Episode #382 (Originally aired 03/25/16)

Once upon a mundane morning, Barb's D got busy without warning.

A realtor in need of an open house sign.

No, 50 of them and designed before nine.

My head hurts.

Any mighty tools to help with this pike?

Aha!

Barb made her move.

She opened Canva and got in the groove.

Both creating canvas sheets.

Create 50 signs fit for suburban streets.

Done in a quick, all complete.

Sweet.

Now, imagine what your dreams can become when you put imagination to work at canva.com.

Tires matter.

They're the only part of your vehicle that touches the road.

Tread confidently with new tires from Tire Rack.

Whether you're looking for expert recommendations or know exactly what you want, Tire Rack makes it easy.

Fast, free shipping, free road hazard protection, convenient installation options, and the best selection of Yokohama tires.

Go to tire rack.com to see their Yokohama test results, tire ratings, and reviews.

And be sure to check out all the special offers.

TireRack.com, the way tire buying should be.

Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Month series, Real Time with Bill Maud.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Please, please, please, please.

We got a big show.

There's, thank you, thank you.

There's so much, so much we have to get to.

A lot of big news this week, not all of it great, but let's start with the thing that was pretty great and will be lasting, which is President Obama, the first president in 88 years to set foot in Cuba.

Amazing.

Yeah.

And contrary to the Republican narrative, he did not go easy on the Cuban dictatorship.

At one point, he stood outside a Cuban prison and he said the prisoners inside here deserve trials or they should be released.

But enough about Guantanamo Bay.

Let's talk about Castro's prisons, because they're terrible too.

Now of course the Republicans did a double freak out because not only did Obama go to Cuba, but he stayed there when there was a terrorist attack in Brussels.

Like Rudy Giuliani said, it's outrageous.

He should be in the situation room right now planning to destroy ISIS.

Oh, keep your skirt on, Dracula.

And then he went to Argentina and did a tango

two days after the attacks.

They really went nuts.

It's always one of those Republican rules.

We don't know it's a rule until we break it.

A tango two days after a terrorist attack?

You know you wait three days after a terrorist attack to tango?

Jesus Christ, what is this man thinking?

That is not how President Trump would have handled it.

If anybody fucked with Belgium on his watch, they would get a very serious tweet about how ugly their wife is.

Oh, yes.

Let me tell you something.

The very mature Republican campaign that we've been watching has moved on from their debate of a few weeks ago where they were trading barbs about who had a tinier cock.

to whose wife is more fuckable.

Oh, it's wonderful, isn't it?

And this started because Tuesday there was a primary in Utah.

Oh, yeah, we're still having primaries.

Nobody gives a shit about that.

So in the Utah primary, which Ted Cruz won, there was an anti-Trump pact that ran an ad that included a nude picture of Trump's wife, Melania,

implying how awful life would be if we had a former model as first lady.

First of all, the picture is not that revealing.

It doesn't even show her ass.

He wasn't even in the picture.

And secondly, the picture is not new.

It's from the catalog that Trump used when he ordered her.

But of course everybody had to act all mad.

Trump's surrogates called it desperate.

Trump called it outrageous.

Bill Clinton called it a great screensaver.

But that was only the beginning.

Today, you saw what happened today.

Oh yes, they're all talking about it.

The National Enquirer says they have the goods that five women had extramarital affairs with Ted Cruz.

Yes, ladies, sex with Ted Cruz.

That's where you close your eyes and imagine you're fucking Newt Gingrich.

I mean, really,

even Bill Cosby's pharmacist says, I don't think I've got anything strong enough for that.

Now,

I personally don't believe any of this is true.

I think I know who Ted Cruz is.

I'm not saying he doesn't enjoy screwing women.

He just does it by defunding Planned Parenthood.

That's how he gets his job.

But it was kind of fun watching Ted Cruz deny.

He said, Trump is a man, or Trump's henchman actually said, is a man for whom a term was coined for copulating with a rodent.

This is what he said.

He said, let me be clear, Donald Trump may be a rat, but I have no desire to copulate with him.

That's not clear.

That sounds like you'd fuck a rat who isn't Donald Trump.

And I mean,

I know a lot of people think I'm making this up.

No, I'm going to show it to you.

You have to see how seriously he delivers this line to appreciate how insane this campaign has come.

Look at this.

Well, let me be clear.

Donald Trump may be a rat, but I have no desire to copulate with him.

Mr.

Gorbachev, tear down that wall

and stop fucking that rat.

All right, we got a great show.

Jennifer Granholm is here, Ryhan Salam, and Ian Bremer.

And a little later, we will be speaking with a very funny committee.

And Gerard Carmichael is backstage.

But first up, before we get to Corey, I would never forgive myself if I didn't make mention of Gary Shandling tonight.

Yes, please do.

He was

He was a good friend and a great guy.

He was part of our HBO family.

He was so much fun to be around.

Lots of parties at my house where he was cracking me up, cracking everybody up.

Just this past January.

at my birthday party two months ago.

Never crossed my mind that night that it would be the last time I would ever see him.

I hope he was happy in life.

I'm not sure.

He always seemed restless.

He was searching for something.

He was very introspective.

He was deep.

I'm not kidding.

He was deep.

But

I know for a fact that he was happy when the jokes were flying, when he was making people laugh.

or laughing at others because he was a very generous audience and a very generous human being.

And professionally, I don't know too many other people about whom it could be said they had the most innovative TV show in two different decades.

And he did.

He did.

It's Gary Shandling's show in the 80s and the Larry Sanders show in the 90s.

That's called a legacy.

A giant.

He will be missed.

All right.

So

on with the show, as show business always must.

He is a U.S.

Senator from New Jersey whose new book is United, Thoughts on Finding Common Ground.

Those of us who are from New Jersey, who know how much that state gets made fun of, wow, we are proud of him.

Corey Booker, everybody.

Good to see you.

Yes, you do.

Us proud.

Thank you very much.

Thank you very much.

Really good to see you.

The pride of Harrington Park.

Isn't that your hometown?

Is the hometown I grew up in?

You know, that's very close to where I grew up.

Where did you grow up?

Rivervale.

We are literally a mile or so away from each other.

You know how many black people lived in Rivervale when I grew up?

You know how many black people lived in Harrington Park when I grew up?

Not how many.

My family was a family that integrated the town.

We literally had to get a white couple to pose as us because real estate agents wouldn't show, in 1969, 70, they wouldn't show black families homes in

most of Bergen County right there.

Walk me through this pose for us.

How did that work exactly?

Um, so an amazing group, the Fair Housing Council, where the woman back in the 60s, who was the head of the Fair Housing Council, is still head of the Fair Housing Council, she's about 90 years old, and they set up elaborate sting operations where a black family would go to buy a house, they would be told it was sold.

The white couple would come after them.

And so, the white couple bid on the house for my parents.

The bid was accepted on the day of the closing.

Instead of the white couple showing up, my father did in a lawyer.

And

amazingly, well, the story gets more interesting than that.

A fight broke out.

The real estate agent was so upset they got caught.

He went to punch my dad's lawyer.

They got into a scuffle that sigged a dog on my father.

It was a big melee.

Sounds like a Trump rally.

You know what?

But it ended up, this book I dedicate both to two towns that made such a profound impact on me, Harrington Park and Newark.

Very, very different,

but yet so much alike in heart and spirit.

Because when I got into the town, it was a community that

did not reflect that real estate agency.

They really wrapped around my family and I've just benefited from some really great human beings.

Well fast forward to today and things are so much better.

New Jersey

New Jersey is fifth worst in the nation in school segregation, meaning there are schools, I'm sure you know this, you could explain it better than I can, but what they call extreme segregation, which means half the black kids in New Jersey go to a school that is 90 to 100 percent minority.

How did that happen?

Well, our extreme segregation is, and by the way, many states in America have really bad realities, and so it's not just New Jersey.

But you don't think of New Jersey as one of them.

No, you don't think of a northeastern state,

but you see a lot of other states like that, even in the Northeast, where blacks and Latinos are like that.

And please understand, this is a result of conscious housing policy that was overtly racist, whether it's redlining some of the FHA policies, a lot of the way that loans were being made, restrictive covenants that were happening in the 50s, 60s, even 70s, that brought this about.

And it's hurting all of us as a country because we already know that most of these communities are not just segregated by race, they're segregated by income.

And so you have concentrated poor communities where HUD and others decide, let's densely populate certain areas of our country with public housing.

And what's painful about this is that many people, when they think about this, oh, this is bad for black and Latino folks.

Well, it's bad for white folks as well.

And we need to start understanding as a country that these are the lines that are dividing us, that are weakening us, and in my opinion, undermining who we truly are as a nation, a nation where we need each other.

And I think a lot of it comes from this result that we herald in this country this ideal of tolerance, as if that's the great aspiration.

To me, tolerance just says, I'm going to stomach your right to be different, but

if you disappear off the face of the earth, I'm no worse off or better off.

What we really should be aspiring for is what I think patriotism means, which means love of country, which necessitates love of each other, that we have to be a nation that aspires for love, which recognizes that you have worth and dignity, and I need you.

You are part of my hope, part of the promise of this country.

It's why our founders, who, trust me, had a lot of imperfections in those documents.

They referred to Native Americans as savages, didn't refer to women at all.

Stokely Carmichael used to say, constitute, constitute.

I can only say three-fifths of the word because blacks were three-fifths of a word.

But they got a lot right.

And one of the things they got right is that we not only need each other, but there's an urgency.

At the end of the Declaration of Independence, they say we pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor.

In other words, if this country is going to go far, we need each other.

As the old African saying says, if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together.

And what's weakening our nation right now more than ever, I think, is these perceived lines that divide us when really the ties that bind us are so much stronger.

Good speech.

Wow.

You should be a politician.

You silver-tongued that shit out of that.

I tell you, you nailed it.

I'm a jersey boy like that.

You hit it out of the park.

You missed Newark?

I mean, we don't read about you anymore, like running into burning buildings and saving dogs and shoveling snow.

I am really proud.

I lived for eight years in these high-rise, low-income housing.

It became public housing.

I still live right in that neighborhood in the central ward of Newark.

So I leave Washington, I come home to Newark, and I'm so proud to be a Newarker.

And it's a city that I think is showing this.

In fact, some of the heroes I write about in the book are true patriots who show, that never gave up on their city.

And basically they said, if the American dream is ever going to be real, it's got to be real here.

It's got to be real for everybody.

As Langston Hughes said, you know, America never was America to me, but I swear this oath, America will be.

And that's what Newark's about.

So I know you're on the Homeland Security Committee.

There's a horrible attack again this week in Brussels.

I know what Trump's message is.

It's a horrible message.

I don't agree with it.

I don't know what the

Democratic message is on this.

What is it?

Well, so first of all,

I don't want to think about one of the great threats to our country through a political lens.

I want to think about what's the American message in all of this and how are we going to defeat what we see as a determined enemy that is doing horrific things, not just to the United States, not just to Europe.

I know we get a lot of attention on things that happened this week, but just today

there were people killed in Iraq at a soccer game.

Can't even go to a soccer game.

In fact, ISIS has been killing more Muslims than they've been killing anyone else.

And so our response has got to be what we're doing right now, which is taking their territory away from them, this ideal they have, this perverse ideal that they have of creating a caliphate.

We're going to take their land back and we're going to win that war in that field, but we also have to disrupt their terrorist networks and we have to counter violent extremism at home.

And so that's not a sound bite.

But see, wait, you say violent extremism.

I've said this before on this show.

I think the Democrats risk losing this election if they cannot put together the words Islamic extremism as opposed to violent extremism.

Please just tell me that you recognize that it is a distinct threat.

much greater than any other violent extremist threat.

You don't really think it's on the same order as the KKK.

Well, first of all, I think.

Are you really worried about the KKK?

Well, what I'm worried about is that you began that question by saying the Democrats will lose if.

First of all, if the Democrats lose because of how they talk about this extremism, then they've got more problems.

My party right now...

Maybe that's their biggest problem.

Maybe that's what will lose the life.

If there's a terrorist attack, what if this was LAX instead of the Brussels airport?

I mean, 45% of Democrats already, if you take Trump's name off his proposal to ban Muslims coming into this country, agree with it.

Democrats.

Right.

And so, look, this is a a threat like no other, and it's one that literally keeps me up

working on, like no other.

But I also understand, and I'm not creating a false equivalency here, but since 9-11, we've lost 48 Americans, Boston bombing,

and to

a Christian walking into Planned Parenthood in Colorado,

massacring people, people walking in.

Christians are not trying to get a dirty pressure.

And I'm not.

And I'm not saying that.

That is a false equivalency.

But I'm saying I'm not trying to create the false equivalency.

I'm saying that when you say to me that this is the only threat we should be taught, that we will...

No, no, no, that we will.

I'm saying it's distinct and different and bigger.

And so size matters.

And what I'm saying to you is,

and what I'm saying to you is, I am,

as a senator, spending an extraordinary amount of time focusing on that.

But what frustrates me is here you and I are having a conversation when we pivoted off of Newark, but I've got kids with lead poisoning in the water in Newark.

I've got poverty that people working full-time jobs.

It's a different issue.

We've got to take a look at the other one.

And I walk at the the same time.

And so what I'm saying to you is that I think what Americans are hungry for is a vision in which we can manifest our strength as a country by focusing on the whole panoply of issues.

And if we

fear is important to people.

And fear-mongering is weakening to people.

Well, it's not mongering if there's an attack.

I mean, yes, of course Trump is fear-mongering.

Right.

I think NCROS trying to up him this week on patrol Muslim neighborhoods.

And so why can't we

we play to that level where this is about a two-minute soundbite as opposed to a sophisticated plan to defeat our enemy, not only abroad, but the enemy when it manifests itself here at home?

Just say Islamic terrorism.

Just say those words, and you'll win the election.

Avoid those words, and you're going to lose the election.

That's my advice.

And I hear you.

I know you're not running, but

I've heard you mentioned as a VP candidate, as a Supreme Court nominee, the next James Bond.

And

you know, they need a new most interesting man in the world.

So

thank you very much, I'm here.

Do your job.

You're doing great at it.

All right, Corey Booker, let's meet our panel.

Thank you.

Hey.

How you doing?

All right.

Here's our panel.

He is the president of the Eurasia Group and author of Superpower, Three Choices for America's Role in the World.

Ian Bremer back with us.

Hey, Ian.

Good to see you.

All right, he is the executive editor of the National Review and a columnist for Slate.

Our old friend Raihan Salam back with us for the many a time.

I don't know how many times.

And our returning champion, she's the ex-governor of Michigan and is now very ready for Hillary Jennifer at home.

You are very ready.

I know you are.

Remember to send us your questions for tonight's overtime so we can answer them after the show on YouTube.

All right, I'm going to continue with that discussion.

It was the first day of spring this week, and we had a horrible terrorist attack.

I thought of the Arab Spring, and I read this article in the Wall Street Journal.

Sahab Amari is the editor of a book called Arab Spring Dreams, and he says, today the Middle East is less stable and less hopeful than it was before the Arab Spring.

He mentions Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Syria, places that had Arab Spring uprisings.

We were all very hopeful at the time.

He said, at the height of the movement, I edited an anthology of essays by young Middle East dissidents.

They described an Arab world where women and men were equal, blasphemous cartoonists were tolerated, and gay people could live openly.

He asks how those dreams turned into nightmares.

And so I would ask that to you.

Well, I think

the last 40 years, the Middle East was either stable or had frozen instability for three reasons.

One, is they could take a lot of money out of the ground.

Two, is it...

Oil.

Oil.

And it was expensive.

And the United States, for the world.

The United States, number two, was providing a fair amount of security for these countries and wanted to.

And number three, despite the fact that they weren't well governed, the people were pretty quiescent.

They didn't have the tools and they didn't have the inclination to revolt.

2016, all three of those things, to various degrees, are eroding or gone.

And so, I mean, whether you're talking about Obama or whether you're talking about Hillary or the Republican candidates, you can't tell me any of them have plans that are going to make this any better.

The Middle East today is not something we're going to fix.

It's much more like climate change.

It's going to be two degrees of six degrees.

It seems like when there is an uprising, it gets hijacked by the religious nuts.

I mean, this is what happened with the Arabs wing.

It didn't start out as an insurgency.

that it became.

Same thing with Iraq.

We had Michael Ware here last week talking about it was an insurgency against the Americans, but it was secular.

And then the religious folks hijacked it.

Same thing in Syria with ISIS.

Same thing in Egypt with the Muslim Brotherhood.

How do we stop this?

Were we kidding ourselves when we thought that there was something in an Arab country between the caliphate and a police state?

Well, Bill, one of the issues is that...

people on both sides of these struggles are religious.

This is a part of the world where even the people who are secular are actually a lot more steeped in religion than people in this country who think of themselves as religious.

You're right.

So part of the story is that when you look at the societies where, you know, look at Tunisia.

This is a country where you have more or less a decent settlement.

Indonesia is a country where people were very worried about religious extremism, and now you basically have a functioning democracy there.

And I believe that the real issue is there were some societies where the dictators wiped out all civil society.

There were no other institutions outside of the state.

And then there were some where there were people who were able to start businesses, they were able to have real meaningful institutions outside of government.

And those are the societies that today have a fighting chance.

It's not just all about these societies are religious, these aren't.

You have religious people fighting on both sides, both for decent, tolerant societies and also who are fighting in the name of this Islamic barbarism you're talking about.

You were raised Muslim?

That's true, yeah.

But you're not practicing.

You know, I drink, I carouse, I do all of it.

But I do, but I take it seriously.

But I know, but you do realize, I'm sure you do,

how rare that is as a Muslim in the world, that you can openly say that and do that.

You're lucky.

You're an American Muslim.

You can drink.

You can say, I'm not a Muslim.

And I mean...

Bill, here's the thing to keep in mind.

If you're looking at Brussels, if you're looking at these terror attacks, you know, two of the guys who were caught up in them, they ran a bar.

These guys were involved in drug dealing and petty crime.

You know, when you're looking at this disaffection, it's a sea in which a small number of religious extremists are swimming, but they're swimming in a sea of disaffection of second generation folks who are living in poverty, and they're actually turning a blind eye.

They're aiding and abetting this kind of extremism.

It's a lot more complicated than religion.

And if you limit it to religion, you're missing the fact that religion can partly be the antidote as well as the problem.

I'm not limiting it to religion.

I think there are other factors.

It's other people who don't want to put religion in the stew.

And it's a major thing.

And I agree with you, and you've got to talk about it frankly.

It's definitely in the middle of the.

ISIS has a thousand names, but all of them have Islamic in them.

Yeah, so

ISIS is a narrow and far-extreme sect of the wide band of the Muslim religion, the Islamic religion.

And this gets back probably to your previous conversation and the point that you've been making a lot, I think, on this show is why not say Islamic terrorism.

However, we've got a huge number of moderate Muslims, not just in this country but elsewhere, who don't like that term and words matter.

And so why not call it, if we want to ally ourselves with the moderate Muslims, why not use the language they're suggesting we use which is jihadism and not broad brush an entire religion

with a term they don't want

but think of what you're saying you're saying that somehow these folks are so combustible that if we use the wrong word we're gonna nudge them over into strapping on a suicide message if you know i mean if you're what does it say about about us that we refuse to listen to with the terms that they would like to be referred by?

I'm not an official.

I've never been an official.

I'm not running for anything.

I'm certainly willing to say that Islamic terrorism is a problem and a unique problem and there are aspects of the religion that make it a unique problem.

Willing to say that.

But I also am very sympathetic and empathetic to President Obama when he knows that's true as well and he refuses to use it because he understands that the overwhelming pull of the United States is to get us more sucked in into wars that we don't have good answers for.

And the more sucked in we get, the more problematic, the more painful, the more cost in resources and in human lives.

And he'd much rather spend time fixing a relationship with Cuba,

rapprochement with Argentina, pivoting to Asia, than talking more about Syria.

I'm with him on that, actually.

He also recognizes, though, he recognizes that words matter and that insulting a whole swath of people that come from 50 different countries and represent a billion and a half people is not a great idea when it's one small slice but it's not one small slice you know everybody talks about this like there are no numbers Obama said it's very important for us to align ourselves with the 99.9% of Muslims who are looking for the same thing we're looking for order peace prosperity I love the president but he just pulled that number right out of his ass

there are numbers we had a guest on a couple of weeks ago Rohil Raza.

She is a woman who runs the, there she is, the Clarion project.

She goes by the numbers.

That's what her video was called.

53% of the population of 39 Muslim countries that were surveyed want Sharia law.

Sharia law, death for leaving Islam.

Death for insulting the Prophet or the Quran.

stoning a woman to death for adultery, amputation for theft, whipping for missing Friday prayers or drinking alcohol.

The numbers vary from country to country, but this idea that it's just this small problem, the reason why this is a unique problem, why I was imploring Corey Booker to say that, is because it is a disturbing threat based on the size.

The New York Times says there are 5,000 militant Islamic groups in the world, armies like Boko Haram and ISIS and the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.

intent.

They want to get nuclear weapons, support from the local population.

I'm not saying most people want to commit terrorist acts.

I'm saying they have illiberal ideas that are sometimes in line with what the terrorists believe.

And recent events.

No one's denying any of this, but here's

the thing.

Oh, yes, they are.

Well, there's some people who are very foolish and dangerous to deny this.

I am very sympathetic to where you're coming from, but here's what you need to keep in mind.

When you're looking at Muslims in most of the world, they are subject to the same dynamics affecting Christians and other groups.

They're secularization.

Okay, so the question is, how salient is your Muslim identity?

People that we call European Muslims today used to say they were Moroccans or they were Algerians or whatever else.

Now you call them Muslims because when you polarize, when you say that being a Muslim is this, it means these things, you make it more significant for people who are on the fence.

There are all these people who are on the fence who kind of are thinking that, you know, this is not necessarily the most important thing for me.

Maybe what matters to me is, you know, what kind of tax code I want or whatever else.

But when you focus on this, then you actually create the sea I'm talking about, in which a small minority of people who are violent swim in the sea of people who feel marginalized and disaffected.

And what you want to do is shrink the sea of the market.

They make the sea of people.

I mean, as the former governor of Michigan, we have the largest Arab American population outside of the Middle East, right?

Dearborn is 40% Arab American.

If you bring it home,

and the people, and they did, they did, overwhelmingly.

The people who are living here, who are living in the U.S., who need to be our allies in this as well, are offended by this broad brush.

And in Dearborn, people are comfortable.

These are facts.

They're not no brushing.

What I'm telling you, though, is that if people are offended that we are using Islamic terrorism to suggest that all of Islam believes or acts in that way, that's the problem.

They're not saying they're leaders than they should be by the fact that the U.S.

says Islam or not.

I really do.

We can't bomb these guys into submission to the USA.

I can ask a different question, though, about this.

It is not the only issue, but if you alienate people who we need to be our allies, then we end up

capturing the United States.

This would get them more on our side.

You know, we don't want to alienate the people who believe in our values.

We seem to be always getting out of our way to defend the people who don't believe in our values, like the Saudis.

Why are they our friends?

I think you've seen from Obama.

I'm so upset about Obama going to Cuba and standing there with Raul Castro.

Saudi Arabia is our ally in a far worse dictatorship.

Look,

far worse human rights record.

Look, I'm not a fan of Saudi Arabia, but it certainly is true that they've done a lot to combat our enemies.

And the enemy of your enemy is sometimes your friend.

It's not something that we're particularly happy about, but it's a reality.

Okay.

We must interrupt this discussion to

have something very silly.

Time for another installment of a segment we do on this show called, I don't know it for a fact,

I just know it's true.

It's about the phenomenon that sometimes you don't really have the proof for something, you just know it's true.

I'll give you an example.

I was watching a little video a couple of months ago when Sarah Palin came out for Donald Trump.

Show the video and I'll tell you what I mean.

Trump's candidacy, it has exposed not just that tragic, the ramifications of that betrayal of a transformation of our country.

See, this is what I mean.

When I saw that, I said to myself, I don't know for a fact that Sarah Palin is on meth.

I just know it's true.

So here are a few more.

I don't know for a fact that the place where Bernie Sanders buys his suits gives you a second suit for free.

I just know it's true.

I don't know for a fact that Paula Dean gets drunk and says, not everything Hitler did was bad.

I just know it's true.

I don't know for a fact that the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 will contain the line, I don't think that's yogurt.

I just know it's true.

I don't know for a fact that Hillary Clinton has butterscotch candies in her purse.

I just know it's true.

I don't know for a fact that Fox News anchor Bret Bear used to be known as the closer at a Cadillac dealership.

I just know it's true.

I don't know for a fact that when we all have driverless cars, Lindsey Lowen will still find a way to crash one into a tree.

I just know it's true.

All right.

He's a comedian who's the creator, executive, producer, and star of NBC's The Carmichael Show.

Gerard Carmichael is over here.

Hey.

Pleasure to see you.

How you doing?

I'm great.

How are you?

Oh, thank you for dressing up.

You wore a suit and tie.

I appreciate it.

You guys look really, really nice.

I'll figure I'd fit in.

A little bit.

So many people come out here looking looking crummy.

Okay.

So listen, first of all, congratulations.

What a great start your career is off to.

Your show is awesome.

Your sitcom is what a sitcom should be.

Thank you very much.

It's always about something.

Thank you,

which I think is great.

Thank you very much.

And when I watch it, I feel like we have a lot in common because we are two guys who want to challenge.

Even the people who like us.

Yeah.

Well, you don't want people to be bored, you know?

A lot of entertainment is so mindless.

You know, people are just like coasting along and it's jokes, but it's nothing that like intrigues you.

Nothing.

Of course a lot of it is mindless, but even the stuff that's not mindless I feel is very often pandering.

Yeah.

That they never have the balls to say something that their own audience won't agree with.

Yeah, yeah.

Like that would be the worst thing in the world.

Yeah.

And you are able to do that.

I mean you piss off people.

Yeah.

Well, it's the beauty of not being a politician.

You know, I was backstage and I realized that this segment, there's no way I could top the moment you had with Corey Booker.

There's nothing I could do.

His parents have this, like, everything about him is amazing.

He, like, builds, he builds trees from scratch.

I didn't even know it was a thing he could build.

It's like his parents have like this elaborate.

Even his parents' like house story is crazy.

I don't have, like, my parents don't have a story that beautiful.

The only thing my dad did was once pull a gun out on a nigga that owed him $30.

And it's like, that's not nearly as entertaining or inspiring.

It's pretty entertaining.

It's not as inspiring.

To a white person, it'll look very entertaining.

Right.

But you're not afraid to get booed.

That's what I mean about what we have in common.

I saw you're special.

And you say, you know, when the audience groans, you go, you know, keep groaning.

Yeah.

Just go deeper.

Because you feel something.

You know what I mean?

Like, it could easily be mindless.

I could say things.

I could come out here and be like, Bernie, 20, whatever year this is, and you guys would go crazy, and that's my fun.

Let me show you.

This is a little thing we put together for my, when I did my little birthday rant back in January, and this is a little montage of me with my beloved audience.

Yes.

What are they booing me for?

Really?

Oh, don't fucking start with me.

Don't start with me.

Oh, fuck you with the booing.

What is the booing?

It's going to be rough unless you get that stick out of your ass.

Right?

What's up?

Pie, come on.

That's dull.

Exactly.

What's amazing is that?

Would that be called gangster?

No.

But it wouldn't.

It would not.

But it would be called...

It would be called intriguing.

It's very intriguing.

It's gangsta adjacent.

Gangsta adjacent.

Yeah,

it's in the area.

I don't see anybody else doing it.

It's the chipotle of gangsta.

You know,

it's a sign that gangster was there, but that it's moving out.

Who else does that?

It's interesting.

Who else says fuck you to their audience?

I know.

You have like, it's like an old married couple.

It's just like, it's just like, oh, oh, really?

Well, get the fuck out of my face.

Right.

It's like a very interesting, I like that.

But you do the same thing, and that's what I find interesting.

Yeah.

And a lot of your shows, I mean, you're talking about things like Bill Cosby.

That was a really interesting episode.

Yeah, I hear, oh, thank you very much.

I appreciate it.

Yeah, it's...

You were at his house, Bill Cosby.

Did you go to the house?

Of course not.

I've never met him.

I hate him.

I always hated him.

I never thought he was funny.

Yeah.

Back in 1983.

Back in 1983.

A girl told me a horror story about Bill Clark.

In 83?

83.

God damn.

Did you alert anybody?

I mean, I feel like you could have been.

Tell the authorities next time that happened.

Yes, I.

No, no, but.

I'm calling from the set of DC Cab.

I have an emergency.

You guys, there's a comedian.

You all love them.

I think that, you know, I went to the house, and it's, you know, a thing where everybody loses.

You know what I mean?

Like, where it's, if you loved them, if you felt fondly of them, you know,

the accusers and all the, everyone kind of loses in that situation.

The episode that we did on the show was rooted around that.

Like, what do you do when someone that you admired and you put on a pedestal?

You know, he's guilty, right?

I mean, you know, I have eyes and ears.

What?

Yeah, okay.

I mean.

You know, I mean, but it's, yeah, I mean, it's that line of, you know, obviously you want to be, you know, respectful to the victims, you know, when making content about it, and you want to to be very respectful for it and and and in no way were we trying to do a slant in any direction you know but it is a thing where I mean you hear the facts and you hear these things isn't that whether shouldn't you always slant where the truth is no here's the thing so the the interesting thing about the episode is I think it's actually much more genuinely provocative not in the sense of like you know just edgy and just saying things to find this find the gray area right and if as an admirer of his work what we focused on on the show was me as an admirer of his work saying, well, okay,

guilty, even guilty of whatever the accusations are, what do I do now that, you know, I still admire this person's work?

Like, how do I separate the two?

And it's a difficult, you know, it's a difficult thing because it's like, I think we all,

any entertainer or fast food chain or whatever.

It's not hard.

I mean, the work is not even close to what matters.

But you weren't a fan of being.

But you weren't a fan.

But even if I was, I mean, I was a fan of Roman Polanski.

Yeah.

But once he drugged a 13-year-old and fucked her in the ass, I was not a fan.

I didn't make that up.

That's his public record.

But

you say that, but you say that, obviously, but also the movies got way worse after that.

You know what I mean?

That's not true.

The pianist, he won an Oscar for it, and it's a great movie.

And I can know it's a great movie.

Yeah, of course I saw it.

Yeah, and you acknowledge it as great.

Yes, but not him as great.

You have to be able to do that.

But you are kind of, like, when you acknowledge the pianist is great, it's kind of a...

monster can be a great director.

Yeah, but that's what I'm saying is that's what the episode was.

Like it was saying that like, oh, even someone accused of these monstrous things.

Okay.

So

let's talk, and with the panel, about the liberal bubble, because I know you're not afraid to go there, and I'm always criticizing what goes on on college campuses.

There was a doozy this week at Emory University.

Oh my gosh.

You know what happened at Emory?

Talk to me.

I can't.

I won't say it.

Somebody wrote Trump, pro-Trump

messages on the sidewalk in chalk.

Oh.

And I swear to God, the kids went apeshit.

It seems

in chalk as permanent as we thought his run for.

One student said, I legitimately feared for my life.

I thought we were having a KK rally

on campus.

What were the messages?

Just Trump, like Trump in the 20 word in chalk.

Oh my gosh.

Another one.

I'm supposed to feel comfortable and safe, but this man, Trump, is being supported by students on our campus, as is their right in a democracy.

And our administration shows by their silence they support it as well.

I don't deserve to feel afraid at my school.

I so badly want to dropkick these kids into a place where there is actual pain and suffering.

What happened in this country?

You know what's funny?

I was on the fence about having skipped going to college.

But now I've never felt more confident in my decision before.

I'm like, oh, yeah, okay, I missed out.

I missed out on things I wanted to miss out on.

Part of it is just the way that child rearing changed.

And when you think about the early 80s, you've got missing children, daycare centers run by Satanists, and all of this stuff.

And then you have a generation of kids who grew up in that environment.

You know, in the 70s, you know, you'd ride the subway when you're nine years old, you know, whatever.

It was just not a big deal.

But now you have a whole generation who grew up this way, just really cosseted.

And now you're seeing the effects.

And what's going to be scary is as people go out into the world and they discover that it can't be cosseted in those ways, they're going to encounter dangerous ideas that are very different from their own.

They don't seem to get that concept at all.

Everything seems to take a back seat to their feelings and their sensitivity.

Democracy, they don't give a shit about.

Free speech doesn't matter.

It's all about, oh my gosh.

How much do we have to worry about it?

Because it's not going to last.

It's not going to survive contact with reality.

Once you're kind of in the world.

No, but seriously, it's just...

I trust

you so true.

I mean, really.

That's a great.

You are painting them with a broadbrush, too.

Again, I'm just reading the talk.

I know one story, but you can't think of it all like this.

Oh,

this is only one story of many.

It happens all the time on campuses.

Watch this show.

So, okay, so let me get to this other issue that happened this week, which is about, I think, manliness, because the candidates were going back at each other about their wives.

And I just got to say, part of this problem is the media.

I turned on

What is it called now?

Meet the Press Daily on MSNBC.

Okay, just show this little clip.

This is how Chuck Todd opened the show today.

Yep, it's Friday.

It's a week that started with a major terrorist attack and the likelihood of a big commander-in-chief test.

And yet, it got turned into an unbelievable exchange over candidate wives and the National Enquirer.

How did we devolve to this?

Yeah, how?

Who?

Who's talking about this?

I don't know how this happened.

This, this.

It is.

This.

How?

Come on.

You.

It's a complete lack of self-awareness on the part of the press that they are the problem.

No, but

it's a two-year, $10 billion

election.

You can't sustain interest in Americans for anything for that long unless you feed them something.

Okay, but

this is a news channel.

Ostensibly.

Ostensibly.

But it's entertainment, though.

No, no, no.

This is an entertainment show.

That's a news channel.

But CNN has the same obligation.

It's MSNBC.

Well, whoever, there's the same obligation to advertise as dollars.

That's the problem.

They say get the money out of politics.

We got to get the money out of the news business

like it used to be.

That's nuts.

That is completely nuts.

Here's the question, though.

Here's a good question.

Who do you trust, though?

Who should we trust?

Well, I don't trust anybody anymore, but I certainly don't trust somebody who does.

Well, look, I buy the idea that the profit motive is leading to this lowest common denominator thing.

But the thing is that the deeper problem is that people don't have relationships with people they trust.

You are not a big fan of organized religion, but guess what?

In an era when people would go to church regularly, those are the people who are immune to Trump's appeal.

Because they actually have neighbors, they talk to people, they have other authority figures they can turn to beyond just what MSNBC or whatever else is saying at any given moment.

That's the real problem that's going on.

The ones that are actually

all those relationships that go beyond the family are just not there.

The ones that are most immune to Trump's appeal are the 18 to 22 to 26-year-olds, the same ones that were complaining about Emery.

And by the way, they're not on MSNBC.

The average age of a watcher of MSNBC, I think it's 64.

It's 67 for Fox News.

It's 68.

It's 62 for CNN.

These guys are not paying attention to that.

And they're the anti-Trump voters because they know it's a bunch of BS.

But back to your point, though, these news channels that have got to fill air, you can have somebody like Donald Trump just calling in from his pajamas in his room, and they will take the call.

There's no requirement for equal time.

They're not, you go to these debates, they've got them in tears so that the people at the lower

network don't get equal time.

I mean, how do people really, how can they discern when one guy is sucking up all of the oxygen and they're allowing it to happen?

You know, it used to be a lost leader, the news division.

It didn't always used to be this way.

CBS didn't care if they made money from Walter Cronkite.

That's what the Beverly Hill Billy.

If you gave Scott Walker $1.9 billion in free media, he wouldn't know what to do with it.

You need people who can actually create drama and excitement, and sadly he does.

One more question about one more issue.

APAC, that is the Israeli lobby, but it is not the same thing as Israel, although every candidate in America seems to think it's the same, was this week.

All the candidates spoke there, except for Bernie, the Jew.

I love that.

Bernie skipped it.

Trump, for the first time, used a teleprompter, which tells you something, which is that you have to kiss the ass of APAC so carefully that even Donald Trump didn't want to fuck it up.

But Europe has been real assholes about Israel.

I mean in general the UN, as of 2015 the United Nations Rights Council had issued more official condemnations of Israel than the rest of the world's nations combined.

I wonder now that Europe has been attacked four times, I think, now in a little over a year, and they say ISIS has 400 fighters that they're ready to introduce back into Europe and they're trying to get a dirty bomb.

Maybe Europe will have a little more sympathy for what Israel goes through.

I think they are.

You know

you've got

You've got millions of refugees that are making their way into Europe.

The Europeans can't stop them and they also are incapable of integrating them into their societies.

And so as a consequence, not only will you see more voters being more sympathetic to Israel, but the Israel-Palestine model, wall them off, watch them carefully, that's going to increasingly be appealing to larger segments of European society.

And that's something we have to watch very carefully.

Well, please.

I was just going to say, just back to the APAC speech by Donald Trump.

Of course, he did have to use the teleprompter.

The one moment where he goes off script, though, he says that a Barack Obama is the worst thing to ever happen to Israel,

which they had to come back and apologize for the next day.

He is, when Hillary Clinton got up and said that loose cannons sometimes go astray and shoot wrong, she's talking about him.

That man is such a loose cannon that he is a danger to this country.

I'm going to get to that now.

Oh, okay.

Thank you, panel.

It's time for New Rule.

All right, New Rule, Bashar Assad's wife, Asma, has to be told, girl, you can do better.

Maybe in Syria he's president Assad, but over here we'd go by a different name, Bashar, your Uber driver.

New Roll, Ted Cruz must apologize for this attack ad featuring a photo from Melania's modeling career.

Come on, Ted.

Ronald Reagan beat George Bush I in the 1980 primaries, and he did it without once bringing up Barbara's modeling career.

Neurol, the 11-year-old Minnesota boy who was arrested after stealing a cement truck from a work site, ramming two police cars and leading the cops on an hour-long high-speed chase, has to sit down so I can tell him something.

Son, you're my hero.

I never wanted children before, but I want to adopt you.

Some kids your age sit around and play Grand Theft Auto, but you, you are Grand Theft Auto.

Neural, if Obama really wants to help put a Clinton back in the White House, he has to stop reminding us what happened last time.

Neural, the Australian woman who says she has a rare disorder that prevents her from swallowing,

has to come up with a better excuse than that.

And finally, new rule: Hollywood has to remake Sophie's choice.

But this time, it's about the current battle for the Republican nomination.

And Sophie's horrible choice isn't that she can't save both her children, it's that one of them has to live.

Now, I know that picking between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz is driving Republicans crazy.

Mitt Romney got so angry today, he punched the wall and yelled Fudgeicle.

I almost feel bad for Republicans, although not really, because they did it to themselves.

Jesus, you guys started out with 17 candidates, and somehow you wound up with Mussolini and Joe McCarthy.

In recent weeks, Republicans have even been coming up to me on the street or at a party or in an airport restroom and

saying, Bill, give me a hand.

They say, sure, Trump and Cruz are both despicable ass clowns, but which one is less awful?

Glad you asked, I say, because there always is a more correct choice.

And I'm not just saying this to my Republican friends.

I'm saying this to liberals too.

Hillary Clinton is not a sure thing.

You need a fallback beside suicide in Canada.

Somebody's got to stay here and eat all this kale.

So let's look at the differences, and there are real and important ones between Cruz and Trump.

They're not the same.

Comparing them is apples and orange.

Donald Trump is like Ebola.

He'll violently kill you right away.

Cruz is more like the Zika virus.

We won't see the damage until future generations.

Donald Trump wants to build a wall to keep out creepy foreigners.

Ted Cruz is proof we need it.

Ted Cruz

has a daughter who doesn't want him to touch her.

Whereas Donald Trump's daughter is fine with it.

He said it, by the way.

He said it.

But perhaps the most important difference between the two men is this.

Donald Trump is the most thin-skinned person in human history and reacts to the smallest slight with the hair-trigger wounded ego of a male flight attendant.

Whereas Ted Cruz is immune to insults because he's learned to live in a world where everyone everywhere has always hated him.

Vaudevillians used to say they were born in a trunk.

Ted was born stuffed in a locker.

Like a growing number of Republicans, Lindsey Graham publicly supports Cruz, even as he mentions that Ted makes his skin crawl.

It's sort of like when they ask a gay actor to kiss a woman, they'll do it, but only because it's their job.

In fact, it's exactly like that.

And

then there's Trump, whose three main endorsers are Sarah Palin, Chris Christie, and Ben Carson.

Or as I call them, Catty, Fatty, and Batty.

So that's it, Republicans.

I feel your pain.

You're stuck between a rock and a gross place.

The house of asshole or the house of douchebag.

Team werewolf or team vampire.

Verizon or AT ⁇ T.

But we have to accept that being a grown-up means hard choices between disgusting options.

You have to decide.

We all have to decide.

So

let me just say, in the choice between Trump and Cruz, I forsquarely choose Ted Cruz.

That's right.

My choice is Ted

Cruz, because

here's the deal breaker with Donald Trump.

He's a lunatic.

If a non-rich or non-white person said the things he says, they wouldn't put him in the White House.

They'd put him in Bellevue.

We can't make a crazy person commander-in-chief.

There are actual job requirements.

It's not like Mardi Gras Parade King.

Do I think President Trump would actually disappear people?

No, but I can't rule it out.

With him, I can't rule anything out.

What does he do on day one?

Send Megan Kelly to Guantanamo Bay?

Or me?

He's already sued me.

The president signs off on a kill list every day and sends out the drones.

And I like going outside.

So,

yes, Ted Cruz will be our worst president.

But Donald Donald Trump might well be our last,

which is why I say

better dead than Ted.

That's our show.

We're off next week, but we'll be back April 8th.

I'll be at Riverside in Milwaukee, June 5th, Heinz Hall in Pittsburgh, July 8th, and the Capitol in Portchester, July 9th.

I want to thank Ian Bremer, Ryan Salam, Jennifer Granholm, Gerard Carmichael, and Corey Booker.

Join us now for overtime on YouTube.

Thank you, folks.

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.