Of Douchebags and Douchebagery.

There’s a few douches I’ve been meaning to comment about and one of them used to be my hero.

LINDSEY GRAHAM

Dude you are so gay, just come out of that closet already. Every time you show up on the news, gaydars all around this world explode. More seriously you are pro-defense of marriage act which is an insult to all your gay compadres in America. You defend Guantanamo’s existence by saying “We had 450,000 Japanese and German prisoners housed in the United States during World War II. As a nation, we can deal with this.” on a CNN interview in May of 2009. You gave up on democracy when you prevented filibustering in the senate.

RICHARD HEENE – Balloon Dad.

Really I think you will go down as a massive douchebag in the history books written on douchbags. Pulling this hoax to make everyone believe your kid was in a balloon floating away, all the resources dispatched to save the balloon, making your kids puke from having to lie so much. You sir, are not just a douchebag but also a fucking retard.

BILL MAHER

Yeah really. I never thought I would say this. But Bill, you started believing your own hype. You became my hero the day you jumped into your own studio audience to personally remove a “truther” who was heckling you.

At that moment you became a demigod the likes of George Carlin beating verbally beating down a heckler and the following bit is a fucking classic:

Bu back to Bill Maher. You made Religulous and it was brilliant and I think your head started to inflate this season from the insane amount of ego packed in there. You also begun your new crusade, blame the sick for being sick because you think everyone’s a fucking moron and that everyone is responsible for everything that happens to them. And then you proceeded to bully as many o your guests as possible to give you the answer you wanted to hear, your philosophy on nutrition. Just like every other libertarian fucktard out there who believes in absolute personal responsibility you got it all wrong. You fail to understand that people are just that, people and that people are the end product of experience, environment, biology, the way they were raised, education and everything else that can influence the making of a person and it’s for that reason that I reject libertarianism.

But then it got even worse, you went on, on a rant about the evils of vaccination because corporations make the vaccine. This is where you flew into the douchebag stratosphere. Really are you gonna be this chick?

Minus the massively awesome rack of course. Come on dude, don’t be that guy.

Your douchbagery went so far that your own guests almost ridiculed you off your own stage. It began with a debate with Senator Bill Frist, sure he’s a republican, but he’s also a physician. And Maher bullies him into the nutrition argument again. No surprise he’s on the board of PETA (fucking morons here to)

His argument that medicine misses a lot. Someone’s watching too much House M.D. But his kookery wouldn’t end there with the vaccine conspiracy. The next week he went on and on about and his guests mocked him to no end for his sophomoric knowledge of medicine.

To add insult to career suicide, Michael Shermer even wrote an open letter to him. Now if you don’t know who Shermer is, he’s an American science writer, historian of science, founder of The Skeptics Society, and Editor in Chief of its magazine Skeptic, which is largely devoted to investigating and debunking pseudoscientific and supernatural claims. In his letter Shermer completely owns Maher.

An Open Letter to Bill Maher on Vaccinations

From a Fellow Skeptic

By Michael Shermer

Editor of Skeptic magazine and “Skeptic” columnist for Scientific American

Dear Bill,

Years ago you invited me to appear as a fellow skeptic several times on your ABC show Politically Incorrect, and I have ever since shared your skepticism on so many matters important to both of us: creationism and intelligent design, religious supernaturalism and New Age paranormal piffle, 9/11 “truthers”, Obama “birthers”, and all manner of conspiratorial codswallop. On these matters, and many others, you rightly deserved the Richard Dawkins Award from Atheist Alliance International.

However, I believe that when it comes to alternative medicine in general and vaccinations in particular you have fallen prey to the same cognitive biases and conspiratorial thinking that you have so astutely identified in others. In fact, the very principle of how vaccinations work is additional proof (as if we needed more) against the creationists that evolution happened and that natural selection is real: vaccinations work by tricking the body’s immune system into thinking that it has already had the disease for which the vaccination was given. Our immune system “adapts” to the invading pathogens and “evolves” to fight them, such that when it encounters a biologically similar pathogen (which itself may have evolved) it has in its armory the weapons needed to fight it. This is why many of us born in the 1950s and before may already have some immunity against the H1N1 flu because of its genetic similarity to earlier influenza viruses, and why many of those born after really should get vaccinated.

Vaccinations are not 100% effective, nor are they risk free. But the benefits far outweigh the risks, and when communities in the U.S. and the U.K. in recent years have foregone vaccinations in large numbers, herd immunity is lost and communicable diseases have come roaring back. This is yet another example of evolution at work, but in this case it is working against us. (See www.sciencebasedmedicine.org for numerous articles answering every one of the objections to vaccinations.)

Vaccination is one of science’s greatest discoveries. It is with considerable irony, then, that as a full-throated opponent of the nonsense that calls itself Intelligent Design, your anti-vaccination stance makes you something of an anti-evolutionist. Since you have been so vocal in your defense of the theory of evolution, I implore you to be consistent in your support of the theory across all domains and to please reconsider your position on vaccinations. It was not unreasonable to be a vaccination skeptic in the 1880s, which the co-discovered of natural selection—Alfred Russel Wallace—was, but we’ve learned a lot over the past century. Evolution explains why vaccinations work. Please stop denying evolution in this special case.

As well, Bill, your comments about not wanting to “trust the government” to inject us with a potentially deadly virus, along with many comments you have made about “big pharma” being in cahoots with the AMA and the CDC to keep us sick in the name of corporate profits is, in every way that matters, indistinguishable from 9/11 conspiracy mongering. Your brilliant line about how we know that the Bush administration did not orchestrate 9/11 (“because it worked”), applies here: the idea that dozens or hundreds pharmaceutical executives, AMA directors, CDC doctors, and corporate CEOs could pull off a conspiracy to keep us all sick in the name of money and power makes about as much sense as believing that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their bureaucratic apparatchiks planted explosive devices in the World Trade Center and flew remote controlled planes into the buildings.

Finally, Bill, please consider the odd juxtaposition of your enthusiastic support for health care reform and government intervention into this aspect of our medical lives, with your skepticism that these same people—when it comes to vaccinations and disease prevention—suddenly lose their sense of morality along with their medical training. You excoriate the political right for not trusting the government with our health, and then in the next breath you inadvertently join their chorus when you denounce vaccinations, thereby adding fodder for their ideological cannons. Please remember that it’s the same people administrating both health care and vaccination programs.

One of the most remarkable features of science is that it often leads its practitioners to change their minds and to say “I was wrong.” Perhaps we don’t do it enough, as our own blinders and egos can get in the way, but it does happen, and it certainly happens a lot more in science than it does in religion or politics. I’ve done it. I used to be a global warming skeptic, but I reconsidered the evidence and announced in Scientific American that I was wrong. Please reconsider both the evidence for vaccinations, as well as the inconsistencies in your position, and think about doing one of the bravest and most honorable things any critical thinker can do, and that is to publicly state, “I changed my mind. I was wrong.”

With respect,

Michael Shermer

Bill do yourself a favor and stop smoking so much weed, this year you went from reasoned ideologue (and I sorta let that ideologue part because you brought good arguments) to total douchebag. And this in a few short months. You actually lost me as a viewer as I cannot stomach that kind of lunatic conspiracy crap that only 2 years ago you kicked parts of your audience out for doing the very same.