"He would be a comic genius, if only he were funny." Joe Sobran once wrote something to this effect regarding Robin Williams. I feel the same way about Bill Maher.

During Maher's latest show he referred to the White House's jobs program as "operation weekday freedom," and get this, he joked that the President reacted to disarming Haitians by proclaiming, "Are you crazy, you'll piss off the NRA." Hilarious! Well, not really. The showstopper for his rigidly left-wing audience was his quip that the ailing John Ashcroft "might have picked up some sort of infection wiping his ass with the Bill of Rights." Maher is predictable, and going after the Catholic Church, President Bush, and the National Rifle Association is about as daring as crossing the street.

So bitterly ideological has Maher become that his HBO-schtick increasingly resembles Cinder Calhoun, the fictitious PC comic who appeared on Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update to highlight how humorless feminists can be. It's the type of comedy that has people laughing out of political solidarity, and not because anyone finds it particularly funny.

I've watched the various incarnations of Maher's television program over the years, but I can't recall ever laughing at anything he has said. It's not that I'm incapable of laughing when conservatives are the butt of the joke. Al Franken and George Carlin routinely go after conservatives, but I still find them funny. Michael Moore has even had me in stitches. But Maher seems to get things backward. He's an ideologue who uses comedy to advance his ideology, rather than a comedian who uses ideologues to advance his comedy.