Overtime – Episode #380 (Originally aired 03/11/16)

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

Hey, here we are.

First question, Bill Kristol, would you vote for Hillary if Trump is the nominee?

Ooh, tough, good question.

I won't vote for...

I'd prefer not to vote for either, so I'd like to find a real Republican to vote for.

But if that doesn't happen, if it is Trump and Hillary, would you stay home or vote for Trump?

I know you wouldn't vote for Trump.

Right.

I'm trying to recruit a Republican to run somewhere in the United States.

Oh, I'm saying.

Come on, Bill.

come on, it's past the conventions, it's Trump and Hillary.

What do you do?

You're going to have to face this.

I know you've thought about it.

I'll face it.

I'll face it on November 6th or 8th or whatever election.

So you're not going to decide till you get in the booth?

Is Hillary?

Hillary's really that bad?

She's really that evil.

She's pretty bad.

She's pretty bad.

To be honest.

Really considering that.

She's not evil.

She's not evil.

You'd like you.

You must have a good time.

You're a conservative.

You don't want Hillary Clinton as president.

And if you're a real conservative, you don't want Donald Trump.

But you can't really picture Hillary with a table full of steaks behind her, can you?

I grant you that.

I grant you that.

Jane, is there any legal action that can be taken against the Koch brothers?

Well,

one legal action is confirming a Supreme Court justice who might overturn Citizens United.

That's going to be an animating issue in this election.

Well, I mean, they're not going to let Obama pick one, right?

Which, of course, they'll pick one.

They'll pick one.

They won't even meet the person in the city.

Right, right, which is, of course, what they always do, cheat.

I mean, it's cheating.

But, you know,

that's going to get people upset.

The citizens are burning on both sides, I think, for the first time.

Okay.

Has the Obama doctrine been a successful foreign policy?

I don't even know what the Obama doctrine is, except maybe don't do stupid shit.

Remember he said that?

Don't do stupid shit?

By the way, that is what I'm going to miss most about him.

No new stupid foreign wars didn't take the bait every time they leading from behind.

We were 50,000 people dead in Syria.

There might have been a stupid faith.

Right, and that was all his fault because Syria was a paradise before.

But

Libya has not been a successful foreign venture, right?

That's kind of.

I love the way they pretend that the Middle East is a perfectly manageable place.

And it's all Obama's fault.

Why did he ask?

It's a very difficult place.

I never said it was all Obama's fault.

You can't say that that's a success.

Syria and Iraq, it's horrible.

But what could anyone else have done?

You could have intervened intervened early and helped Syria.

Intervene with troops on the ground in Syria?

Well, you certainly could have helped the resistance to Assad.

There were plenty of people.

But there were Democrats there.

Who's the resistance?

You know, they tried to find a moderate army.

They wound up with five guys.

That's not a joke.

Five guys.

And you know, your war in Iraq went so well.

So

we had won it.

Well, in fact, we had won it, despite having mismanaged it, we had won it by the end of 2008.

But we can have that debate some other time.

Okay.

Okay.

Well, we had.

We had.

Yes.

And Obama said so when he put it in the right thing in 2010.

But he didn't.

Well, he was smirked with the business.

He failed to

carry out, to be able to negotiate a status of forces agreement, which Bush

hadn't negotiated either in 2008.

That was a mistake.

Okay.

But I mean, it seems like the answer is we have to stay in these places forever to make them work.

Yeah.

Well, you know, there's a lot of people.

Yes, to some degree, as we did in Korea, as we did in Germany.

There is a fascinating article out right now by the Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg where he talks about the don't do stupid shit line.

And I think Obama was sort of incredulous that people thought it was somehow controversial not to do stupid shit.

Like that should be.

Yeah, because it's an excuse for doing nothing.

No, people get slaughtered.

That's what it is.

Don't do stupid shit in Rwanda.

Was that a good policy?

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, I think you're okay with

it.

That's what Mark Clinton said, right.

The stupid shit doesn't intervene.

Let's not do stupid shit with never intervening.

You can intervene and do smart shit.

What he's saying is you have to know when to intervene and when to do it appropriately.

And that's what his doctrine is.

I don't think it's, you know, blanket money.

Libya,

the only time I was in the Obama-white ass is when I supported the intervention of Libya because I didn't want to see hundreds of thousands of people get slaughtered, and I thought there was a chance to have a decent outcome in Libya.

And as Sam is right,

there was no follow-up by us, by the Europeans, and now it's a terrible place.

So if you're serious about helping people, doing things around the world, you've got to be willing to stay the course.

But you know, one of the things Obama says in this article is the hardest decisions to make are sometimes sometimes not to go to war when you have so much of a drumbeat of people pushing you to go.

You know that even Mormon missionaries won't go to Syria?

Well now no one would go there obviously.

Okay, I know.

There are a million Syrians in Europe now.

All right.

Maria, how can the average American safeguard themselves from being the victim of fraud?

I hear fraud is at all-time record levels, especially because of the the internet, right?

It is, it absolutely is.

I think the number one thing we can do is apply the if it's too good to be true, it is doctrine to ourselves.

And we never want to apply it to ourselves because when it's happening to us, it's just wonderful.

Right?

It's only too good for other people.

So, I mean,

the scams people fall for.

I've gotten that, you know, the message from somebody you know, and it says, hey, I'm over here

overseas and I need you to send me $500.

You sent it, of course.

No, no.

No, but the first time I got it, I almost did, because it never happened before.

Right.

And somebody looked at it and went, oh,

call this person back and ask them any question about who they really see if they know you.

Yeah, I mean, the journalistic dictum, trust but verify.

Right.

Because our first impulse is always to trust, especially if emotions are high.

So like during the elections, right?

Everyone is really riled up.

People want to trust, don't they?

And when you're emotional,

you're not logical, you're not reasonable, and you start acting rather than thinking, and taking that moment to reflect might actually save you from sending $500.

So you're not supposed to send the money?

Well, to me, you can send it.

Oh, okay, fine.

Yeah, when Trump, you know, he talked about how they love their country.

I mean, it seems a little over the top or something.

I mean, we all love our country, but it seems a little erotic.

It does.

And also, when you read

wine.

They'll take you out.

I mean, I read this poll that only 11% of Republicans say Obama loves the country the right way.

It's creepy, isn't it?

There is a right way.

Trump is so good at convincing people that his is the right way.

I mean, every single one of his statements, how can you argue with them?

They're all so wonderful.

It is

a little creepy, though, that he said that he would also date his daughter if

there's a little bit maybe too much of this election thing going on.

That is an amazing book in itself, how Trump is successful with women voters, because it's not like he's not.

And, you know, sexist alert, I know people are going to object to this, but sorry.

Women like confidence.

They do.

I don't think that's sexist to say, right?

Women like confidence.

I think men like confidence, too.

I think everyone likes confidence.

And Trump does do better with men.

I think it's a Republican women that they're resisting Trump more than Republican men.

I would say that.

But it's not an equivalent.

Women and men are different.

Come on.

Men, they like tits, and they like

beauty, and they like ass, and they like new.

You know, I mean, Ashley Madison, when that was hacked, we found out this was the cheating site for married couples.

37 million men, 12,000 women.

If that doesn't doesn't work, tell you everything you need to know about.

Voters are kind of saying they like new too.

They didn't want another Clinton,

you know, and they didn't want another Bush.

They want new.

They want strange.

And they're getting it with Trump.

All right.

Should Hillary Clinton release the transcripts of her speeches to Goldman Sachs?

Obviously.

Really?

Yeah.

What could she be saying there?

If it's nothing, then why not release it?

What could it be?

I'm sure there was some nice language, but probably nothing damning that she said to some bankers that she probably wouldn't stay on the trail.

I would bet, if I had to bet, I would bet that there's really nothing damaging there, but they're very protective, that campaign.

They don't like to be bullied into doing something.

And I just think they should just get it over.

I'm going to say it.

I said it last week on the show.

She, if she's the nominee, has to pick Elizabeth Warren as the vice president.

Sounds like this.

This is the smart move.

Energize the base and take the Wall Street issue off off the table.

They also mentioned Sherrod Brown as a possible alternative.

Too boring.

He's a great guy, but it's just more boring the same.

That excites exactly nobody.

And Hillary already excites exactly nobody.

I mean,

Trump excites people.

Those bund rallies are pretty.

Bernie.

Bernie, yes, we know.

You have been saying his name.

Sam, why has polling been so unreliable, and what other other tools should the media use to report on the election?

Well, I think I know, but go ahead.

There's a technical answer here.

Polling in a primary is really difficult.

Sometimes the methodology, you know, you could end up doing, you know, phones versus online polling.

There's different reasons that it's unreliable.

In some states, there aren't really good pollsters.

I mean, it's a very boring answer.

But you also have to keep in mind that polling is not necessarily supposed to be predictive.

It's a snapshot in time.

And so you're trying to pick up trends along the way.

But isn't it also because it's hard to reach millennials?

I mean, they did not get

Bernie's support in Michigan at all.

I mean, some polls had him down by over 30 points, and he won that race.

And I think that's because.

And that's why you got to look Hillary online poll.

You mentioned the Sanders number one under the 100%.

83%.

Yeah, and if you do the math in your head, that's like triple his margin.

Hillary won by about eight points among voters 30 and over.

Right.

So that is actually what these polls were showing, so they didn't capture.

Yeah, and impulsers are trying to incorporate more cell phones into their surveys.

The online surveys, which were once terribly unreliable, have become more reliable now that more people are doing stuff online.

But it's a changing situation.

Do they still do it by landline?

A lot of the pollsters.

Do you know who's entering landlines?

Grandparents?

The guy who punched the black guy.

I mean, that's

all right.

Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.

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