Bill Maher is a rotting legume, somewhere between two weeks and two decades past its prime. Maher has been broadcast comedy/politics' enfant terrible for as long as anyone can remember, but he truly seems to be living on borrowed time since his most recent series of face-plants. His most notable fuck-up of late was, of course, using the term “house n*****” during a taping of his show Real Time With Bill Maher three weeks — or 7,000 news cycles — ago.

Since then, he's sputtered out an apology and continued business as usual — whether that’s having black guests on his subsequent show publicly flagellate him for a bit or having the editor-in-chief of Breitbart News on to find common ground. For every good thing Maher tries to do to make up for his mistakes, he finds a way to do something doubly stupid. That’s his pattern: two steps forward, 10 steps and a few racist slurs back. He’s been doing it for decades.

Maher knows that HBO probably will let him say whatever he wants forever, being that it isn't beholden to advertisers. But the point is: He got away with it, again. Just like the cops who get off for “doing their jobs,” Maher rests on the defense that comedy is a sacred place for bad politics. Same as shitheels like him practically always do.