Overtime – Episode #491: Julián Castro, Chelsea Handler, Danielle Pletka, Gideon Rose, Salman Rushdie

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

All right, look at all these questions from people.

Who gets the first question?

You do.

Do you agree with Elizabeth Warren's plan to get rid of the Senate filibuster?

Yeah, under certain circumstances, yeah.

If the decision is between

every American gets health care or we stick to this 60-vote rule, then yeah.

It's a crazy rule to begin with, right?

Because it always was meant to be simple majority.

And it just sort of became this different.

I mean, the Senate is meant to be the body that is more deliberative, as hard as that is now to believe,

more deliberative.

And the founders envisioned that this would slow things down.

But it had, and it has.

But they never used to use a Dirigor for every single issue, right?

Absolutely not.

I mean, we used to be be able to trust each other a little.

There was an honor system.

And you could build a consensus.

Now you can't build a consensus.

It's absolutely verboten to vote with anybody on the other side on anything.

We can't use the honor system because I answered for you.

There you go.

One side is fresh out of honor.

If people know going into an election, right, that you're going by majority rules, 50 vote, 50, or if the vice president breaks a tie, that also clarifies to the electorate where they're going to be.

So I think we're moving in that direction.

Okay.

Will Britain ever Brexit gracefully?

Now, what's the deal now?

They've moved up the date?

I don't know.

They want to.

The European Union may not let them.

Nobody knows.

I was in London last week.

You would turn on the main evening news, and these very senior newscasters would say, you know, I know I'm supposed to tell you how this is going to work out, but I don't have a clue.

Nobody knows from minute to minute what's happening.

So

gracefulness is out the window.

Brexit is like the Republicans' original Obamacare health care plan.

It was get rid of Obamacare and then we'll see what happens next.

They got rid of British foreign policy, British strategy, and then said, okay, let's figure out what happens next.

Nobody had any replacement plan.

And it turns out that all policies have downsides.

And gee, being in Europe wasn't that such a bad thing compared to being out.

And now having voted to get out but not knowing where they go, they don't know what to do next.

And by the way, just on the subject of the simple majority, I mean, that referendum with a simple majority is what has got us into this mess.

This is David Cameron's mess, that he called the referendum and said a one-vote majority would be enough.

You're talking about the vote to leave.

Totally.

That's the problem with mob rule.

Right, and we don't like that.

But

it also reveals the other big problem, which is what you said, which is that we all know what we hate.

We just don't know what we want.

But it's a colossal failure of the British ruling class.

And this is across left to right.

Jeremy Corbyn is not top of the list, but he's quite close to the top of the list.

If Jeremy Corbyn had been calling for a second referendum several months ago, it would have happened.

But he's not really a European.

He comes from that old Trotskyist left,

which thinks that Europe is a rich man's club and we shouldn't be in it.

He's not going to fight for Europe because he's never been a European.

And that's a lot of what the people who voted to leave feel like.

They feel like we are this island, this emerald, whatever that is.

Well, that make Britain great again.

But what they forget is the reason for

Britain's greatness was exploiting the wealth of a quarter of the world.

Yeah, of course.

Indian politician came to Britain last year and made a speech in which he said, look, when the British came to India, it was just about the richest country in the world.

When the British left India, it was one of the poorest.

Where do you think the money went?

India was one of the richest countries in the world.

India at the end of the Mughal Empire was unbelievably affluent.

The Mughals were colossally wealthy.

The Mughals were.

The Mughals

were not colossally wealthy.

There was a really upper aristocracy with lovely titles and big crowns.

This was a country which was raped,

as was a lot of Africa.

Sure.

Etc.

And

the kind of glorious moment of Britain's, England's precedence was based on that

rape of the world.

Now, gee, we don't want immigrants, but we went to their countries and fucked them over.

I think to do a little bit of a disservice to sorry.

The England of World War II was not an England.

What if England had just

kissed the world on the back of the head?

Would that still be?

I'm reading the question.

After the last couple of weeks we've had, are you still attracted to Robert Mueller?

I know you said that you were.

I am sexually attracted to Robert Mueller.

It's out there.

I feel this way.

I love him.

I like that kind of operation.

Crossing your T's, dotting your I's.

Apparently, he didn't cross all his T's.

Well, actually, William Barr didn't cross all his T's.

But I am waiting for the full report to decide whether I want to pursue a sexual relationship.

Yes, you should definitely wait for the full report.

Okay,

what are your takeaways, panel, from the massive New York Times piece on the Murdoch family and their global political influence?

Yeah, they are

everywhere.

They're about him.

Yes.

The whole family.

They are the secret to a lot of things because if they would turn

on the base.

Well, if Fox News would stop becoming state media.

As opposed to CNN and MSNBC.

Oh, come on.

You know,

come on.

Come on.

Come on.

You, come on.

Let's all come to the media.

That is a false analogy.

No, it's actually a totally correct analogy.

Fox News has become the news of the right, and the others of the right of the rights.

But Fox News does not report.

The New York News has fact checkers.

Yes.

No, sorry.

Sorry, dude.

That's not a thing.

I think CNN doesn't have fact checkers.

No, I think that CNN has drifted to become the analog of Fox on the other side.

CNN.

But enormous amount to elect Trump.

CNN gave Trump the most amazing amount of airtime.

And also, I mean, and what do you think their agenda was in so doing?

Well, it certainly wasn't left-wing.

You can't talk about that.

It's about what the policies are.

If you can say things that aren't true, then it's okay.

And that's one thing.

In other places, you can say things that are not true and you get called on it.

That's the difference between the two.

No, no.

Sorry.

I'm sorry.

You're just not walking.

Well, there is a level of accountability that CNN and MSNBC have that Fox does not have.

They can never get college.

To say, I'm sorry for a false reporting or anytime they make a mistake, they actually say, You think Fox ever says, Sorry, we got it wrong?

I don't watch any of them, but I've seen Fox and CNN and MSN say they got it wrong.

Fox guests last week announced that Trump was banning aid to three Mexican countries.

Yes.

That was stupid.

Did they apologize for that?

They did not.

He said he wanted to.

I mean, that's not...

That's not the worst offense.

Their worst offense

is that they don't report things as if they didn't happen.

Reporting is the thing of the past.

You just spent 10 minutes talking about

how the media was doing a bad job.

That is exactly the theme that we keep hearing.

The bad job is different than not reporting at all.

When Trump said,

we have defeated ISIS, the next day there was an ISIS attack and it killed Americans.

Fox did not report it.

That's different.

That does not happen on the other networks.

Okay.

I think it's important to distinguish evening Fox from daytime Fox.

I agree with you.

What's the difference?

Are they nicer in the daytime?

Fox editorial.

There are people at Fox who are serious journalists doing serious news and they are not necessarily the news hosts at the evening.

Right, right.

And it's unfair to people like Chris Wallace or Brett Baer or Shepherd.

People vote with their feet.

People vote with their eyes.

People do actually watch that just as they're watching on MSNG.

Well, I mean, I also, I think this is one reason that they're not going to be able to do that.

And they peddle conspiracy theories on top of it all.

Sorry, go ahead.

No, I was just going to say, I think that that's why the issue is not the Murdochs alone, because if they went away tomorrow,

they have set a blueprint for how to do this that I think somebody else would take up.

Yes, you're right.

It's all us.

The problem is us.

Our politicians, our media people, they're responding to our preferences, our tastes, our dollars.

We want this.

We as a society are choosing to go into this because we like the fighting.

We like watching politics as ice hockey.

If we were to be mindful like Chelsea was talking about, there wouldn't be a market for this.

They're just supplying what we want.

Yeah.

I mean, you're going to have to face that.

Well, but they're also, you know, I mean, they're also, I think, creating some of that, right?

Because they give that, and it just reifies it.

It's like potato chips.

They give us more things that we like than can't stop eating them.

Yeah, it's a cycle.

So what are your top three issues?

What do you think the top three issues the United States needs to focus on?

Well, health care, right?

Is number one?

Yeah, I would say it's number one.

Secondly, to me, is education.

I would say immigration, then climate change.

My first executive order is probably.

Oh, that's four.

Yeah.

Oh, well, I'll break the rules.

My first executive order would be to recommit to the Paris Climate Agreement on the first day.

Okay,

we wish you luck.

We wish everybody luck.

I know it was a tough night for you with everybody ganging up against you.

You held up really well.

I'm used to it.

I know.

I appreciate you doing it.

All right.

Thank you, everybody.

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