Overtime – Episode #635: Sarah Isgur, Matt Welch

For the first time ever, Yamaba Resort and Casino at San Manuel is giving away a Mercedes-Benz for every tier.

Play with your club Serrano card, and on October 2nd, you could be one of five winners to take home a Mercedes-Benz.

Plus, you could qualify to win a Mercedes-Benz Maybach at Palms Casino Resort Las Vegas, October 11th.

Two properties, six car winners.

Only at Yamaba Resort and Casino, your California to Vegas connection.

You in?

Details at Yamaba.com must be 21 to enter.

Please gamble responsibly.

Hi, I'm Dustin, your friend and jeweler at Shane Company.

If you're shopping for an engagement ring, we want you to feel like a kid in a candy store.

All of our diamonds are in stock, in store and online, so you get to use your eyes, not your imagination.

Come in and look at marquee-shaped diamonds right next to ovals and pairs.

As your friend and jeweler, you can trust you'll get your dream diamond at an everyday competitive price.

We have the widest selection in store and at Shaneco.com because a friend knows choosing a diamond is personal.

Shane Company, your friend and jeweler.

Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, Real Time with Bill Ma.

Okay, here we are on CNN, and this is our panel.

He's co-host of the Fifth Column podcast, Michael Moynahan.

He's co-host of the YouTube show and podcast, Turganometer, and the author of An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West, Konstantin Kissin.

All right, thank you, gentlemen.

Elon has

had to go and save the world, and I think he will.

Okay, here are the questions.

Will Russia's bombing of Ukraine's capital city prompt a counter- Oh, yeah, I saw that on the news today.

Horrible.

Saw it on CNN.

Start on light, are we?

Yeah, prompt a counteroffensive supported by Western allies.

No, the counteroffensive is coming anyway.

It's nothing to do with the bombing.

The Ukrainians have been planning this for a long time.

They've been waiting for what they call Rasputice in that part of the world, which is mud season, to be over, and also training up their forces with Western weapons, tanks, etc.

So the counteroffensive is coming.

The actual these bombings of the civilians, they're not all they're doing is strengthening the resolve of the Ukrainians more than anything else, other than of course killing and maiming innocent people.

So the counteroffensive is coming, but it's not because of that.

How does this war end?

Well, I've said from day one that I think the likely outcome is that Ukraine will make some territorial concessions.

which will be Crimea and parts of the Donbass.

And likely that will be in exchange for what Ukraine actually needs, which is long-term security.

And in my opinion, there's no other way of providing it other than either NATO membership or UN peacekeepers on the border.

But I don't think that's going to happen.

So most likely, Ukraine has a successful counter-offensive,

pushes Russia as far away as it can,

and then makes a settlement that means that what happened in 2014, remember we talked about it earlier, when Crimea and parts of the Donbass were first taken, that can never happen again because Ukraine is now part of NATO and is therefore under the umbrella of that organization.

But you see Putin ever making concessions?

I mean, we talk a lot in this country about how long Biden's going to last.

I keep reading that he's sick, Putin.

Is that just a rumor?

Do you have relatives in Russia?

I have relatives in both countries, but nobody really knows.

I mean, I don't know if you know this.

They take his poo in a bag and it's kept separate from it.

No one can analyze it.

So the information isn't getting out.

Let's put it that way.

How do you know that?

So you're saying they take the Putin poo and put it in...

They keep it separate.

When he goes abroad,

they keep a hold of it.

Because

how could everybody get it?

It goes down the toilet.

Maybe he shits in a bag.

Maybe that's what we're discovering right now.

But if you're on CNN, you can't say bad words.

You heard it here first.

It's not live there, is it?

No, but it's not edited either.

Oh, I forgot.

Okay.

This is new, the CNN thing.

I don't know.

But on the Putin thing,

the sickness we saw in those files that were leaked by that 11-year-old kid in the National Guard in Massachusetts was the intelligence

analysts say that he has cancer and his leg shakes all the time.

And as far as concessions, I mean, the only way that most Ukrainians see this, and you know this from the polling of Ukrainians, they don't want to give up any territory.

Of course.

And the way that this ends is Russia loses.

And he does pull out.

You see that what happened in Kiev.

I mean, they tried at the very beginning of this war to encircle Kiev and cut off the head of the snake, what they thought, and they were routed by an army that at that point didn't even have all the Western weapons that they have now.

And these columns of tanks coming in and being picked off.

But plainly, he could bomb Kiev much more than he has.

That's what we were seeing on the news today.

Just apartment build.

It's just pointless.

Well, not pointless if you're a terrorist, because that's...

Militarily pointless, yeah.

Militarily pointless, except for the long-range goal of winning the war and making people just say, uncle.

And that seems to be a-bombing.

I mean, terror bomb the entire point of that I mean look I you know criticize it if you will I mean what we did in Germany in 1943 44 and 45 was to bomb and say we were gonna break what publicly said this Bomber Harris said we're going to break their spirit and that's right something that ended here now in 1945 the Russians are doing this today but that isn't that isn't what's happening on the ground I remember on the first day of the war I called up one of my friends in Kiev and I said to him listen I've talked to some people you need to get out and he said to me I still remember this conversation he said this is different to 2014.

We are not, this is our country.

We're not leaving.

And what is happening in Ukraine now with these bombings, it's only strengthening their resolve.

Well, they're brave people.

They are.

Incredible.

All right.

What does the panel think of a recent poll that puts Democratic presidential challenger RFK Jr., yes, if you hadn't gotten the news, Robert Kennedy Jr., the son of Robert Kennedy, our former Attorney General,

at 19%?

I saw that today, too.

Can he hope to?

I must say, I'm surprised that right off the bat, he's polling at 19%.

Kennedy name helps.

Yeah.

19%.

Kennedy nails.

But another poll item at 17%.

So they seem to be in line in that Marianne Williamson is at 9%.

So you have a chunk of people, and when you talked about this in the main shows, 70% of

Americans don't want Joe Biden to run again, 50% of Democrats.

There are people looking for alternatives.

And I really wish it wasn't Robert Kennedy.

But the DNC right now is lining up the troops and going to prevent him from doing any damage.

They're not going to have debates.

There's going to be no primary debates.

He's just going to be pushed aside.

If he's running as a Democrat, if he decides to then run as a third-party candidate, you have a Perot situation.

And why don't you like him?

Why don't I...

I mean, you said you wish it wasn't him.

Why?

Yeah, I wish it wasn't him for a variety of reasons.

I mean, you know, Kennedy said something in 2013 that

a frequent guest on the show, Matt Welsh, just tweeted about, was, you know, he thinks that, you know, climate deniers should be put in jail.

There should be regulations against people denying climate change.

His past is checkered with this stuff.

It's not just the vax stuff.

I don't get into those issues.

I don't know a ton about it.

That's not my area of expertise at all.

You know, he said too many nice things about Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, as his brother Joe has too.

It's just a very weird, and he's becoming more conspiratorial too.

The sort of they are censoring me all the time.

I just don't, you're a Kennedy.

Your last book sold 2 million copies.

No one's censoring you.

you.

So I don't like that kind of instinct.

It's not my kind of.

Right.

But they won't treat what he is saying about COVID with,

but they should.

Yes,

like many people who've written about COVID, including the U.S.

government, they got a lot wrong.

He might be getting stuff wrong.

Sure.

But he's not a nut.

Yeah, I mean, the nut nut.

He's not a nut, and he's not a nut about COVID either, or vaccines.

But the thing about this is that, you know, it's hard to tell these days.

It's hard to tell, because you could get kicked off of Facebook of YouTube of all this stuff for saying that this came from a lab in Wuhan not from a wet market in Wuhan but the lab that did bad viruses that was down the street that got people like lots of people not just like a one errant person that was kicked off once no this was very very common that was all these things you couldn't say then which are now conventional medicine

What we know about medicine is always changing on a day-to-day basis.

I mean, just last year, they got metabolism wrong.

They came out with this big report that said, we'd always thought it was slow down in age, and it doesn't slow in age.

That's kind of a basic part of our health.

And you can read stories like that almost year to year.

They also got depression wrong.

Oh, it wasn't the serotonin.

Okay, I'm not saying it's corrupt, although there is quite a bit of that too.

Somehow when it's the Sackler family with the opioids, it's like, oh, see, corporations and pharmaceutical companies, but when it's COVID, COVID, oh, no, they must have everything on the up and up.

Okay, but say it's not mostly that.

They were trying and they did a great thing.

They came up with a vaccine, which many people, most people needed, and it saved millions of lives.

That's true, too.

Robert Kennedy may not agree with that.

But your point is entirely correct, Bill, which is I think a lot of people have forgotten how we got to be successful in the West.

And part of that is freedom of speech and freedom of research, right?

Especially in science.

In science, right.

Especially in medicine.

We need people

to be able to talk about the facts.

And when you have some kid who works for Twitter in the Philippines censoring a Nobel Prize-winning scientist in his speaking about his era of expertise, I think we've lost the plot.

Right.

I mean, one final point on this is the number of people that are wearing t-shirts that said, I believe in science.

Science became this thing that was the conventional wisdom coming from the government, from the CDC.

I believe in that.

That's what they're talking about.

You cannot believe in science.

Science is a process.

Science is always changing.

And people thought, I could believe in science.

They thought it never moved, and they were surprised when it did.

Right.

And that's the thing.

The left,

the far paranoid COVID left, talks about science like it's religion.

The science.

While they're doing things like wearing masks alone outside.

Yes.

The science.

What does the panel think of Steven Spielberg saying he regretted replacing guns with walkie?

Oh, yes, in the walkie-togies in E.T., yeah.

He re-edited E.T., and now he's regretting that.

And I'm so glad he is.

He's saying, movies were made of a certain time.

They're all going to look weird in the future in some way.

Leave them as they are.

I think it's terrific.

Amen.

Yeah.

I mean, the really scary thing is that classic books, and I think this is what precipitated his comment on this, was Roald Dahl, who was a psycho and an anti-Semite, but a good children's book author.

And he has some pretty negative portrayals of people.

It's not the Jews.

He doesn't talk about it in the kids' book.

And they change the most banal thing.

Fat.

You literally.

You can't say fat.

Yeah.

I don't know.

What did they change it to?

It was like nicely shapely.

I don't know.

Body positive is what they probably changed it to.

Yeah, this kind of thing is insane, but they're actually changing books, and that is literally Orwellian, not the good use of the word Orwellian.

We got to make way for commercials.

We're here on CNN.

Thank you again.

We'll see you next week.

Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10.

or watch him anytime on HBO On Demand.

For more information, log on to HBO.com.