Americans are NOT stupid... are they?

[Sera]

Yeah, no.
You couldn't tell which of them was spewing irrelevant shit?

It wasn't really irrelevant, it just wasn't correct. He made silly assumptions. He was saying that maybe she is not stupid because according TO her HIGH APPROVAL RATINGS before her resignation, she MUST have been doing a good job... whereas the other had poor ratings so must be doing a poor job and must therefore be "the stupid one." It's bullshit, of course -- but i can see the logic behind the claim. Ordinarily people measure the politician by the approval rating of their constituents, the ones with high approval ratings must be good at their jobs and therefore must be pretty smart. The part about Palin wasn't really irrelevant either, because one of Maher's biggest schticks is talking about how stupid Palin is -- so that's why O'Reilly brought Palin up.

(What he probably didn't count on was that Maher's statistics about the stupidity of the people would undermine the statistics about constituent approval ratings -- which come from the people (the majority of which are stupid according to Maher's statistics) obviously, so stupid people would probably approve of stupid politicians... Again, not irrelevant, but he did end up undermining his own argument.)