Overtime - Episode #368 (Originally aired 10/16/15)

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

All right, here we are.

And now, Lawrence, this is for you.

If you do not win the Democratic nomination, come on, what are the chances of that?

Will you run as a third-party candidate?

Look, I want to be a Democratic candidate.

I want to have a chance on the Democratic stage to rally people to what I think is an issue at the core of the Democratic Party, restoring democracy to the people.

And that's what I want to do.

I want the chance to do that.

Now it's been hard because, you know, I'm a teacher.

I'm not a billionaire.

I'm not a politician.

If I were a politician, I could be paid while I was running for the United States presidency.

But as a teacher, once I start running, I got to give up my job.

So there's a period of time where I can run on credit cards and savings accounts when they can't pay me from the campaign or anything, where I try to get into the race.

And what I did in my case was raise a million dollars in less than 30 days.

That's more than five Republican candidates.

It's more than Jim Webb and Lincoln Chafee, and it's just about exactly what O'Malley raised.

I rallied 10,000 people to the campaign.

We have a real campaign staff.

I qualified for public funding, but the Democratic Party wouldn't even acknowledge me as a candidate.

And so the polls wouldn't include me on their polls.

And so when they said 1% you have to be at to be in this race.

I would be careful about this.

This is kind of what Jim Webb was doing.

the other night.

You know, I realized that

it comes off as whiny, and then people don't want to.

During the debate, I I tweeted.

They won't let me talk.

They won't let me up.

During the debate, I tweeted that you should be included.

So I was trying to help you out.

But the question is, Bill, here's the question.

Do we know that was really...

Here's the check how she's talking about.

I don't

know.

But you're on the other side there, John.

I know.

I'm all for all for the pressure.

I don't sit there.

They're building graph lane.

What do you have to do to be able to

do that?

But

I think we've been around this Mulberry Bush, but the issue, I think, is being raised by the other candidates.

But if the issue is how do we get a democracy first?

Like, how do we make that the priority?

What Bernie said in that debate, the one line that I think was the most important line, not mentioned by anybody, he said, if we're going to have any chance of addressing these problems, we've got to deal with campaign finance, which is exactly my point of view.

But this is my

80% of Republicans agree with you, according to the Bloomberg polling this week, which is fascinating.

One of my big problems with liberals in this era is their ability to nitpick fights fights on the very, very, very, very, very far end of the spectrum.

You know, Dolce and Gabbana, remember that?

How dare they say, because they're two ancient Italian men,

that they don't think that the babies should be made artificially.

Well, you know, you agree with them on 99% of the thing.

They're two gay men.

Do you really want to pick this damage?

I don't know about this example you're citing, Bill, but I do believe that.

Well, I'll tell you what I mean.

I don't know, but I don't know.

Did you hear about the Dolce and Gabbana skin?

Well, I've followed Dolce Gabbana, but in stores, not this story.

But I believe very much in working with people and you subsume a lot of the differences you might have to make, to campaign on one big issue.

And I don't believe in sectarian fights.

And I think liberals, the real problem with liberals over the last decades has been that they haven't taken their own side in the fight.

And I think one of the things that's appealing to Bernie Sanders, put aside socialism, is he's a fighter.

And he's fighting on behalf of people and not special entities.

People want to fight on a small scale.

So let's fight the people that that he's fighting instead of fighting him.

The good thing about the Deutsche and Gabona thing is it established unequivocally that Elton John is king of the gays, right?

We now know that definitively.

But look, this is not

a small issue.

The point is

the station was founded 150 years ago to redeem the promise of democracy.

I do not make it a small issue.

Absolutely.

Johan, what's behind the rise of anti-establishment candidates like Jeremy Corbyn?

in the UK?

Yeah, Jeremy Corbyn is the candidate for the Liberal Party, and he is way out there to the left.

I mean, like more than Bernie Sanders even is here in India.

More to the Lerner Sanders.

He's way to the left.

Yeah.

Name some of his positions that would establish this point.

Well it's very interesting.

One of the key things about Jeremy Corbyn is that he's a rejection of the new labor project.

So I think one of the things that happened in the U.S.

is that the Bush years were so horrific and so awful that it kind of precluded some of the things that went wrong under the New Democrats and under Clinton.

And Jeremy Corbyn, that didn't really, we didn't have that same gap in Britain.

So Jeremy Corbyn is really about, first thing he said was about apologising for the Iraq war, but also about rejecting so much of the kind of neoliberalism of the New Labour years, of the Tony Blair years.

And I think a similar thing has to, Bernie actually represents a similar critique of the Clinton years, although he doesn't couch it as that.

And we really need that.

A lot of the things that are going wrong for those people in Vegas that I met, they did go wrong under the Clinton years.

We can forget that.

You're right that there were good things as well.

It's important to acknowledge that.

No, I know.

I'm not a Glinton booth.

Yeah, I know, I know.

All right, John, do you see Marco Rubio as a serious contender?

What?

Yes.

Yes.

I mean, he's the guy I predicted would win the nomination.

I think it's going to come down to three folks.

It's going to come down to on the establishment side: Rubio, Kasich, or Jeb.

I still think Jeb has a shot.

And I think on the other side, it's going to be Ted Cruz.

I don't like Ted Cruz.

I don't know how I'm going to be it, but I think it's going to be him.

So it's going to be

one of those three against Ted Cruz

in the final number.

What odds would you put on Trump being the nominee?

20%.

That's high.

I'm going to fly out of here.

He's died many times.

Oh, yeah.

The media has completely turned around on him.

Let me say something about Donald Trump.

No one has played the media better than Donald Trump.

Well, he's playing with the media.

He is, but no one has done social media with the Twitters.

He is dominating the news coverage of this whole campaign in ways that no one has ever seen because he does it off the cuff.

And he's authentic in his own kind of crazy way.

And I think it's fascinating.

We can talk about social media, but this past summer.

I don't like him.

This past summer was an example of media malpractice at its highest.

Well, it could be.

You could not turn on a TV set without Donald Trump sucking up all the obstacles.

Listen, listen, here's the thing.

It was a great discussion.

You're preaching to the establishment choir.

But I will say, and I'm the establishment, but let me say this.

Let me say this, that the reason he got in the news so much is because he's newsworthy.

And he says stuff that

we're doing.

And the world we live in.

It doesn't take eight weeks to lime the depths of Donald Trump's brain.

Like, we could figure that out in about a week.

He's always

turning a huge amount of coverage.

He's clickbait, but he's a a good clickbait.

We had a huge amount of coverage about this ridiculous email scam.

I don't know.

And then

less coverage of Bernie Sanders than the email scam.

You guys are on the media.

I know.

It's worth remembering.

Hillary Clinton was at Donald Trump's wedding.

She took money from him, right?

When we're talking about this issue,

do we think that Hillary Clinton was at Donald Trump's wedding because she likes him and wants to hang out with him?

Do you think most people at people's weddings because they like them?

Well, that's a good point.

In my neighborhood, yes.

Does the panel expect any revelations to come out of Hillary Clinton's testimony before the Benghazi committee?

Right, we'll be off next week.

I think she testifies on a Thursday.

We should have mentioned here on the air tonight, a second Republican this week came out and basically said the thing is rigged.

It was just to take political pot shots at her.

They can't even keep that quiet.

So

it's a longer-running committee than the Watergate Committee.

It's wasted about $4.6 million.

However, I have a contrary vote.

She was on that Watergate Committee, wasn't she?

She was.

I have a contrarian vote.

But that wasn't bullshit.

There was a senator named Senator William Fulbright, who I think in 1966 held hearings on the Vietnam War.

I think this country would be served well by a real Benghazi committee, which would look at what has the United States policy been one of regime change?

What were we doing in Libya?

What has that led to in the crisis we see play out in the Middle East?

That is a real committee.

You know,

I think that Trey Gowdy has been trying to do the right things.

I do think that the Republicans have tripped all over themselves.

And if they were trying to do the right things, the media attention now has been,

whatever effort they put into it, then kind of sideways.

The tragedy of all this bullshit opposition is that it prevents the real opposition that the Democrats actually do need because they do lots of bad things.

Well, you know I'm rooting for you, John.

Thank you very much.

All right.

Thank you, everybody.

I appreciate your help.

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