Bill Maher: 'Governing with the GOP is like rooming with a meth addict'
March 19th, 2011 2:44 am ET .Do you like this Article?
Bill Maher may have been up to his old tricks again, slamming Republicans, but this time, he actually picked up on a theme two well-known Republicans had brought up earlier in the week.

The theme: Republicans aren't getting serious about the serious problems.

On his HBO show "Real Time," Maher used his New Rules segment to slame Republicans as the "Party of Distraction." That is, "useless distractions that make up the Republican Party agenda." Republicans, said Maher, focus on "useless distractions," making mountains out of molehills, while ignoring the real issues facing the country: "Climate change, loose nukes, debt, infrastructure, the wealth gap, our addiction to oil from weird, distant places run by monsters that want us dead, like Alaska."

Among the useless distractions Maher listed as Republican obsessions: public unions, Sharia law, anchor babies, the "Ground Zero mosque," NPR, the "war on Christmas," the New Black Panthers and Planned parenthood. The problem is so bad, said Maher, that trying to govern with Republicans "is like rooming with a meth addict" who, instead of rent, worries about strange voices coming out of the air conditioner.

Among Maher's slams:
--On ACORN: "Republicans are obsessed with people cooking up wild, nonexistent schemes to vote, ignoring one important truth: this is America. No one wants to vote."
--The lunacy of Oklahoma banning Sharia when the Muslim population there is "rapidly approaching zero."
--The New Black Panthers, in which he said about Republicans, the truth is, "every black person scares you." Then, in a local joke for Californians, he put up a video slide of the two black guys standing outside the polling station in Philadelphia, he pointed to the audience and said, a guy from Orange County saw the photo and look, he's leaving the studio. (Orange Country is heavily white, heavily Republican.)
On Thursday, the day the House would vote on NPR funding, Ron Paul chastised his Republican colleagues for pretty much doing the same thing by obsessing over NPR when the cost of the war in Afghanistan is a far more important issue to address.

That echoed the sentiments of Haley Barbour who told caucus members in Iowa last week:
Anybody who says you can't save money at the Pentagon has never been to the Pentagon. We can save money on defense and if we Republicans don't propose saving money on defense, we'll have no credibility on anything else.
Not that far off from the point Bill Maher was making..