During an interview with Howard Kurtz on CNN's "Reliable Sources," Bill Maher said Sean Hannity of Fox News is "terribly sexually repressed." Maher made the comment after viewing a video clip, in the course of which Hannity described him (Maher) as being "an angry, bitter guy."

Here's how Maher responded during the Kurtz interview:

MAHER: No, he's an angry, bitter guy. That's called projecting.

That's called taking what you feel and giving it to somebody else. I'm a happy, single guy. He's a repressed, typical Republican.

I'm sure just terribly sexually repressed and it comes out in all their sorts of hatred and vile and bile -- why would I be bitter? First of all, our side won. You know, their side is in a wilderness like there's been before.

So --

Sexual repression is just part of a more complex condition in Hannity's case, that might best be described as a form of arrested development.

He is typical of a certain type of right wing pundit... loud, driven, smug, dogmatic, intellectually challenged and programmed to repeat the same key talking points ad nauseum. It doesn't matter if he is out-to-lunch and factually incorrect on some issue, the ideological hype and will-to-coerce never wavers - you have at least to give him an 'A' for effort.

Watching Hannity doing his thing can be funny as hell, but also disturbing.

The other night he had guests on his show who also lean to the right, but when Hannity started banging on even they looked at him as though he had a screw loose. He hammered home objections to everything Obama is about with such thinly disguised contempt or possibly hatred, it seemed badly off-base.

Notwithstanding Hannity's often proclaimed regard for conservative African American justice Clarence Thomas, his attacks on Obama at times come off as nasty and personal in a manner that goes beyond the Whitehouse policies under discussion. There is an undertone to Hannity's commentary on Obama that says as much about prejudice as it does about politics.

He doggedly referred to the president in the third person... "he" and "him"... you half expected him to start throwing in the occasional "it."

On a recent show, with reference to the Cairo visit he said in all seriousness that Obama was now referring to America as "a Muslim nation."

What president Obama in fact said is that millions of Muslims live in America. We're not talking some big secret here. Any reference to America being a 'Muslim nation' has to be kept in the context of the overall remarks. But leave it to Hannity to wrench Obama's comments out of context and present them in a manner that completely distorts what the president was saying.

Obama's precise words were:

We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation, or a Jewish nation, or a Muslim nation. We consider ourselves a nation of citizens, who are bound by ideals.

If you actually took the number of Muslim Americans, we'd be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.

This is the spin Hannity put on it:

He honors the national day of prayer behind closed doors. Now, on his Middle East apology tour, the President calls the U.S. a "Muslim nation."

The same president who insists the U.S. is not a Christian nation is now calling us a Muslim nation.

When Bill Maher, who has a good eye for these things, says Hannity is sexually repressed there is no doubt he has hit on one of Hannity's chief features... yet another right-wing Irish-American Catholic with the hang-ups that go with it. It's pretty evident who the "angry, bitter guy" is.

Sean Hannity really shouldn't go after Bill Maher. They're badly mismatched. Maher is just way too sharp for the Fox News shill.