VALUES: Brother Maher's aim was true!

MONDAY, OCTOBER 12, 2026

His remarks on the treatment of persons: Bill Maher is Cornell's most televised living graduate, surpassing even Ann Coulter. 

At times, we've been puzzled by Bill's recent commentaries, but we thought his aim was generally true with respect to the disgraceful, appalling recent news from his disgraced alma mater.  

Sean James reported Bill's remarks for Mediaite; he provides full videotape. Headline included, his report starts as shown:   

Bill Maher Calls for Abolishing Frats Amid Cornell 7 Saga: A Gentleman ‘Doesn’t Exploit the Woman, He Saves Her’

Bill Maher said it’s impossible to know what exactly happened in the “Cornell 7” case, but the saga has made one thing crystal clear to him: fraternities need to be abolished ASAP.

The veteran comic weighed in on the alleged gang rape during the Friday episode of Real Time. Maher closed the show by saying the details of the case are sordid and hazy, but whether it was a gang rape or group sex doesn’t change his mind—frats have got to go.   

"Any place that’s all male, no girls allowed, just doesn’t function without depravity. Just ask the Catholic Church,” Maher said. “Ask the Taliban.” 

He continued, “Everything that’s inherently bad about men gets worse if you put them in a fraternity. The drinking gets worse, the cruelty, the treatment of women, the tribalism, the peer pressure, one-upmanship, conformity, segregation, nepotism, bullying, elitism...

We're not experts on fraternities. Also, we'd use more nuanced language than Bill uses when he says that there are things that are "inherently bad about men." 

(Later, saying that colleges should also get rid of sororities, he makes the same sweeping claim about women.)

That said, Bill's general aim was true. As we noted several times last week, our human race badly needs "the girl." 

It needs Edie Doyle to help Terry Malloy struggle with issues of conscience—to expose him to instincts which may be better than some of his own may be. It also needs people like the Robert Redford character—men who know enough to respect the decency of the world's good, decent girls and young women. 

The world gains when people like Bill speak up. Here's more of what Bill said:   

In this case, a young woman made a bad decision, as 20-year-olds do, when she went to a frat house drunk and did Ketamine. And for that, she claims to have paid a price no woman should have to pay.

No one was there [or] knows what happened, but I do know what a "gentleman" is. A "gentleman," gentlemen, is someone who in that situation doesn’t exploit the woman, he saves her. That's a gentleman.   

For the record, Bill was using the term "gentleman" as a way of mocking the way the word is used in the mission statements of many fraternities. He was really saying that any person should step in to help a young person who is being assaulted after making a bad decision—as young people often do.

Good for Bill! We wish he'd also said this:    

Does anyone think the men and women who run schools like Cornell haven't been complicit in tolerating the destructive behavior described in the recent reports? And how about the people who send Greg Gutfeld and a panel of stooges out on the air, night after night, to teach young men that they should continue along with the ugliest and stupidest forms of the age-old loathing of women and girls?

How about those horrible people? Who's going to save us from them? Also, how about the horrible people, all over Blue American journalism, who refuse to report and discuss what happens on Fox every night?

We've named some of their names before. Who's going to save us—our women and girls, our boys and young men—from the horrible conduct of them?

Tomorrow: Full services alleged to return

VALUES: Down on the waterfront, long ago...

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2026

...Brando admired "the girl:" Her name at birth was actually Saint. The leading authority offers this overview of the life of a widely admired person:

Eva Marie Saint

Eva Marie Saint (July 4, 1924 – October 6, 2026) was an American actress...

...She made her film debut in Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954), opposite Marlon Brando. The film won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and earned her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

[...]

Eva Marie Saint was born on July 4, 1924, in Newark, New Jersey, to John Merle Saint and Eva Marie (née Rice) Saint. Her parents were Quakers. She attended Bethlehem Central High School in Delmar, New York, graduating in 1942. Saint studied acting at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.

And so on, at length, from there. In the obituary in yesterday's print editions, the New York Times includes this:

Eva Marie Saint, Oscar Winner for ‘On the Waterfront,’ Is Dead at 102

Eva Marie Saint, who won an Academy Award in 1955 for her gripping movie debut as the shy love interest of Marlon Brando’s longshoreman in “On the Waterfront,” and who proved equally convincing as a stylish siren opposite Cary Grant in the romantic Hitchcock thriller “North by Northwest,” died on Tuesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 102.

[...]

Her supporting performance in “On the Waterfront,” which boasted one of the most impressive casts and crews ever assembled, would alone have assured her a place in movie history; the movie remains near the top of the American Film Institute’s list of the country’s greatest films. It won the Oscar for best picture and director (for Elia Kazan), and Mr. Brando took home the award for best actor, for his tormented performance as a former prizefighter who moonlights as muscle for a corrupt union.

Even if Mr. Brando had the most indelible lines (“I coulda been a contender”), Budd Schulberg, who won the screenwriting Oscar, said Ms. Saint had the riskiest assignment—portraying a convent-educated young woman, Edie, who simmers with passion for Mr. Brando’s Terry Malloy. Edie, who discovers Terry played a role in the death of her brother, who had run afoul of union racketeers, plays a critical role waking Malloy’s conscience.

We could do without the stock about "simmering with passion." But as we noted quite recently, the Edie character does indeed "play a critical role waking Malloy’s conscience." 

As we noted on Wednesday, we've always admired Robert Redford for what he chose to portray in The Horse Whisperer—for his portrait of a grown man who is wise enough, and human enough, to care about the suffering of "the girl."   

As we recently noted, we've also long admired the thematic undercard of On the Waterfront, in which the female character, portrayed by Saint in her film debut, "plays a critical role waking [the male character's] conscience."   

The film ends in the classic male-centric way, with a fistfight down on the waterfront. But along the way, the Brando character sees that Edie is a better person than he is, and God bless his decency all the way down:

He decides that he wants to be like her!

He decides he wants to be more like "the girl!" He's helped along by Karl Malden's Father Barrie, who memorably offers this:   

Jesus Christ is down here on the waterfront...

So the Malden character says, in this famous scene.   

The Redford character cares about and respects the girl. The Brando character wants to learn how to be more like her.  You rarely see expression of such gender dynamics—of such gender values—in major American films.  

This week, it's been hard to avoid comparing those male characters to the gruesome performance of the men and women running such campuses as Cornell. To the gruesome misogyny displayed each night on the Fox News Channel. To the uniform silence meeting such cable news shows within elite Blue America.  

We expect to talk about this more in the future. Over here, in Blue America, the uniform silence will persist. 

No one will say the first word about the ugly values sold to boys and young men on those grisly Fox News Channel shows. The CEO who invented those shows will instead be sent to the Hall of Fame!

The Brando character admired the superior qualities of "the girl!" In last Sunday's New York Times, Jennifer Weiner described that very person:  

My kind, smart, big-hearted daughter...   

Her kind, smart, big-hearted daughter, who is now (gulp) a freshman in college, from whose values our struggling culture could gain.

VALUES: Did he say the same thing all over again?

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2026

There's no known cure for this: Yesterday, the sitting president said it again--or did he?   

To see what he said, you can just click here. We'd transcribe it like this:

PRESIDENT TRUMP (10/7/26): If you want to see trauma, you want to see problems—

And I said it the other day: Let them hit a missile into San Diego or Los Angeles on the way. Let them hit—

You want to see a horror show? You want to see problems?

Let them hit San Diego, let them hit Los Angeles if you want to see some bad things happen, you want to see a country that would be in free fall.

 We’re not going to let that happen. We protect our cities. We protect our country. We’re not letting that happen.

AUDIENCE: [Applause]   

"We aren't going to let that happen?"

In the view of one close reader, that's largely what the sitting president was clumsily saying the other day, with a clumsy reference to the idea that "we'll have to pay a bit more for gas" clumsily marbled in.

On this morning's Morning Joe, Mika and the others were pretending that he was still inviting an attack on the coast. (Joe wasn't there today.) Eventually, it was clear that Mark Leibovich didn't agree with what the rest of the gang was saying, but under the rules of the cable news game, he knew that he couldn't just say so.

There is no cure for the tribal mind. That's another way of saying that there is no cure for human. In our view, Al Gore didn't say he invented the Internet, and the current president didn't invite Iran to bomb the west coast

More on this another day. There's plainly no cure for this.