NYTimes Provides More Space for Controversial Comedian Bill Maher, This Time in Support of Drug Legalization

August 8th, 2012 8:53 AM

The New York Times handed over more real estate to controversial left-wing comedian Bill Maher, this time in the Sunday Book Review section, where Maher praised a book in support of legalizing marijuana in a review and in the front section of the Book Review, where Maher lamented: "The drug war, just like the war on terror, created jobs and budgets, and the beneficiaries don’t want to give them up, even though they know they’re fighting an immoral and unwinnable war."

An excerpt from the front section:

....Maher writes in his review of Doug Fine’s new book, “Too High to Fail: Cannabis and the New Green Economic Revolution,” that there are fiscal and moral arguments to be made over how the United States polices pot. In a recent e-mail, he said of Obama: “If I could tell him just one thing, it would be to remind him that each of the last three presidents could have gone to jail in their youth for doing drugs that other Americans are still being punished for. Just getting caught smoking pot once can follow you around for the rest of your life, blocking career and even housing opportunities. Three presidents in a row now have acknowledged partying in their youth. Our drug policy is a glaring hypocrisy.”

Back in March, Maher, who has donated $1 million to a pro-Obama SuperPAC, wrote an op-ed for the Times pleading for a cease-fire in the current culture wars over insensitivity: "Please Stop Apologizing." Yet the paper hypocritically failed to inform its readers of Maher's previous vile comments about Sarah Palin, even though conservatives spent weeks making them an issue after controversy erupted over Rush Limbaugh's comments about birth-control activist Sandra Fluke.