Liberals are furious over President Donald Trump changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America, but their outrage is avoiding the larger dispute.
Rather than address the trade problems with Canada or what might resolve them, they are using the name change to attack Trump.
That reaction gave Bill Maher an opening on Friday during his HBO show “Real Time.”
With one cutting joke, Maher mocked the liberal response and turned its underlying logic against the people making the complaint.
“Trump is so mad at Canada, he renamed Lake Ontario ‘Lake America,'” Maher said. “Now I have to buy a new globe again!” he joked.
Maher then delivered the sharper punch line. “Liberals are very pissed at this. They say you can’t just go around renaming to suit your political agenda. Just ask any Latinx birthing person.”
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The audience loved the joke, and it landed because it highlighted the incoherent and inconsistent liberal beliefs.
Liberals are objecting to a politically motivated name change after spending years promoting their own preferred terminology.
The real question is which issue matters more.
Trump is using Lake America as a jab during trade negotiations with Canada, while liberals have renamed entire categories of people and promoted terms such as LatinX.
The same contradiction appears in the ongoing political dispute over defining what a woman is.
A Supreme Court Justice was cornered on that question during her nomination hearing and avoided saying anything that could conflict with the current political agenda narrative.
Now the Women’s National Basketball Association, also known as the WNBA, is facing chaos because it does not want to challenge that narrative.
The situation reflects the broader consequences of allowing political language to override plainly stated reality.
Immigration offers another example of this pattern.
For years, “illegal alien” was the legally understood term, but it was later treated as “mean” when the liberal political agenda shifted toward downplaying illegal immigration.
That change produced the phrase “undocumented person.”
Yet the objection is that such a person may possess documents while still not being in the country legally, making the newer phrase a misleading substitute for the legal reality.
Stating that someone is not in the country legally is neither evil nor mean.
Rejecting that fact has harmed America, while countless people have been hurt by the way Democrats have handled the wider immigration issue.
The pattern is consistent because liberals use whichever language they believe will advance their political agenda.
Their terminology changes when the political objective changes, even when the replacement language obscures what is actually happening.
That strategy is also visible in current campaigns, where Democrats say, “we’re a big tent,” rather than admitting, “we’re hoping by embracing our radical leftists, we’ll get more people out to vote for us.”
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The approach may ultimately hurt them if Americans reject the party because of its extreme positions.
Maher’s joke was therefore more than a quick laugh about buying another globe.
It exposed the contradiction of liberals condemning Trump for politically convenient renaming while repeatedly using politically convenient labels of their own.
That is why his Lake America punch line worked so well with the audience.
Maher used liberal language rules against liberals themselves, making their outrage the target and delivering a fitting response to the controversy.
