Justice Scalia's theory as to why we don't see the devil anymore? Is it the logical answer that fictions like the devil are in the Bible because it was written before the age of science, when humans didn't know where the sun went at night, and is obviously a reflection of mankind's thinking in his intellectual infancy?
Of course not! That makes sense. What Scalia said about the devil is, “He used to be all over the New Testament... What happened to him?... He got wilier.”
Motherf**ker! Of course! Wilier. He may be evil, but he's always looking to improve himself. Antonin Scalia once said that people like him, who adhere to a traditional belief, were “regarded as simple minded.” We are, he said, fools for Christ.
You know, whether you're fools for Christ, or coo coo for Cocoa Puffs, I really don't care why someone acts like a fool, just that they do and when they do, we keep them away from decision making.
It would be one thing if Mr. Scalia sold pizza for a living, but this is a man we go to to interpret our laws. It's like smelling a gas leak and calling an exorcist. Antonin Scalia put George Bush in the White House and he believes the devil went down to Georgia. He gets to decide when life begins and he thinks evil is a person, you know, like a corporation.
Here's the problem with believing the devil exists. It means you see the world divided into teams of good and evil and suspect the wily one, may be on the side of them, and when you start seeing compromising with your opponent as a compromise with evil, well, there's your tea party.