James Carville Comes Unglued, Rants That GOP Speaker, SCOTUS 'Bigger Threat Than Al-Qaeda'
James Carville has finally lost it. Not that he ever really had it, mind you, but on Friday's "Real Time with Bill Maher," he went on a wild-eyed rant that should have even his fellow leftists wondering if Mr. Carville has finally slipped his clutches.
Carville took Speaker Mike Johnson wildly out of context to portray him as worse than Al-Qaeda while earlier claiming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “right-wing bullshit” is why Israel finds itself at war.
Earlier on Saturday, my colleague Nick Arama pointed out that Bill Maher himself actually agreed with Donald Trump on something (I know, I was gobsmacked), but Maher has also demonstrated some un-hingedness where the new Speaker of the House is concerned:
Maher finds Johnson particularly threatening, having himself compared Johnson to Osama bin Laden and having guests on who will indulge those feelings. Carville was just the latest example, “This is a bigger threat than Al-Qaeda to this country. Let me tell you something, the Speaker of the House, they got probably -- at least two Supreme Court justices, maybe more, right, don't kid yourself and people in the press have no idea who this guy is, how he was formed, what the threat is, and this is a fundamental threat to the United States.”
Were I to offer Carville any advice at this juncture, it would be "wipe off your chin."
Let's stop and think about this calmly, as Carville appears incapable of doing. We need only one example of al-Qaeda's behavior to blow holes in Carville's assertion: On that day that will live in infamy, September 11, 2001, terrorists flew hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, destroying the former and doing serious damage to the latter. A fourth airliner was intended for another target but was brought down by the heroic sacrifice of some of the passengers. Almost 3,000 people died in those attacks -- more than were killed in the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.
By contrast, the Supreme Court has confirmed the Second Amendment and returned the abortion issue to the states. As for Republicans in Congress, they have expelled one of their own over alleged acts of fraud, called for the impeachment of the most deeply and fundamentally corrupt President... ever, and - shocker of shockers - one of them put up some Christmas decorations.
So, one group commits acts of terror and mass murder, while the other confirms the Constitution and carries out their duties as defined by that Constitution. I'm not seeing an equivalence here.
Later in the interview, Carville went off on another fact-free tirade:
Carville accused Johnson and his fellow travelers of not believing “in the Constitution and will tell you that. Mike Johnson himself says what is democracy but two wolves and a lamb having lunch. That's what they really, really believe and to say, oh, come on, man, that's some crazy -- no, no, they believe that and they're coming and they've been doing it forever. They're funded.”
The quote about wolves, lambs, and lunch is an old one attributed to Benjamin Franklin about the dangers of unchecked majoritarianism and Johnson correctly noted that the Constitution does not establish such a system. Yet, Carville made it sound like Johnson wants to eat all the proverbial lambs.
One would think that Carville would at least make some effort to get a quote from one of the Founders correct, since the actual statement isn't anywhere near the point he was trying, badly, to make.
Check out this fun bit from Nick Arama's story, in which Carville gets himself fact-checked into the adjacent time zone; you'll want to watch the full video clip:
One would hope Carville would learn something from this. But, honestly, he probably won't.
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