An enjoyable sequel to last week’s segment with Bari Weiss about being done with COVID. There’s nothing about the virus in this monologue but Maher’s dissent from pandemic hypercaution predictably drew attacks from liberals and applause from conservatives, which has him thinking about how strange the “strange new respect” phenomenon in American politics has become.

It works the other way too, he correctly notes, citing the example of Liz Cheney. In an age of extreme partisan polarization, it’s an unbearable affront to tell your allies the truth when they want to believe a lie.

“Let’s get this straight,” Maher said. “It’s not me who’s changed, it’s the left. Who is now made up of a small contingent who’ve gone mental and a large contingent who refuse to call them out for it. But I will. That’s why I’m a hero at FOX these days. Which shows just how much liberals have their head up their ass because if they really thought about it they would have made me a hero on their media. But that can’t happen in this ridiculous new era of mind-numbing partisanship where if I keep it real about the nonsense in the Democratic Party it makes me an instant hero to Republicans.”

“People sometimes say to me, ‘You didn’t used to make fun of the left as much.’ Yeah, because they didn’t give me so much to work with,” Maher said.

Again, it goes both ways. Consider the fact that on this date five years ago, this guy was the honest-to-goodness National Security Advisor to a Republican president:

In a new interview, Michael Flynn says covid was intentionally introduced into the world by global elites like George Soros, Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates and the Arabella Group so they can “rule the world,” “control humanity,” and defeat Donald Trump. pic.twitter.com/5UM2grzJGS

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) January 29, 2022

To this day, despite his descent into madness, Flynn is one of the most popular political figures on the populist right. Meanwhile, the most influential person in the Republican Party has labored for more than a year under the pitiful delusion that he won the 2020 election and most of the elected officials in his party are afraid to challenge him on it, a perfect illustration of Maher’s point about “a small contingent who’ve gone mental and a large contingent who refuse to call them out for it.”

Conscientious people on either side don’t have to look outside their own tents to find toxic absurdity nowadays, especially when it’s unclear which contingent is actually the small one and which is the large.

To his credit, Maher really has kept it real about both sides. Maybe Cheney can become a recurring guest on his show when she’s primaried into oblivion in Wyoming this summer.

It's not my fault that the party of FDR and JFK is turning into the party of LOL😂 and WTF🤦‍♂️. pic.twitter.com/gpdAY4vhEV

— Bill Maher (@billmaher) January 29, 2022