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I have slipped into an alternate universe.

I throw up a little bit in my mouth to say this . . . but . . . but . . . omigosh I can't believe I'm going to say this . . .

Bill Maher is right.

Holy crap, I think I just infected my computer with a virus by typing that.

Bill Maher commented on this column by Kathleen Parker where she says (among other things) that if you don't want your thoughts broadcast in the public square, don't say them. She also says that we should " . . . edit our thoughts."

Edit our thoughts?!

That's exactly what we don't want to do. You remember that I commented on this very thing, saying that the NBA can do what it wants, but we as a society need to make sure that 1) we don't let what a few people think dictate how we think, and 2) allow prevailing sentiment to mask what people really are.

As is usually the case, it's not as simple as it seems at first. In spite of the comments Maher talks about, Parker made some good points. You really should read the column.

Here are Bill Maher's comments on it. My apologies for linking to the Huffington Post.

Maher said "I would listen to a hundred horrific Cliven Bundy rants if that was the price of living in the world where I could also listen to interesting and funny people talk without a filter." Best line of the monologue: "I'd rather be a Mormon."

Maher also referenced President Obama's comments that "When ignorant folks want to advertise their ignorance, just let them talk." Which I also agree with.

Holy crap, I've got to find the platform back to reality . . .

Oh, here we are, back in reality, where Eleanor Clift is completely nuts.

In possibly the dumbest democrat attempt yet to cover up the Benghazi fiasco, Eleanor Clift "points out" that Ambassador Stevens wasn't murdered.

Seriously.

Then she goes on to explain that the whole deal was a protest about a video—you remember, the lie that Obama told that was proven false three minutes after he told it and about which new evidence keeps pouring in proving that Obama knew it was a lie.

The clip I watched stops before Clift "points out" that John Edwards never had sex with Rielle Hunter.

This isn't new. This chick has lived in an alternate reality for a loooong time. You remember years ago when she was hawking her "biography" of Abraham Lincoln and telling stories about his life that she completely fabricated out of her imagination. To hear her tell it, Lincoln was running Nigerian scams out of the White House using stolen cell phones.

Good news! Everything is under control!

The Obamas took a break from playing video games and riding skateboards long enough to tweet that the kidnappers in Nigeria should bring back "our girls." I don't see how that couldn't work.

This hashtag diplomacy is exactly what you expect from a jejune group who sends out juvenile imbeciles to explain away Benghazi with "Dude, that was, like, two years ago."

This is just the latest in actions from this group that undermine the credibility of the United States. It's right in line with sending the Queen of England an iPod full of your speeches and asking people to support health care to show that "You love me." It's consistent with a President who would draw a red line in crayon then want to start a war because people made fun of him being a wuss about it, King Jofrey style. If you had to describe the Obama administration in one word, it would be "childish and silly."

Dude, that's like, five words.

Facts:

• Don Sterling is a disgusting human being
• Sterling got fined 2.5 million dollars and got banned from the NBA for life.

Those are the facts. I was tired of this story three minutes after I first heard about it. Now it's been old news for a week. By the time some really, really (really!) bored anthropologist comes across it on this blog it will be closer to contemporary with the breaking news of the fire in the Alexandria library than with anything going on at that time. Plus it has a reeeeeeaaaally long run-on sentence.

Which makes it prime fodder for this appallingly lame blog.

You've heard all the buzz and all the opinion. Now you've come here to get the straight dope. Here it is:

The NBA can do what it wants. It's a group of 31 partners and of course they're going to do what they have to do to protect the interests of their entity. They can ban him, they can force him to sell (I guess—I imagine it's a franchise deal), they can excommunicate him from their ranks—none of that has thing one to do with America as a whole or our system. It doesn't have anything to do with anything.

That's the NBA. Everyone else ought to be a little concerned about whether society gets to dictate what we think.

Since you're reading this highly intellectual thinkfest of a blog, I don't need to repeat that Sterling is a disgusting pile of crap (Dammit, I just did).

We shouldn't let society tell us what to think or what to say. Society does get to punish us for what we think—or rather, deliver consequences based on what we think and say. But we can't let it dictate what we're allowed to say.

I'm not making any sense . . . wow, that's a first!

You can say what you want. You have that right. But you don't have a right to not expect consequences for what you say. So what society does is to regulate what people say based on their perception of the consequences. That's the way it is and that's the way it should be. But it should happen organically and based on the amalgamated view of society as a whole. It shouldn't be an orchestrated calculation of a small group.

Here's what I'm trying to say: There are some people who use this to say "We have to figure out ways to keep people from saying things like that!"

Bull freaking crap.

That is the last thing we want to do. I want to hear what people have to say. I want to know what people are. What if you work with someone who's an underhanded back stabber? That's not a good thing. But given that he is, knowing that is a good thing. A week ago I hadn't heard of Dickwad Sterling. Now I know he's a scumbag. That's a good thing to know. But it doesn't affect my life in the least. (Except I just wasted ten minutes talking about it when I could have been staring into space dreaming about flying bunny rabbits wearing little confederate gray tuxedos—with teal cummerbunds.)

Now I don't know what that means functionally about what we do or say any differently than we did about this. What I am saying is that I don't want to live in a society where people can't say what they think.

I guess what it changes is what we pay attention to. Certain elements want you to think that the Sterling deal is the most important story of our time. It's not. I'm much more concerned about things that actually affect me—like whether my family is going to have access to quality health care under a system that's designed to take care of the politburo at the expense of the proletariat.

Let the NBA worry about Sterling and let's concern ourselves with stuff that affects our lives. If some crusty lech spouting crap to his love toy affects your life, maybe you should go find a blog that's less sophisticated than this one.

Yeah . . . like that's possible . . .

Here, this is becoming a lesson in the Constitution. Our system is based on majority rules. It's the idea that there will always be some whackadoos, but for the most part society as a whole will know what's best. What most people want will be the best thing, and, even if it isn't, doesn't it make more sense to keep the most people happy?

That's what the Constitution kind of outlines. Then after the Constitution gets all through going over how we run things based on what the greatest number of people believe, then we have the Bill of Rights. That's a set of principles that are so sacred that they don't fall under the category of Majority Rules. Even if 95% of the country think the Presbyterians are right, you still have the right to the religion you choose.

Here's the way to think about it. The Bill of Rights is not to protect the popular and the smart and beautiful. It's to protect the ignorant and the clueless and the bumblers who say stupid things and the people nobody likes.

If you are smart and suave and well-spoken and everybody loves you, you don't need the Bill of Rights. That means that it's there to protect people like me and you.

I've flapped my gums about this before. The Constitution says that "Congress will make no law . . . " An employer can limit any freedom it wants, for the most part.

But the existence of those freedoms in the Bill of Rights does inform our thinking in America. Just because it's not codified law, we still have a culture of "Hey, it's a free country."

Here's how this came about. A talk show caller this morning asked "Aren't you concerned that the President of the United States and the Secretary of State and the National Security advisor were able to swoop down and ruin the life of a guy who made a video?" (The video the Obama administration lied about being the cause of the Benghazi attack.) "When is he going to get an apology?"

The talk show host said something like "I don't care about offenses committed against some idiot who made a video."

Well, I do!

The guy's a moron. He ruined his own life. He's probably a pile of crap.

But in the eyes of Obama I am a pile of crap. Where does that leave me?

When they came for me . . .

It's a law. Every 11 days one of your Facebook friends has to post a picture of a loser in low-slung pants with a caption that says "Like if these should be banned!"

No! Oh, hell no!

Why? Why would you do that? Why would you prevent the losers from wearing some easily seen marker that enables you to immediately identify them as wastes of skin?

Variations of this include calls for whatever Idiot of the Week said the stupidest thing on MSNBC. Do you really want to MSNBC look like a real news organization instead of the crybaby pantywaists that they are? Why in the world would you want your opponent to cut the players that benefit your team the most?

Think, people! Think!

A week ago my sister texted me pointing out that being a racist is probably the least of Don Sterling's faults. The man is a three-time winner of the Scumbag of the Year Award. Since I didn't post on Wednesday this week, Ann Coulter had to use my sister's material for her column this week.

Obama sucks. He sucks at an astonishing variety of things. But the most important thing he sucks at may be Foreign Policy.

He is just not capable of doing the job. No crime there; people are suited for different things. There are things that I have no talent or capacity for doing. But I don't claim I can, then make a mess of them, and then brag about how great I am.

The most annoying thing about Obama sucking at Foreign Policy is the way he brags about how great he is at it. That may be the talisman for what's wrong with his entire presidency.

As usual, Jonah Goldberg gets it exactly right in in his column There's No Plan B for Obama's Foreign Policy.

It would be really funny if it weren't so frightening.

Anyone who's read this blog for more than three minutes . . . well, probably wishes they could get those three minutes back. But in addition, they've picked up on a couple of themes that I keep circling back to.

One is letting people show who they really are. There are ways that you want people to be. But forcing them to be that doesn't help you. You need to find out what people in reality are then deal with that.

Complete aside . . . Army basic training has the goal of trying to turn you into a soldier. The DIs are there to help you get through basic training. Whatever extra push or assistance or support you need, the staff is going to try to see that you graduate.

In the Marine Corps it seems like the DIs are trying make you fail boot camp. It's like they want you to wash out.

That's because they kind of are. It is a weeding out process. If you aren't cut out for the Corps, boot camp is designed to find that out.

You can argue the relative benefits of the two approaches, but that's the way it is.

So one of my themes is what I call the Wild Weasel. That's making people light up their SAM sites. Make them show you who they are. This came from a book I read thirty years ago titled "The Road Less Travelled" where M. Scott Peck said "When someone says 'I love that person—I can't live without him/her,' that's not love, that's parasitism. Love is being perfectly capable of living without someone, but choosing not to."

The Marine Corps doesn't want you to graduate if you're not cut out to be a Marine. I don't want a waste of skin to look like someone I might want to hire because there's a law about how to wear your pants. You don't want your wife to stay with you because you've made it financially impossible for her to leave or have threatened her if she does. You need to know what choices people make when they really do have a choice.

I told my son he could never be a successful criminal 'cause he always leaves a trail of where he's been—back pack, keys, books, etc. My daughter said "So you want us to be successful criminals?"

So I said—Nota bene—this is profound: "I want you to have the ability to be successful criminals but choose not to."

. . . I guess that's kind of two themes . . .

But the other theme that I'm always flapping my gums about is the idea of hijacking sacred principles for your own ends. "Rape hoaxes" I call it.

This is what liberals have done with Race. For a couple of generations courageous people have marched and fought and gotten beaten up to make "racist" the worst thing that you could call a person. Then the liberals hijacked the idea to shut down debate on policies of the most useless human being to ever occupy the Oval Office.

This is what happens when a girl cries rape when no rape occurred.

In the "Rape Hoax" first, you start with something so dramatic that it can't be questioned. Rape is such a thing. Rapists need to be tortured and killed. You think I'm kidding. Rape is a crime of control, and the just thing to do to a rapist is torture him to death so he sees what it feels like to have someone doing something awful to you and there's isn't one damn thing you can do about it. That's how horrendous rape is.

So hoaxing a rape is a horrendous crime. It's horrendous because it minimizes something unspeakably horrific. It has the effect of taking the edge off the crime. "She says she was raped? Yeah, I've heard that before, and it turned out to be a case of morning after regret."

This is what liberals do with a variety of issues. Race, Poverty, Women's Rights, Equality . . . you name it. Take something so sacred it can't be questioned, then wreck it as a tool to further their agenda.

Their latest rape hoax is, oddly enough, about rape.

The President gave some speech about the problem with rape in college. He said that one in every five girls in college is a victim of sexual assault.

That's a lie. The President lied (stop the presses!).

I don't have to say (which is phrase immediately followed by saying it) that any sexual assault is too much. The actual figure is more like one in forty. One in a million is way too much. But Barack Obama lied to us to . . .

To what? Who knows? Typically he lies to us to steal our money or get more control or . . . whatever. Doesn't matter. The more heinous crime he committed is to minimize the idea of sexual assault on campus.

Whether he gets whatever he was trying to get out of his lie, he has damaged the very people he is pretending to protect. Now when you hear about sexual assault on college campuses (a horrendous, heinous, absolutely unacceptable occurrence) you're going to dismiss it. "Eh, it's just one other thing the dictator is using to try to steal my money and freedom."

You've already been through this weeks ago when it was still a story. You remember how Barack Obama blasted America for paying women less than men. That was clear back in his STFU speech. Nobody pays any attention to that. It's the White House equivalent of the awards shows Hollywood puts on every week.

But Obama couldn't leave it alone. He needed something to distract from the disastrous Obamacare fiasco and his catastrophic failures at Foreign Policy. So he checked into his tried and true "America is horrible" hotel and set up housekeeping in the "America pays women less" suite.

If you've watched liberals operate for longer than it takes to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop, you saw this one coming. The White House pays women less than it pays men doing the same job. Obama never accuses anyone of doing anything that he's not guilty of himself.

You know how this works. The statistics Obama used show that women get paid less than men, but when you adjust for experience and positions they are paid the same. Men who fly jet airliners get paid more than women who work part time filing documents. Women who fly jets also get paid more than men who file documents part time, but there are a lot less of them.

So when the White House got called on paying women less than men they said "Yeah, but you have to account for experience and position!"

No, really, who takes those buffoons seriously anymore?

You don't get much more ridiculous than Jay Carney saying "Oh, that memo about what to say about Benghazi? That wasn't about Benghazi."

I'm glad people are keeping the pressure on Benghazi, but that's the same thing as the Malaysia Flight 370 story. We will never know any more about it than we do right now.

What we know is that Obama and Hillary were unprepared, absent the night it happened, immediately knew it was a coordinated terrorist attack, and concocted a lie about a video no one had ever seen.

We also know that neither Obama or Hillary will ever suffer one iota of consequence for any of it.

You know this. You know that Obama will never suffer one "smidgen" of political fallout for anything he has done or will ever do. If it were possible for that to happen, he would not be President of the United States right now.

The only reason that a man as useless as Barack Obama is President of the United States, is because he has complete and absolute immunity from the natural consequences anyone else would suffer for the exact same thing.

Office of the Dean of Maddenly Annoying Bullcrap

Holy crap. In spite of your best efforts I'm sure you saw or heard snippets of Obama's speech on Obamacare and other Happily Ever After Stories. I honestly wonder what color the sky is in the world he lives in.

If you haven't seen Ironman 3 by now it's your own fault. But I'll give you a spoiler alert anyway. Obama is the terrorist shill in Ironman 3. It is not possible for any human being to be as stupid as that man appears to be. He is Ben Kingsley reading lines someone is feeding him. They chose him because he's the only one simple enough to read them without laughing out loud. Read the lines, get your trained seal treat. No thinking involved.

Obamacare will reduce the deficit!

Really? How?

Oh, wait, there's more.

Obamacare will save the lives of millions! It will eliminate disease and poverty and ignorance. It will halt the rise of the oceans!

It slices! It dices! It makes julienne fries! It takes the tears out of cutting onions! Operators are standing by!

Holy. Freaking. Crap.

Don't you wish your job were as easy as Obama's? "Hey, boss, good news! My new bit design will drill 10,000 feet farther in 30% of the time with 50% less cost!" How do you know that? Have you field tested it? "Shut up! Gosh!"

Hey, I don't know why I even talk about it. As Obama says The Debate is Over."

(I know, I never click on links to articles either. But if you did, you'd find a really good one there . . . )

Don't worry. The bell is about to ring. Gather your books and perch on the edge of your seat. But you can't leave just yet . . .

You see this in medicine all the time. The doctor will target a system without understanding the overall picture. You take something to alleviate the pain without fixing what's causing the pain in the first place. The trouble with that is twofold (this is college; you have to expect highbrow words like "twofold"): First, you haven't fixed the problem. And second, the cure that you applied will have other effects that you didn't anticipate and don't understand.

The best example of this was Fen-Phen.

You're fat. The doctor gives you a pill. Two weeks later you're skinny.

What? What possible side effects could there be? Stupidest thing in the history of Medicine.

The human body is a very complex system, well beyond the understanding of the developers of the drug. People did lose weight, but they also damaged their heart and other organs and died. The developers of the drug just could not understand all the ancillary effects of the system responding to the changes the drug was making.

It occurred to me that Obama's bad "Health Care" system parallels bad health care. Just like Fen-Phen permanently damages your health, creating complex problems that the developers didn't foresee, Obamacare is destroying the system that it's prescribed to help. It's a system much more complex than the developers of the program are capable of understanding.

The obvious difference is, on the drug you actually saw the promised results before the secondary effects kicked in and you died.

You get the idea. Class dismissed.