Overtime - Episode #375 (Originally aired 1/29/16)

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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late night series, real time with Bill Maher.

Over time, Tom Hartman, will you support Hillary Clinton should she get the Democratic nomination?

In a heartbeat.

Of course.

Absolutely.

Right.

Yes.

And you'll tell your listeners.

I tell my listeners that

I said it too.

I said, eat the chicken.

Fish may be your first choice, but eat the chicken.

It's not even that she's not terrible.

I mean, she's really good in a lot of ways.

She's just not, in my opinion, she's not as really good as Bernie.

I think we're on the same page on that.

But she, you know, let's also remember, a lot of the reason is that she has been demonized for 30 years.

Nobody gets beat on like Hillary Clinton.

She really does have a kick-me-sign on her back.

Well, the Republicans taped it there.

Yeah.

Democrats aren't too nice to her either.

I mean, there's just something about her that people want to just take a shot.

All right.

Kristen, did Donald Trump make a mistake by skipping last night's debate?

We'll find out in three days.

I think the problem is that, you know, so first of all, the ratings for his rally were only a quarter of what the debate got.

But it wasn't a quarter of a year.

So, but

really,

in the debate, there was this moment when Megan Kelly did the old Tim Russert move from Meet the Press, where you pull the old clips and quotes from people and say, hey, you said all these things.

What's going on?

By not being there, Donald Trump avoided having what would have inevitably been like a ridiculous montage.

And also, can I tell you, I think what he also knew instinctively, because he's a media person, a television person, is that this show has gotten boring.

I mean, when I started to watch the part about the immigration debate between Cruz and Rubio, I was like, wow, I've seen this five or six times, this exact debate, and I know what comes next.

It's Chris Christie coming in.

I know his line.

Hey, this is what's wrong with Washington.

Elect me, a fat governor.

I'm sorry, I'm interrupting your debate on the Senate floor.

That's what they call jumping the show.

And

if you look at Donald Trump's poll numbers, they've gone pretty consistently up.

There's only twice that they've dipped.

And it's after debates where Donald Trump wasn't the big headline, where he was just one guy on a stage.

So he knows that by being just one guy on a stage, that's bored people is the biggest enemy of the state.

Right.

I keep calling him the natural.

He's a natural politician.

He's right not to be a political.

Well, he gets entertainment in a way that politicians just don't.

You know, back in the 20s, Oswald Spengler said that you know when a civilization is in decline,

when its leadership and its structure becomes a caricature of itself.

Here we are.

Okay.

Trey, what kind of revelations will you disclose in your forthcoming book about your time in Congress?

Ooh, good question.

What are we going to be in store for you?

Paul Ryan is a secret Muslim.

Number one, no.

Prostab.

The beard.

Wait.

I will show actually how things can get done in Congress and how some Republicans and Democrats are working together.

But I also want to show one example would be the influence of money or lack thereof.

So for example, with the gun control debate, people are like, oh my gosh, the NRA, they own Congress.

The reality is this.

A $5,000 check to your campaign from the NRA means nothing.

It means nothing.

Five grand is what somebody wipes their butt with in a morning of fundraising in Washington, D.C.

The reality is that the NRA has a large membership and those members are people who vote, etc.

But these are some of the subjects that I'll get into: how legislation has become like a big turd sandwich, the omnibus bill, which is 3,000.

A very scatological book, you have.

And there you go.

Very, very, very, very, very, very, very, how money may or may not have.

See, I'm still writing it.

I pulled that back.

Yes, I would take that out.

Thank you.

How worried should we be about the spread of the Zika virus?

Well,

here in, I mean, it's a mosquito-borne virus.

One thing I've always loved about Southern California, no mosquitoes.

I've never been bit my mosquito.

Florida, where we're from,

has lots of mosquitoes.

Yes.

Here's a particular irony.

The big problem with this virus is it causes horrible birth defects.

And the state that has the highest population of the Acades aegypti mosquito that carries it is Louisiana, where they're aggressively trying to stop Planned Parenthood from passing out birth control.

I mean, it's almost like, you know,

karma or, you know, God talking to us or something.

Well, you know, our imaginary friend in the sky.

You know what I'm talking about.

Those are both bullshit.

Okay.

I take your point.

What are the chances that a third-party candidate like Michael Bloomberg, who was talking this week about maybe entering the race, will enter?

Bloomberg will destroy Democrats.

I mean, this becomes

a problem.

He'll split the same voters.

Yes, the area that I live in tends to have sort of moderate, very fiscal conservative Republicans who might be considered someone who would support Bloomberg.

Bloomberg has now just been sort of relegated to this nanny state liberal: hide your big gulp sodas, hide your guns, and hide your cigarettes because he's going to come and take care of everything.

Okay, well, I mean, that's a little of his resume.

But other than that,

25 years ago, he would be a down-the-line Republican who could be the nominee.

I mean, he's fiscally conservative, law and order guy.

A bit of a neocon,

a bit of a neocon, strong on Israel.

I mean, there's a lot of him that's old school.

Imagine an election, though, where you have either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders, you have somebody on the Republican side who's not Donald Trump, and then you have both a Donald Trump and a Bloomberg independent run.

Then you start having an election that looks more like those European countries, where instead of trying to keep everybody into these two very overly large buckets in a way, you have four different choices that represent different things that different voter blocks.

Let's have Trump and Bernie, Wall Street and Denmark.

Let's see who wins.

Let's have it out.

Thank you, panel.

You are a great audience.

I appreciate you coming here.

See you next week.

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