Overtime – Episode #381 (Originally aired 03/18/16)

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

He got fucked up in the knob.

Okay.

We are.

I'm still

warning you.

I know you are.

Okay, we're back.

Rick Wilson, will there be negative consequences for Republican politicians like Christie, Chris Christie, who have endorsed Donald Trump?

Well, Christie gets to fetch a shine box every day when Donald Trump summons him now.

He does look.

And he is a guy, and I think a lot of these people are going to pay a price for it.

And

I think that Donald Trump is not a transactional politician.

He's all about the bottomless ego need of Donald Trump.

And that's why anybody who's endorsing him, they're thinking, oh, I'm going to get something out of this.

I'm going to get an appointment.

I'm going to get some favor from Trump.

No.

When he's done, he's done with them.

That moment on the airport tarmac where he said, go get on the plane.

That was the coldest diss I've ever seen in politics.

Okay.

Bernie, does Bernie Sanders have a realistic proposal for Wall Street reform?

I think he

has more rhetoric than reality.

Actually, Hillary Clinton has a very specific and detailed proposal to use some of the powers that are there in the bill,

as the New York Times editorial said.

I do not think that

simply saying break up the bank, look, I just did a piece.

They don't tell us to what low level you need to do it.

And in fact, we have in the bill powers that have not yet been used.

And no, I do not.

You're talking about the Dodd-Frank bill.

Yeah.

And you are the Frank in that.

I know, but the only, I don't say that.

So you know something about it, I would say.

Yeah, but

the only person in history who could refer to himself in the third person and not seem like a pompous jerk was Charles de Gaulle.

So

I never refer to myself.

But the point is,

what I've seen, I've looked carefully at what Senator Sanders has said.

And by the way, he was there, he voted for the bill.

He was in the Senate when we passed the bill and was very supportive of it.

But I have not seen specifics that go beyond what we have done there.

Okay.

Esperanza, what can you tell us about your work with free the slaves?

Ooh, well, I didn't know slavery was so prevalent.

So that shows.

There is slavery still in the world.

A lot of it, actually.

Yes, it is amazing and horrific.

And in our own backyards and in a lot of the products that we are acclimated to using.

It's shocking.

So when I heard about that, I said, okay, I want to align myself with these people and folks folks who are listening to me.

I don't have to hear about it.

And what countries are we talking about?

Where is it worst?

Worst in India and Bangladesh, but happens almost everywhere.

I'm sure it happens everywhere, unfortunately.

There's all sorts of forms of slavery, right?

Of course, of course, yeah, yeah.

Saudi Arabia, yeah.

What do you think about Obama criticizing them in the Atlantic?

Amazing.

It's about time.

About time.

Right, yeah.

That was a pretty stark, that was a pretty stark reading.

About time, somebody did in America.

I think there's a bipartisan moment where we're getting past that infatuation.

And not that they need to listen.

Michael, what?

You just have no leverage.

Very limited leverage.

With who?

Saudi Arabia.

But I think we have more leverage than ever because we don't need oil like we used to.

We are the leading oil providers.

But they don't need you.

You have proven yourselves impotent in the Middle East.

We have?

Really?

Well, I mean, yes, we have.

Who's more impotent than Saudi Arabia?

It's their own backyard, and they won't even send troops to kill ISIS.

Well, right.

They're the ones who should be doing it.

Why are we doing it?

They're paying the bills to kill ISIS.

They're fighting the war in Yemen.

They're fighting the great religious war in Yemen.

You don't want to get in the middle of this, do you?

Trust me, you don't want to.

No.

You're the smartest.

You had to have met all night.

Look, you know,

we've never had letters.

We've never had compliments

All night.

Oh, my God.

Shut up and get out of the way.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And where were you earlier?

God damn.

No, look, we've never had less influence in the Middle East than we do now.

And we are not the worst for it.

I do not think that this is America's role, it's not our need, and it's not possible for us to bring peace there.

So I'm talking about the peace.

Forget energy politics.

I'm not talking energy politics.

Forget energy politics.

I say go green, go hard, and go now.

But there are people dying there.

Can we stop it, my dear?

What can we do to stop it?

We can't.

Sweet bugger all.

What?

Virtually nothing.

I agree.

Virtually nothing.

But you know what?

It'll make it worse when we try.

In so many ways, you've contributed so much to this problem, and it's washing up on all our shores.

I vote against it.

It's a moral responsibility.

But what?

To do what?

It would make it worse.

I voted against it.

I don't see that we can do anything.

How about a little tough love, right?

The Republicans are always for personal responsibility.

What about personal responsibility for all those countries that are surrounding ISIS, who say they are enemies of ISIS, but we don't make them fight ISIS?

Why are we leading this coalition?

They have planes.

I know.

We sold them to them.

In fairness, though, the support of Saudi Arabia has been a bipartisan fact of life in this country for 45 years or so.

No, I know.

I want to make sure that it's not just on my party's head.

Right.

No, it's not.

It falls on us all.

That falls on us all.

The Bush is the ones who actually held hands with them.

Literally.

But our willful refusal to understand the deeper stories of what's going on in the Middle East, our misconceptions, our thinking that it's just the way we want it to be, I mean, we should just plain stay out.

We have no idea.

Right.

We only make it worse, yeah.

And you know, the reason why we don't is because we always have to big ourselves up that we're the indispensable nation, and we're not.

It's Russia.

Well they're not either.

Dude, Putin just played us all for fools.

No, he didn't.

It was a master stroke.

Excuse me, but he stepped in.

You're a Putin fan?

No.

I'm a huge Putin fan.

If you are into global power politics...

You are totally contradicting yourself.

You acknowledge that we have no great interest there, and then you complain that we didn't do anything.

There's nothing that we could accomplish and nothing that we could

accomplish.

And at least Putin knows what he's after.

Putin is after a secure naval base on the Mediterranean and a new West.

What's he going to do with it?

Well, he's secured it.

And he's achieved it and he's got in and he's got out with relatively

we have more bases.

Excuse me.

Let me finish.

We have more bases in the Middle East than he does.

To what effect?

How does it help America?

And how does it help him to have one?

Neither one of us.

But he still maintains his Mediterranean blue political.

And we have one too.

That's all he's after.

It's all war war.

That's all all you men ever talk about.

If I may call it the wind.

It's a waste of time and money for both of us.

All the South has is cotton and arrogance.

Sister Simone, I can do all of Gone with the Wind, by the way.

Massa, Massa.

Lion, Fiji Scarlet.

It's the only thing worth fighting for.

Worth dying for.

The kids don't know Gone with the Wind.

No, no, seriously.

It's lost on them.

Sister Simone, do you think that the coalition of religious support for Republicans will start to break down if Trump is the nominee?

Well, that's a good question.

I think the religious support for Republicans has broken down, period, regardless of who the nominee is.

Because what's happened is that the...

fact of the more progressive thought that it's seen more as an integration of all of the questions, not just sexual questions, become the questions that we ask at this time.

The issues of income inequality, the issues of the disparities in in our cities and towns, the issues of racism are at the heart of religious conversation.

And that is changing how America embodies faith and how faith is involved politically.

It's broken down, period.

It's an interesting question because

a lot of evangelicals who are supporting Donald Trump who in previous eras would have been absolutely rigidly opposed to gay marriage, absolutely opposed to abortion, they're like, woo, Donald Trump, so what?

We're doing it.

It's all about Trump.

And this to me is

a sign that the evangelical part of the Republican base has to do some self-assessment and decide if they really believe in the things that they want to be definitional for the party.

Defend them for a second.

Doesn't the Bible say, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's?

They're saying, look, we're not voting for a preacher.

We have a preacher.

We're voting for a president.

That's a different position.

Their historical thing of disqualifying people flat out who believed in gay marriage or who believed in abortion

is suddenly completely gone with Donald Trump.

Well, not completely, but with a large faction, a large part of the evangelical

correspondence between Donald Trump and much of the Bible on marriage, and that is it's okay for a guy to marry a lot of women.

Then the Bible says that's okay, and Donald Trump says that's okay.

Polygamy, right?

Yeah, right.

One after another,

right.

And Saudi Arabia.

We love Saudi Arabia and

older brides.

Bin Laden was the 20th of 55 children.

It's always the middle kids.

All right.

Thank you very much, everybody.

You're a great audience.

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