This is remarkable if you know anything about Bill Maher and his audience. You would have to switch channels to MSNBC or the Daily Show to find a more progressive crowd.
I’ve never been a fan of Bill Maher but to his credit, he did anger many progressives on Twitter this week by standing up for Israel.
Jamie Weinstein is a senior editor at the Daily Caller. I met him at CPAC in March and he’s a very smart guy. Last night he was a member of the panel on Maher’s show and his defense of Israel drew applause from the audience.
The Daily Caller’s Patrick Howley sets the scene:
Is there hope for liberal television after all? Probably not, but for a brief shining moment one conservative rocked the epicenter of the lefty airwaves with such righteous force that HBO viewers are still trying to figure out if they should be terrified, impressed, or some combination thereof.Daily Caller senior editor Jamie Weinstein appeared on “Real Time with Bill Maher” last night with former Democratic Rep. Jane Harmon and predicter-of-things Nate Silver. Maher actually agreed with Weinstein that Hamas deserves the blame for the conflict in Gaza (a bit of a different tune than Maher’s 2001 knee-slapper that terrorists are “not cowardly”), and then something happened that only Nate Silver would be able to tell us the likelihood of.“What did Hamas use the money they had for? They built underground tunnels to attack Israel with and hide their weapons, not protect their people,” Weinstein pointed out, prompting a Real Time audience applause break. Bill Maher’s audience actually applauded a conservative for laying out the facts!
Here’s the video via Mediaite:
I especially liked the part where panelist Jane Harman quoted Charles Krauthammer saying “Israel builds an Iron Dome to defend its citizens from missiles, Hamas uses its citizens to defend its missiles.”
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