Bill Maher’s Pathetic Ignorance About Putin

Jamie Glazov

Bill Maher, host of HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” revealed some frightening ignorance on his show this weekend in an exchange with Matthew Continetti, associate editor at The Weekly Standard. When Continetti pointed out Obama’s mistake in canceling the missile shield and the danger that Vladimir Putin poses to the West, Maher scoffed with derision and ridicule, making wisecracks about how the Cold War is long over. Perhaps Maher might want to reflect about the reality of there having been no Nuremberg-style trials in the post-Soviet era and what that has meant, in the most tragic sense, for Russia and the world.

First clue: it has something to do with why the surviving heirs of the Soviet monster remain in power in the Kremlin today. Second clue: it’s connected to why the Putin gang recently ferociously denounced a resolution that equated Stalinism with Nazism.

Throughout the Cold War, liberals like Maher ridiculed conservatives’ concern about the threat of communism. I wonder when Maher will invite Harvey Klehr and John Haynes on his program to discuss their new book, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, which reveals substantial evidence regarding American communist support for Soviet espionage. Will Maher admit that the liberals were wrong about almost everything they argued regarding the communist infiltration of America? The evidence now proves the liberals wrong beyond reasonable doubt.

A dialogue like that between Maher, Klehr and Haynes may serve as a solid foundation to bringing Maher into contemporary reality regarding Putin. Because the liberal denial continues today, as revealed by Maher, about the present threat emanating from Russia. The fact is that the threat of the KGB, now termed the FSB (Federal Security Service), remains. The FSB is the same old outfit — just with a different name. Konstantin Preobrazhenskiy, a former KGB agent, has revealed that Russian spying continues at a high degree in America and poses a major threat to the U.S. He has also revealed Russian-Iranian cooperation, and how and why the Putin gang is helping Iran build the bomb.

To add to all of this, there is a serious and deadly problem of the Putin regime’s involvement in, and support of, Islamic terrorism. Alexander Litvinenko paid with his life for, among other things, the information he knew about the FSB’s links to al-Qaeda.

But Bill Maher finds it all really funny. Sort of how my liberal and leftist academic acquaintances used to break into sidesplitting laughter when ridiculing Ronald Reagan’s reference to the Soviet regime as the “Evil Empire.” As someone who comes from the Soviet Union, and who has recently reread the Gulag Archipelago and Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales, I still have difficulty understanding what is laughable about it all.

I wonder if Bill Maher would also laugh, in his contemptuous and self-satisfied manner, upon learning the facts regarding the nightmarish, sadistic and barbaric torture that is, as we speak, being inflicted on prisoners in Putin’s prison cells.