Overtime - Episode #350 (Originally aired 4/17/15)

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Tocal

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

We're on overtime.

Judith, do you believe going to jail?

Oh, we never mentioned that.

That's right.

You went to jail.

That takes balls.

Do you believe going to jail?

How many days were you in jail?

85.

85.

That can't be fun.

Even the best jail is not fun, right?

It was not fun, but I turned it into a reporting assignment, so it was more fun than it would have been.

Yeah, it's not like in Sweden Sweden where you get a nice little apartment in jail.

Or if you're Martha Stewart, right?

Did you have a cellmate and everything?

Many.

Many?

Yes, yes.

They were crowded, and it was a busy summer.

Did you have the top bunk or the bottom?

There are no bunks.

No bunks?

No.

No.

You sleep on a yoga mat and a concrete shelf.

It was interesting.

Let me reiterate: the pot smoker is just a character I play.

play.

Do you believe going to jail to protect your sources was worth it?

Absolutely.

And I would do it again if I had to, but I hope I don't have to.

John Meacham, how do you decide on the subject of your next biography?

Oh,

I don't know.

It's a good question.

The key thing is can you find something new to say about usually dead people?

And what does it tell us about what we're doing now?

Is there something illuminating about moments in the past where things actually worked?

I've written about FDR, Churchill, Andrew Jackson, Thomas Jefferson, and now Bush 41.

And

what's Bush 41?

Say

I get struck blind and I I can't read your book.

That's the only reason I wouldn't.

I can tell, yeah.

Because we know glaucoma is not going to be a problem.

We know that.

And I only have a minute to live.

Okay.

It's a little while.

What's the bottom line?

Go ahead.

Go ahead.

Go ahead.

Go ahead.

Good president or bad.

A very good president, the last Eisenhower Republican.

And a man who

did what it took to win, to obtain power, but then he did the right thing when he had it.

And then was punished.

That was ballsy to go back on his pledge to

no new taxes, read my lips,

and then say, no, we've got to raise taxes.

This is something Republicans today never do.

No taxes is way more important than going into debt.

In the old school Republicans, not going into debt was job one.

But imagine, I interviewed Obama to do this, and

he gave this remarkable set piece.

I mean, he speaks in camera-ready copy anyway, but this was a genuine appreciation of a president who had put the country first.

Imagine a Republican president now passing major clean air legislation, signing the Americans with Disabilities Act.

I don't think appointing Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court was putting America first.

You don't.

Well,

I would say you judge him.

I would say you judge him on the whole record, and the whole record was.

But that's a pretty shitty thing to do.

We gave you David Souter.

Will you take that one?

What?

He gave you David Souter.

Yeah, but I mean.

Okay.

Okay.

But Clarence Thomas, I mean, many scholars have said he is the least qualified person who's ever been on the Supreme Court.

If he wasn't black, they wouldn't have appointed him.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I know.

You know?

Everyone knows that, John.

Does anyone know that?

They just needed a black guy when the other black guy, the one black guy on the court left, and they found it, the one conservative.

I need to find that document.

Okay, well.

I'm telling you.

Good luck.

Nero, what's at stake for progressives in the next election?

Oh, could you be more vague?

Well, I mean, it sort of scares me to have a Republican president, a Republican House, a Republican, Republican Senate, and the Supreme Court will be at stake.

But not just the Supreme Court.

I mean, tax policy, the whole future of the country when you have one party.

But how many of the justices are at that point where they could...

Well, Ruth Bader Ginsburg is definitely moving up in in years.

Right.

I think it's fair to say.

Right.

You know, we have a number of relatively senior Supreme Court justices.

I think three could go.

But if we're also talking about how fair the budget is, tax policy, all those issues will be at stake.

And whether we make progress on any issue, like wages, other issues, those are all going to be at stake in the next election.

Okay.

Oh, boy, these are, this must be written by the vague squad.

John, how will history view the Obama president?

A minute or less.

A minute or less.

I suspect favorably.

Really?

I do.

Me too.

Oh, yeah.

I do.

Because Bill Clinton once said presidents at best are remembered for two or three things.

And

you listed them a minute ago.

You know, you have the Health Care Act,

you have killing bin Laden, and you have averting a depression.

I'll take that.

Right.

Yeah, I would say.

Judith, were there any dissenters in the intelligence community who challenged the consensus on Iraq's WMD?

Well, there were some who emerged after the fact,

a few years after the fact, and said I doubted.

There were a couple, I mean, there were fierce fights over

individual bits of intelligence, but when you put it all together, they all concluded that the case was overwhelming.

I think Colin Powell really had the best line about that.

He said, where were all these people

when I was making my speech and when the president was looking at the intelligence?

Where were these dissenters when we needed them?

And I think.

Well, maybe Dick Cheney told them to shut up.

Well, that's my guess.

There were lots of Americans who dissented.

There were lots of people that opposed the war.

Michael Moore at the Oscars?

I mean, it wasn't just Michael Moore.

We're a lot of Americans and a lot of political leaders, and one of them is now president of the United States.

Michael Moore was not in charge of intelligence, I hope.

That might explain it, but no, he wasn't.

No, he wasn't in charge of intelligence.

But a lot of people.

We might be in a better place if he was.

Because let's remember there were no WMDs.

How could they have done worse?

That's not true.

There actually were WMDs.

We are now sickening our troops in the field.

Other 5,000 that they found of the old ones, the old munitions.

That the war actually ended up opening up because we went into war.

And if we talk about Iran and other issues today, Iran has become much stronger because of our war with Iraq.

Well, may I ask you then, why did Senator Clinton vote the way she did?

She says it was wrong.

She says in hard choices, she made a mistake.

It was wrong.

What do you do?

But in real time,

so to speak.

Well, she was one, I think, 28 Democrats who voted for the war.

Yeah, because she made the mistake, which she says now, of thinking the president was accurate.

Back to my issue with the Democrats.

They don't stand up for what they believe in.

They are too worried about looking this way or looking this way.

Republicans create polls, Democrats chase polls.

And George Bush scared everybody.

They're going to do it again this time.

This is going to be close.

Hillary could lose it because it's going to be ISIS 24-7.

Let's hope that.

I promise you, that's what they're going to run on.

And ISIS will, of course,

accommodate them.

Clay, are you going to run again?

Probably not in the next few cycles.

I think I learned a lot.

I went into the race because I had issues that were important to me, education,

veterans issues, my brother's a vet.

And I came out of the race with a whole different set of them.

Gerrymandering, campaign finance,

things that I didn't know enough about until I got my hands in the actual shit.

And so I, and they stink.

And so I, and so

I am very interested in talking about those things.

Did you grow up on a farm?

No, I didn't.

I think a lot of farmers talk like that.

I've got your hands in shit a lot.

So I think, I don't know that I'll run again right now because I don't think that those two issues in particular are necessarily things.

But if you're not running and you're not singing, then what?

Well, I've got a big mouth still.

And I'm still able to talk about things.

Right.

And I still have a platform from singing that I can talk about them.

And I don't know that you can get everything.

I don't know that you can solve that campaign finance thing or the gerrymandering thing from the inside necessarily as easily as you might be able to.

Listen,

you have more effect here in this desk and what you do every week than most politicians do every single

and I'm not kissing your ass because you don't deserve a heart from me.

Let's sing to love somebody.

To love somebody.

To love somebody.

You don't know what it's like.

But, but you can get some of that.

You don't know

If you stop singing, I'll run again.

Bill, all right.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Automatic.

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