During his closing monologue on Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher argued that America is better off than it was four years ago because we’re not in the middle of the time “when COVID hit and America wet itself, emptied its pockets, and curled up in a ball” by overreacting to the coronavirus pandemic.
Maher said, “Now that both Biden and Trump are asking voters the age-old question, are you better off than you were four years ago?, Someone must tell them that everyone’s answer is, you’re f*cking kidding, right? Four years ago? Yeah, I remember March 2020. I was bartering for toilet paper and eating all the food out of my earthquake kit. Yes, what a great time that was, when COVID hit and America wet itself, emptied its pockets, and curled up in a ball. And let me say, I get no pleasure having to characterize my country as panicky, inefficient, and stuck on stupid, but that’s what we are. And nothing proved it more than the flight from hell four years ago.”
After Maher recounted the handling of and lack of quarantine of passengers on the Costa Luminosa cruise ship, Maher said, “Some people said closing schools for so long was pointless and would cause much worse collateral damage to kids, and they were right. … Four years ago, The Daily Beast ran a story with the headline ‘Bill Maher Pushes Steve Bannon Wuhan Lab [COVID] Conspiracy‘ … , which was typical of the mainstream media at the time. Of course, it wasn’t a conspiracy theory, and it wasn’t owned by Steve Bannon, and now everyone, including the Biden administration, admits there’s at least a 50-50 chance that the virus could have begun in the lab in Wuhan that was doing gain-of-function research on that virus, duh. But I don’t see a lot of retractions being printed.”
He added, “When COVID hit, we did a lot of stupid things, because America never reacts, it only overreacts. Ubers looked like those Orthodox Jews who wrap themselves in Saran Wrap in case their plane flies over a grave. We washed the mail. We played baseball in front of cardboard cutouts and ate in parking lots or with inflatable dolls, they closed the ocean, we banged pots and pans to show our love for nurses and our hatred for people trying to get a baby to sleep, for two years, we had to get nostril-f*cked every time we left the house, serious people talked about having sex through glory holes — and if you don’t know what a glory hole is, I wouldn’t look into it — we were told to wash our hands every five minutes, and don’t ever touch your face, and if you absolutely must go to the beach, for the sake of all that’s holy, wear a mask, outside, because the last thing you want to do when a disease is afoot is get fresh air and sunshine and Vitamin D, no, much better to stay locked up, stressed out, and day drinking. And if you do get COVID, remember, natural immunity is always the worst kind. So, even if you’ve had the disease, you need a shot.”
Later, Maher stated, “We handed out four trillion dollars of free money, 280 billion of which was just flat-out stolen in what the AP called ‘the greatest grift in U.S. history,’ and which started an inflationary spiral that we now blame on Biden. So, we’re going to bring back Trump, the guy who ignored COVID like it was the dinner check?”
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