Bill Maher: Bachmann And Scalia Are ‘The Exact Same Idiot’

After two weeks of mediocre shows, Bill Maher hit a home run Friday night, in large part thanks to two of his five guests: MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, who was on fire, and Maya Wiley, Founder and President of the Center for Social Inclusion. (Note to CNBC: I would fire Carol Roth for being embarrassingly ignorant about the debt ceiling.)

During Real Time’s “New Rules” segment, Maher did an excellent job linking Tea Party Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, as two “idiots” cut from the same cloth.

“Reasonable people,” Maher said, “usually see Michele Bachmann as a total loon, but Scalia as a ‘serious intellectual’ — when actually, they’re the exact same idiot.”

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This past week, as The New Civil Rights Movement reported, Bachmann and Scalia were center stage in stupidity.

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“President Obama waived a ban on arming terrorists in order to allow weapons to go to the Syrian opposition,” Bachmann told conservative radio host Jan Markell last Saturday. “Your listeners, US taxpayers, are now paying to give arms to terrorists including Al Qaeda.”

“Rather than seeing this as a negative, we need to rejoice, Maranatha Come Lord Jesus, His day is at hand,” Bachmann pleaded. “When we see up is down and right is called wrong, when this is happening, we were told this; these days would be as the days of Noah.”

Scary stuff.

But so was an interview with Justice Antonin Scalia, during which he proclaimed that the devil is a real person walking the earth — and was “offended” when his interviewer hinted she didn’t hold the same belief.

An excerpt, via New York Magazine:

SCALIA: I even believe in the Devil.

NY MAGAZINE: You do?

SCALIA: Of course! Yeah, he’s a real person. Hey, c’mon, that’s standard Catholic doctrine! Every Catholic believes that.

NY MAGAZINE: Every Catholic believes this? There’s a wide variety of Catholics out there …

SCALIA: If you are faithful to Catholic dogma, that is certainly a large part of it.

NY MAGAZINE: Have you seen evidence of the Devil lately?

SCALIA: You know, it is curious. In the Gospels, the Devil is doing all sorts of things. He’s making pigs run off cliffs, he’s possessing people and whatnot. And that doesn’t happen very much anymore.

NY MAGAZINE: No.

SCALIA: It’s because he’s smart.

NY MAGAZINE: So what’s he doing now?

SCALIA: What he’s doing now is getting people not to believe in him or in God. He’s much more successful that way.

NY MAGAZINE: That has really painful implications for atheists. Are you sure that’s the ­Devil’s work?

SCALIA: I didn’t say atheists are the Devil’s work.

NY MAGAZINE: Well, you’re saying the Devil is ­persuading people to not believe in God. Couldn’t there be other reasons to not believe?

SCALIA: Well, there certainly can be other reasons. But it certainly favors the Devil’s desires. I mean, c’mon, that’s the explanation for why there’s not demonic possession all over the place. That always puzzled me. What happened to the Devil, you know? He used to be all over the place. He used to be all over the New Testament.

NY MAGAZINE: Right.

SCALIA: What happened to him?

NY MAGAZINE: He just got wilier.

Maher rightly took issue with these two “idiots.”

“If you believe we’re living in the end times, like Michele Bachmann does, we get to take away the car keys,” Maher told his audience. “You don’t get to vote on next year’s budget, because it doesn’t concern you.”

And concluded, of Scalia, “You see the world divided into teams of good and evil and suspect the wily one may be on the side of THEM, and when you start seeing compromising with your opponents as a compromise with evil, well, there’s the Tea Party.”

Watch:

//www.youtube.com/embed/0PEA5QXbfX0

Maher transcript partially via Mediaite, where there is also a video if the above is removed.