Politics & Power Quote by Bill Maher

Maher’s line works because it drags two Republican comfort blankets into the light at once: celebrity politics and moral panic. The surface joke is outrageous on purpose. By attributing the claim to Karl Rove - the avatar of GOP message discipline in the Bush years - Maher borrows institutional authority, then uses it to launder a punchline so toxic it can only live as satire. The laughter comes from whiplash: “credibility with conservatives” is usually earned through patriotism, family values, and ideological purity, yet Maher swaps in “Nazism” as the perverse credential.

The context is the early-2000s moment when Arnold Schwarzenegger, a moderate Republican with a blockbuster aura and a foreign accent, became a plausible political savior during California’s recall circus. Maher’s subtext is that the party’s gatekeeping isn’t about principle so much as tribal signaling. Schwarzenegger’s actual “liberal” streak on social issues threatens the base; the joke implies conservatives will forgive anything - even a grotesque historical stain - if it can be converted into identity armor.

There’s also a sharper, uglier point about American political memory: invoking a Nazi father as a credential mocks how casually extreme history gets repurposed as culture-war ammunition. Maher isn’t just trying to shock; he’s framing the GOP as a machine that can metabolize scandal and turn it into proof of belonging, as long as the candidate reliably performs the right resentments.