At the Media Research Center’s “DisHonors Awards” held on Thursday, September 26, 2013 during the MRC’s annual gala, one of three nominees for the “Barbra Streisand Celebrity Dumb Ass Award.” The audience voted Maher the winner.
“This has become a kind of conventional wisdom — that the Republican Party has gone so far right, Reagan himself wouldn’t fit in. But I’m here tonight to call bullshit on that. Ronald Reagan was an anti-government, union-busting, race-baiting, anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-intellectual, who cut rich people’s taxes in half, had an incurable case of the military-industrial complex, and said Medicare was socialism that would destroy our freedom....He was the original, official pitchman for bat shit. When they hold up signs that say ‘No Socialized Medicine,’ where do you think they got it from? We got it from you dad, we got it from you.”
[Reagan audio: “If you don’t do this and if I you don’t do it, one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in America when men were free.”]....
“Both sides really should stop pretending he was something other than the man most responsible for our decline.”
— Bill Maher on HBO’s Real Time, June 7, 2013.