Bill Maher is launching his own personal protest against MSNBC’s wall-to-wall coverage of the George Washington Bridge scandal.
Maher has been pretty dismissive of the scandal from the beginning, arguing last month that there will be no smoking gun tying New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) to the politically motivated lane closures.
That outlook puts the liberal comedian sharply at odds with MSNBC, which has given significant coverage to the scandal and broken news on the lane closures, so Maher announced in a blog post on Friday that he’s done with the liberal cable news channel.
Whatever we had is not working any more. You’re obviously interested in another man: Chris Christie. You’re obsessed with him. So I wanted you to hear it from me first. I’m going to start seeing other news organizations. I’ll miss what we had. It was a rocket ship ride. We were both passionate flaming liberals and we didn’t care what the world thought of us. It was a glorious time. We finished each other’s Sarah Palin jokes. But now we never talk about any of the things we used to talk about: global warming, gun control, poverty… All because Chris Christie came along and put you under his spell.
Maher went on to say that MSNBC has become no better than Fox News, and that “Bridgegate has become [MSNBC’s] Benghazi.”
“You’ve stopped leaning forward,” Maher added. “Look, I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little lanes of traffic don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”
Maher has appeared on MSNBC for years. He’s been a frequent guest on “Hardball with Chris Matthews,” which he’s previously described as his favorite show.
Although he hasn’t responded to the bridge scandal with the same fervor as many of his ideological peers, Maher said Friday on his HBO show that Christie is “350 pounds of toast.”
