Last night, I caught a re-airing of Friday's Real Time With Bill Maher. I've been watching the show a lot more lately, since I wasn't too impressed with it at first. Maybe that first episode that I saw was just a bad one for making a first impression. The show itself has started to find its own pace and flavor. Unfortunately for me, this week's show is the last new one for a while– they'll be on hiatus until June or July (I forget which he said, I think it was July).

Most of the time, the panel is reasonably-balanced, though I have seen some panels that didn't really represent the conservative side on a given issue. Then there were panels like this week's, where the conservative side is in attendance, but the representative is just... broken.

Two of the panelists this week were David Frum (ostensibly representing the conservative/Republican view) and Gore Vidal. Mr. Vidal was clearly the most liberal of the three, even more so than the middle-person, Eddie Izzard. And to be frank, Mr. Frum was seriously out of his league when trying to face off against Vidal. He made a remark comparing the current occupation of Iraq with the liberation of Paris and the rest of Europe in World War II. Vidal countered by pointing out that he (Vidal) had been in combat in WWII Europe, and that he didn't feel there was anything common between the two. A few statements later, Frum commented on the fact that Vidal was criticizing American foreign policy while living in Italy. Vidal reminded him that the Hollywood Hills were, last he checked, still in California. (Frum tried to brush this off, saying that he wasn't in the business of tracking Vidal's address, but if you're going to use someone's living-abroad status as an attack, the onus is on you to make sure you're correct.) It really only got worse for Frum the longer it went on. By the end of that segment, he was barely saying anything at all.