Bill Maher And The Death Of "Politically Incorrect"

I was overseas and never received ABC when Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher was in production, so I never saw the show. But I was aware that the program was cancelled and Maher was attacked and reviled after 9/11 over comments that he made. Here's a link to an article entitled Politically Incorrect: A Eulogy at thebigstory.org that explains Maher's downfall.

In the weeks after September 11, critics wondered how late-night talk shows would change. Predictably, Leno and Letterman told fewer and safer jokes, mostly at the expense of easy targets like the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. The Daily Show's Jon Stewart was so shaken he cried. [Note: Stewart's Manhattan apartment, where he lived with his wife and children, was blocks from the World Trade Center.] But Politically Incorrect, true to form, crashed the somber late-night party. Appearing on Sept. 17 for the first show since the attacks, Maher made it starkly clear his show would live up to its name.

"I do not relinquish - nor should any of you - the right to criticize, even as we support, our government," Maher said. "This is still a democracy and they're still politicians, so we need to let our government know that we can't afford a lot of things that we used to be able to afford. Like a missile shield that will never work for an enemy that doesn't exist. We can't afford to be fighting wrong and silly wars. The cold war. The drug war. The culture war."

What he said later in the show was what caused all the fuss:

Panelist Dinesh D'Souza [God, I'd never heard of this guy before his ridiculous book, The Roots Of Obama's Rage, was published in 2010; turns out he's a longtime influential member of the religious right] mentioned that he didn't think the terrorists were "cowards," as George Bush had described them. Maher replied: "We have been the cowards. Lobbing cruise missiles from two thousand miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building. Say what you want about it. Not cowardly. You're right."

This was in the week following 9/11, and as the linked article says, Maher's was the one and only dissenting voice in the talkshow world at the time that expressed anything negative about the U.S. government, when opinion polls swung to 96% for George W. Bush.