Overtime - Episode #417: Correspondents Dinner, GOP vs Trump, Climate Science

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

Okay, okay.

Do you think, Jeff, do you think that Donald Trump made the right decision by skipping the White House correspondence dinner?

Oh, something we're going to agree on.

I do.

Do you?

Absolutely.

It's bullshit.

Who gives a shit?

I think.

Here's what I think.

You know, this is all about scholarships for kids.

They picked a lot of kids who are liberals from liberal colleges.

So basically, they're using him to fundraise to create future generations of liberal colleagues.

So the Correspondence Dinner is a charity.

It fundraises for

journalists.

Journalists, young journalists.

And that's great.

I'm all for that.

But

you know, there needs to be a little balance.

Yeah, first of all, that's not a charity.

It always pisses me off that everything, colleges are not a charity either.

People you can give to your Harvard as an endowment of $12 trillion, and you can write that off.

And also, it's a dumb thing, the Correspondence Dinner.

I've been there.

Have you been?

I've been to it, yes.

Take Kardashians go and somebody, some sitcom actors.

It's just nothing.

And they don't air the scholarship part of it.

I mean, it is a scholarship dinner, which I didn't even know until the first time that I went.

And I'd sort of even soured on it, even though I went because, you know, quite frankly, it was sort of historic because you have Barack Obama, you want to go and see him, you know, do this in person.

But I went the year that Baltimore was exploding.

And here we are at this fancy dress ball.

Joking.

And outside of that hotel where we have, unbeknownst to any of us, while we were laughing at jokes, Baltimore was on fire.

I grew up.

And so that made me sour on it a bit.

I grew up

believing that journalists were supposed to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, not hobnob with the tape.

I do.

Well said.

Good news this year.

The same day when we're no longer going to the White House Correspondents Association, that's the day, April 29th, they're going to be several hundred thousand climate demonstrators in D.C.

So there'll be something for all those journalists to do.

They can go to that.

Rosa, do you think drones are an effective weapon in the war on terror?

It depends how you use them.

I mean, that's sort of like asking whether I think guns are an effective weapon in the war on terror.

You can use them to do smart things.

You can use them to do stupid things.

Mostly, I think, in the last 15 years, particularly the last eight, we've used them kind of stupidly.

You think Obama used them stupidly?

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

I mean, the one and only thing I will agree with Michael Flynn on is that when you look at the results of this whack-a-mole approach to counterterrorism, we managed to take a situation where we more or less doubled the number of active terrorist groups and tripled the geographic spread of terrorist groups.

I think that that it's extremely ineffective.

It's probably given more strength to terrorist recruiting efforts than anything else, partly because it kills civilians, which is to some extent unavoidable in a war, obviously, but also even the terrorists have friends and relatives and so on, and it pisses people off.

Oh, yes.

Okay, Charlie, at what point do you think Republican leaders like Paul Ryan will stand up to Donald Trump?

Oh, good luck waiting.

Yeah.

You know,

that was actually painful watching Paul Ryan, you know, standing and applauding while Donald Trump was laying out all of his spending plans, you know, watching the Vichy Republicans

showing that they had been completely taken over.

I mean, you know,

it's been painful actually to watch the absolute capitulation of the conservative movement and the Republican Party

to Donald Trump.

I mean, it's a a lack of...

Didn't you have their matching tie, Kevin?

That was the random, the blue tie.

But

at some point,

I'm not going to continue taking the bullets for this guy, but I don't know.

This has been the rolling process

of the last year.

You have the full-out collaborationists like you, Mr.

Lord, and then you have the Vichy Republicans

like Paul Ryan.

There are some of us who feel that the Vichy Republicans were on Capitol Hill all this time, cooperating and not pushing forward with their agenda as they promised they would when they were elected.

Which agenda is that?

I mean, 50 times trying to vote to repeal Obamacare wasn't enough.

Maybe

when they had the power of the purse, they didn't use it.

They didn't use it.

So now you have the power of the purse, your guy is going to spend out of the purse.

So, you know,

watching conservatives go, you know, we have to be fiscally conservative.

We have to be ideologically pure.

And then they go and they embrace the public.

Well, that's what was happening with the cheetah.

Well, they cheeto Jesus, you know, and he's going to do.

But

Oh, let's not have this

Republican

violence.

But what is going to happen with this budget fight?

I mean, it looks so much like Reagan.

Defense buildup, we don't cut entitlements,

and we have a big tax cut.

And of course, George Bush I called that voodoo economics.

And of course, it did run up the debt.

Reagan did run up the debt.

That's undeniable.

Those are facts.

It just looks like that's happening again.

Do we just have amnesia about that?

Ronald Reagan did not have control of the purse with the

Tip O'Neill and Jim Wright, who control the House.

Oh, gosh.

Well, that's the way this works.

When Newt Gingrich became Speaker,

he got together with Bill Clinton and said, we are going to cut spending.

They did do it.

And it did balance the budget.

You've got to have control of the purse.

Which is how they balance the budget.

But they raised taxes.

I mean, that is how Bill Clinton was.

Not that hard.

Which got

no Republicans.

zero votes.

No, and put the

70% it was under Ronald Reagan.

But who is going to raise taxes back to 70%?

The other thing, the thing that worries me.

Thank you.

I don't think Republicans will ever turn on Trump because Paul Ryan has made it pretty clear that he is going to use Trump's right hand, is he right-handed, to get the things that Paul Ryan wants.

And Paul Ryan essentially wants to repeal the 20th century.

He wants to privatize Social Security if he can, gut Medicare, gut Medicaid, gut food stamps, essentially throw the poor onto the mercy of charities and churches, turn everything into a fist full of vouchers, a voucher for you to go to school, which you're not going to have to pay for because Ms.

DeVos wants to privatize it.

A voucher for you to buy health insurance.

Good luck if the voucher isn't enough for you to pay for a policy that can actually help you when you're really sick.

And that fist full of vouchers strategy, they can throw it on Trump and say, well, Trump signed it.

Do you really want to bankrupt Social Security?

Are you kidding?

Social Security.

See, that's the biggest myth that Republicans push.

Social Security.

is not going to be bankrupt.

Social Security has a 70-day lifetime.

You say that because you want to privatize it.

You guys have been doing that since the past.

You never wanted it.

Republicans have never wanted it to exist.

Haven't.

Look, when we got to the 1980s,

you don't want it to exist?

No, I do want it to get existed.

Oh, you do?

Heck, I'm going to be on it.

But listen,

how much is our debt here?

What, $22 trillion?

$20 trillion?

Down under a bar?

No, thank him.

He added $8 trillion to this.

The point is, if we bankrupt the country,

then we are going to do this.

That you don't care for privatization on cutting the deficit and the debt.

He doesn't even talk about the debt.

He doesn't even pretend to be a fiscal conservative.

He basically said, look, here he stands up there and he's going to say, we're not going to touch any of the entitlement programs.

Joy and I disagree on this.

So Donald Trump with Joy agreed, yes, he said.

Yes, yes, yes.

But, you know, he goes out and he says, yes, but we'll cut foreign aid.

Or we're going to cut the National Endowment for the Arts.

He's

big, big, big spending officers.

You could not find with a jeweler's eye if you look in the budget.

It's complete magical thinking.

I mean, listening to Trump's speech a couple days ago, I was, you know, we're going to have dying industries, we'll roar back to life, we will just unleash our dreams and make it happen.

I thought, whoa, and Tinkerbell's going to come down, too.

Lower the ocean.

Lower the rise of the ocean.

Well, at least.

Wait.

I know that's a big laugh line for you: slowing the rise of the ocean.

It's not funny.

The fact that the oceans are rising and getting not just warmer, but more acidic, directly.

Of course he didn't.

He did make a start with the Paris Climate Accord.

You know how hard that is to get 200 countries to sign on to something, and now your idiot is going to rescind it.

But yes, I mean, did he do it?

No, he didn't do it in the time he was in office.

He took eight years.

That's good.

Okay, we're talking about carbon in the atmosphere.

It took 200 years to get there.

Well, then why did he say he could do it?

He didn't say.

He said, we're going to begin to slow the rise of the oceans.

Your guy.

And he didn't.

He did, if you count.

Your guy wants to speed it up.

I mean, this afternoon, this afternoon, one of the things that Obama did that was very smart was manage to get through

the

mileage regulations that said that we would be by the middle of of the next decade be having 50 averaging 50 miles to the gallon or 54 or whatever for cars.

Something that technologically we're completely able to do without

any problem.

I mean we live in a world where say Norway has announced that all cars will be electric there by within five years.

Today Today it became clear...

Today it became clear that

the EPA was not only going to gut that, not only going to take back, at the request of the automakers, take that back, they're talking about taking away the one thing that's really

California's particular ability.

California is the one state that has its own ability to regulate pollution.

But, Jeff, take that away.

In general, I asked this bill before.

We brought it up.

You know, you do believe in theory, of course, I'm guessing, of things that we can't see, like germs and atoms.

God.

Ha ha.

You get me on that one.

Way to throw a monkey around you than that.

But germs and atoms, you concede.

I would concede.

Okay.

So then by that logic, global warming, we can't really see it.

Although we see its effects all the time.

Bill, all I'm saying, I'm a skeptic, not a, I don't say hoax.

Scientists aren't

scientists.

But Bill, this is the problem as I see it, is that too much politics has infected all sorts of sectors of our society, including science.

I want the science.

Bill, when I hear the term that 97% of the whatever scientists have reached a consensus, consensus, Bill, is a political word.

It is not a scientific word.

What is it?

There is no...

Wait, wait, is there a consensus that the Earth is round?

It can be both.

Whether there is or not, it's a fact.

But you do understand that the scientific method is that if you do an experiment 100 times and you get the same result 99 times,

you get a 99% consensus.

Here's what they mean by truth.

Here's what they mean by truth.

Because they did, right?

Like when

Darwin published Origin of the Species in 1859, it was many decades before there was a consensus about it because the other scientists in the world were like, well, that's interesting.

Let's see if we can prove it wrong.

That's how science works.

And after many decades, they were like, well, we can't.

Darwin's right.

Right, that's right.

And now we're at that point with this particular...

case.

In this case, we were at it a long time ago.

Yes, it's a very good question.

Good investigative reporting.

Listen for me.

Good investigative reporting in the last few years has shown that Exxon knew everything there was to know about climate change by 1977 to 1981.

Their scientists were telling their senior management exactly how much it was going to warm, and their senior management was taking it seriously.

They began building their drilling rigs to compensate for the rise in

Rex Tellerson of Exxon is the one who doesn't want to pull out of the package plan.

That's right.

The Exxon guy is our best hope.

He's the mad Diagnatist.

Who appointed him?

Why is the reason?

I love this guy.

Thank you very much, everybody.

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