From The LA Times
By Bill Maher

Whenever there’s a tragedy, comedians are presented with a dilemma: When is the right time to make jokes about it, and what kind of jokes can you make? I vividly remember watching Johnny Carson every year on Lincoln’s birthday, doing assassination jokes. (My favorite was about Lincoln’s birthday stripper, “Freda Slaves.” According to Johnny, “Every guy took a shot at her in the balcony; four scored and seven came close.”) When the jokes bombed, he’d comment to Ed McMahon: “Too soon.”

I know something about “too soon,” because it was only six days after 9/11 when I got into all sorts of trouble with the country and the White House for saying that sticking with a suicide mission, as the terrorists had done, was not, strictly speaking, “cowardly,” and that, in fact, “we have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away.” Of course, by “we,” I meant American society as a whole, but it was not hard for people who never liked me to begin with to pretend that I was calling the military cowardly. I wasn’t.

In fact, I was just trying to follow orders. Right after 9/11, President Bush said the terrorists would win if we didn’t go back to doing exactly what we were doing before the attack, and so the best way to show we were victorious was to not change a thing. And, like an idiot, I believed him, resuming my mandate to never pull a punch and live up to the title of my show at the time, “Politically Incorrect.”

But the atmosphere in the fall of 2001 allowed for very little beyond singing “God Bless America” and buying a flag to put on your gas-guzzling, terrorist-funding car.

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