Episode #346 (Originally aired 3/13/15)

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

Afternoon, time will be

real giant.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.

How are you?

What a crowd.

Wow, I am.

What a relief that you're in this kind of a good mood.

Thank you.

Because it is Friday the 13th.

And yes.

And if you're worried about black cats, head over to the SAE fraternity at Oklahoma University because there's no black cats there.

You saw that story?

Breaking news.

Frat guys are huge assholes.

I mean

if you missed this story, yes, at this fraternity chapter at the Oklahoma University, the SAE chapter, apparently it's like this, you know, in some other places, but I guess this is the worst.

And they were chanting on a bus something I guess that had been passed down to this frat for decades.

And I won't discuss to you with what the chant was, but the basic idea of it was they were congratulating themselves that there would never be a black person at their fraternity.

And all the black people on campus were like, like any of us would ever want to join your

dockers-wearing, frisbee-golfing, corny cracker-ass fraternity to begin with.

Now, in other racist news, over in Ferguson, Missouri, the police chief there did resign.

And

then...

And then they had a big protest.

See, this is what I understand.

You get what you want, and then you protest.

What do we want?

Justice.

When did we get it?

Yesterday.

And of course, when you need to calm racial tensions in America, who better to start talking about it than Rudy Giuliani?

Rudy Giuliani was out there today.

I mean, I cannot make this shit up.

He says that Obama is talking to black people all wrong, because of course who would know better how to talk to black people, Obama or Rudy Giuliatti.

Can't make this up.

Rudy says Obama should talk to black people more like the way Bill Cosby does.

Only Rudy could see a serial rapist and go, yes, look, one of the good ones.

You can

read all about it in Rudy's new book, The Official Creep's Guide to Other Creeps.

But good news, news, ladies and gentlemen.

The Republican Party has a new star.

He's Tom Cotton, the 37-year-old Republican senator from Arkansas.

Now as you probably know, the Obama administration has been working for years on a nuclear deal with Iran.

We would lift the sanctions.

They would not develop their nuclear program.

Well, Tom Cotton wrote a letter to Iran signed by 47 Republican senators, which basically said, don't bother making a deal with our government and Obama, because when he's gone, we'll just cancel it.

Real mature.

And on the second page, it was just a picture of Obama they drew dicks on.

And of course, Iran's reaction was rather swift.

They said Republicans are behaving in a way that is not only rude, but condescending and stupid.

Hey, Moolahs, welcome to our world.

Oh, and speaking of stupid, Email Gate

has entered its second week.

Did you see Hillary's press conference this week?

Oh, it was.

She was defending her use of private, using a private email account, and it was riveting television.

If you consider someone in a pantsuit talking about serving servers for an hour to be riveting television, You know, it's not really that complicated.

Hillary said, yes, look, looking back, I should have probably used two email accounts or two servers, whatever, one official and one for private, but I just wound up using one out of convenience.

Same reason I stayed married.

It's such a typical, typical Clinton scandal, right?

Stage one, they broke a rule nobody ever heard of

that isn't exactly kosher, but it doesn't really affect anybody's life.

Stage two,

Republicans say that this rule was the keystone to our entire way of life.

And if we let it go, Mount Rushmore will explode and our guns will melt in our hands.

Stage three, nothing happens.

I mean, I want to ask them, what do they think they are going to find in Hillary's email?

She's the most boring person in the world.

Do they really think they're going to find one that says, I hate America and love scissoring?

And if they did, what would happen then?

Meanwhile, our state of California today announced that we have, as of today, one year of water left.

So let's definitely keep obsessing about emails because it's only fucking water, ladies and gentlemen.

Who cares about water?

Apple is making a new watch.

Are you going to line up?

Yes, the iWatch.

This is amazing technology, Leslie.

You know the clock on your phone?

They found a way to shrink it and put it on your wrist.

It is a wondrous time to be alive.

This device is so amazing.

It will remind you to make phone calls.

It will track your calories.

It will tell you when you need to exercise.

It's like having a tiny Jewish mother strapped to your wrist.

All right, we got a great show.

Ariana Huffington is here.

Tom Rogan and Cheryl Atkins.

And a little bit speaking with my friend Sean Penn is backstage, ladies and gentlemen.

First up.

My first two guests are civil rights activists featured in a documentary about sexual assault on campus called The Hunting Ground.

It's in theaters now and premieres on CNN this fall.

Please welcome Annie Clark and Andrea Pino.

Hey!

How are you doing?

Hi.

Having you.

I never have two guests.

Well, thank you very much for being here.

Your documentary is fantastic.

I hope everybody sees it.

It's an important issue.

Let's just start off by asking, why did you call it the hunting ground?

Yeah, so we weren't the only ones that had an opinion in this, but I think a very clear theme

within the whole documentary is the fact that it's not just a mistake.

It's not just sex gone wrong you know you have these penalties talking about sexual assault on campus yeah exactly you know rape is is definitely a premeditated crime and and these rapists can rape with impunity on campus okay so let's just go to the numbers first because I think this is what's so shock there's two things that are shocking this is the first one what percentage of women do the studies show have been raped on campus yeah so the best statistics we have from the Department of Justice are between one in four and one in five women are sexually assaulted on campus.

And that number is very high and it has been disputed.

However, if we were to even say that statistic's wrong and it was one in 20 or 1 in 100, imagine if one in 100 students were shot or one in 100 students had their Apple laptop stolen on campus.

What would we be saying about that?

So it's not even an issue of the numbers, it's about the issue itself.

And I think the other shocking thing is that the colleges are so complicit in it.

It reminded me, I have to say, of the Catholic Church.

It's the same thing.

It's the same thing that

their reaction is not to protect the victim.

Their reaction is to protect the institution.

Why do you think that is?

Absolutely.

I think it's the same thing you have in the military.

You have sexual assault in the military, within the Catholic Church, within college campuses.

You have institutions with no oversight who have the incentive to protect the reputation, to keep bringing in donor money, and have

no real reason to protect the survivor.

That's a lot of it.

There is nothing in America that cannot be touched and corrupted by money.

And yeah, I mean, if a college gets a reputation for rape, they're going to have a hard time raising money.

And that's, it's a business.

Colleges are a business, private business that wants to make money, right?

Well, it's a little hard to sell rape on a college for sure, right?

Well, this is America.

Well, actually, something I wish more parents and students understood is if you have a number of zero sexual assaults, that either means your school's obviously under-reporting it, or it means students aren't comfortable coming forward.

So I think zero sexual assaults reported should be a red flag, not something that they should broadcast.

And something like 40% of colleges, right, I think if I remember right from the film, report 0%.

They don't have a rape problem.

They don't have a rape problem.

It reminds me of when the president of Iran says there are no gays in Iran.

Of course not.

There apparently aren't any.

Of course, we killed them.

But also, what really was amazing to me, and I felt bad about it, I guess it shows how out of it I am, is

a lot of what I saw in this movie, I would have thought was coming from the 1950s, like when someone reports a rape to counselors, people who you'd think would be sympathetic here in the 21st century.

It was still a lot of,

well, were you drinking that night?

What were you wearing?

A lot of the blaming of the victims, right?

Yeah, and I I think it has a lot to do with the fact that we have this cultural expectation that rape doesn't happen in safe places like college campuses, that the rapists can't have a Harvard law degree, but that's not the case at all.

Right.

I was also amazed that so many of the women in your movie said, as horrible as the rape was, what was worse was how I was treated after.

Absolutely.

I think you hear that across the country.

And, you know, that institutional betrayal, you go to your school, the police, whomever you go to, that is supposed to protect you, and then they betray you after something has, you know, as awful as sexual assault has happened.

Yeah, it's worse, it's re-traumatizing.

And

for me, it was worse.

All right, well, let's get to the happy part of this story.

And there really is one, which is that you two basically, because you were ignored at your campus when you reported this,

learned how to be lawyers.

And you

turned yourself into lawyers.

And you won based on Title IX.

Now, Title IX has been used for decades, usually about sports in schools, right?

It basically says a woman has a right, everybody has a right to equal education.

And you said, well, yeah, but if I've been raped on campus, I don't have that right because I'm afraid to walk to a night class.

I'm afraid to go out at night.

I can't concentrate because the rapist is right in my classroom.

And you're winning these cases, right?

Yeah, we are.

So we're helping students across the country file Title IX complaints with the Department of Education.

And what we're seeing is you have students that are 19, 20 years old taking on two annual universities.

And it's really inspiring.

And I think it also sends a very clear message that if your school is not on that list that's being investigated, they're next.

And just because.

And just because they're not on that list doesn't mean they don't have a problem.

It might mean they just haven't been called out yet.

And what we're seeing, you know, we have this collective action problem of university presidents not willing to step up and take ownership of this issue.

Like you said, 40% of schools haven't, you know, investigated a case, right?

And I think it was only 6% of presidents who said this issue was prevalent on their campus.

So nobody's willing to step up and say, you know, we've done wrong in the past, but we're willing to work with you in the future.

And so, you know, the thing is, too, like, it's not hard to file a Title IX complaint.

And that's what I hope any student or young person watching realizes is that they do have the right to a safe education and they can do exactly what we did.

And this is a week when I was just mentioning it in the monologue.

We saw the SAE

fraternity

obviously doing something horribly racist, but they're mentioned prominently in your movie too.

Sexual assault expected.

They're known as sexually assault expected.

Yeah.

And it struck me watching these guys on the bus chanting this racist chant that they actually would have been better off sexually assaulting somebody.

That's true.

They got into big trouble for a racist chant, but the statistics show they probably would have gotten away with sexual assault.

I think it's something like 88% of women don't even report this crime.

Is that right?

Is that the right number?

Yeah.

Well, you can see why, but that's what has to change, right?

I mean, that's part of your program is to try to get them to report the crime.

Yeah, well, what we want to see is we want to see responses like that from university presidents.

Because why is anyone going to report if they're going to get to graduate with a rapist if they even graduate?

Right.

Nothing happens to them.

So, right now, there's more of a deterrence for coming forward than there is for committing a sexual assault.

And I wish, you know, the university president at Oklahoma

that response would be repeated in other instances of racism and sexual assault.

Because we know that chapter is not the only racist fraternity in this country.

Right.

Well, that's great work you've done.

Keep doing it.

We thank you for your efforts.

All right.

Thank you very much.

You're great.

Let's meet our panel.

Okay.

Hey.

Here's our panel.

He is a columnist for the National Review and a panelist on the McLaughlin group.

Tom Rogan.

Hey, Tom.

Welcome aboard.

She's an investigative journalist and author of Stonewalled, My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama's Washington.

Cheryl Atkinson.

Hey, Cheryl, how you doing?

And she is the Huffington Post mini group editor-in-chief and author of Thrive, the third metric to redefining success and creating a life of well-being, wisdom, and wonder.

Does anyone write a book with a short title anymore?

And of course, you know her as Miss Universe 1981, Ariana Huffington.

All right, remember to follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and send us your overtime questions so we can answer them after the show on HBO.com.

All right, well, once again, this week we are beckoned to talk about race in America and there is a bit of a fault line there because

on the right they have been saying for a long time that we are living in post-racial America.

Certainly this is what the Supreme Court, the conservatives on the Supreme Court said when they voted a couple of years ago that we do not need the Voting Rights Act anymore.

You hear it from media people, you hear it from legislators.

Last week we had that report from Ferguson saying they were specifically targeting the black population.

This week, the SAE chapter guys, these are 20-year-old white kids chanting horrible racist things.

What has to happen before the whole country gets it in their head that

we are not living in post-racial America?

I'm not sure you can find a place where there's a society where people don't have thoughts against other races or sexes or religions and so on.

So I'm not sure what it means to be purely post-racial.

We're definitely not in the place that we were in the 1950s, pre-civil rights era.

Thoughts are one thing, but chanting and shooting are another.

True, but the unanimous reaction to this, which the response was overwhelmingly, I didn't hear anybody defend the chanting and so on, which shows you that there is a unanimity.

Well, wait a second.

A lot of commentators said they blamed it on rap music.

But they didn't say it was right.

They didn't say it was a proper thing to do.

They acknowledged this was something that shouldn't happen.

Kind of a low bar.

But also, it goes beyond that.

I mean, if you look at the fact that that

on the 50th anniversary of the Selma

bloody bridge

horrible incident in, which is part of American history, there wasn't a single

Republican presidential candidate who went there.

They chose to go to Iowa.

And

neither John Benner nor Mitch McConnell went there.

So it's sort of an amazing moment to think that this party of Lincoln that claims to want to do outreach to minorities completely avoided Selma.

For me that's.

I think one positive though is that that was noticed.

I mean certainly in conservative media there are a lot of people doing articles but also behind the scenes.

And actually with Republican members of Congress saying, what the hell were you thinking?

It's obvious at that level.

There is a perception deficit that the Republican Party suffers from.

It is the party of Lincoln, and it has lost that with a lot of people.

I think we have come a long way in the sense if you compare, for example, the number of minorities in the senior levels of government, military, intelligence services, private business, even compared to Europe, it's positive.

But yes, as we saw with the fraternity, despicable language, not only the despicable language, but the fact that there were people there sitting either quietly or kind of grinning gormlessly, is it?

But these are the youth today, and I don't know, this is a long time ago that I went to college, but it was strange for me to come from a widely integrated integrated world before I went to college, and then to go to college and find sororities and fraternities that self-segregate based on religion, sex, and all these other things, race as well.

Aren't college campuses the place where these things shouldn't be happening?

Well, you know, we Greeks gave you fraternities and sororities.

That's right.

I think we have to take them back.

Yeah, yeah.

I think you've basically screwed it up.

Yes.

And, you know, after all...

It's an anachronism.

It's an anachronism.

You know, we also gave you

nude Olympics, remember?

That's how it started.

Really, it was nude to me to restrict it.

At the beginning it was nude Olympics, but you know, we kind of evolved and we started wearing clothes, which is particularly good during the Winter Olympics.

But my

point is that, you know, fraternities, it's not just the racist singing, the sexual assault.

Sixty people have died.

in fraternity incidents in the last seven years.

I mean, at what point do we say, really, why are we still justifying things?

Because they're also homophobic, but they're always putting things up their ass.

That's always a hazing thing.

It's always, well, he puts up

tragedy struck at SAE.

What does it say?

This I thought was kind of interesting, that no one got fired in Ferguson for shooting a black kid.

The people who got fired were for the racist emails.

It's always the emails in this country.

Is that really worse than shooting the kid?

Well, if even the people who were looking the hardest, I think, for evidence of racial wrongdoing couldn't find it, it would have been pretty hard to fire someone on that basis.

I think they looked very carefully and they found hard evidence in the emails that they apparently didn't find in the actual shooting incident.

Okay, so

there were two policemen who were shot in the protest, which I don't think anyone thinks is a good thing.

But I saw conservative commentators blame Eric Holder for this and the rhetoric he created.

Could I just say it's the fault of the shooter, one.

But if we're going to look deeper than that,

I noticed I think it was the police chief in St.

Louis who said these policemen were specifically targeted.

It wasn't random.

Yeah, that's what was going on in the entire black community.

It wasn't random.

They were being specifically targeted.

So if we...

Again, no one is condoning this.

We don't want to shoot policemen.

Fault of the shooter.

But underneath that, if we're going to look for the second layer of blame, I got to say, it's the cops themselves, look in the mirror, the courts in America, the justice system.

This is the...

Yes.

Sorry to interrupt.

No, I was just saying I think there are two positives that come recently.

Number one is the fact that it is coming so much more onto the radar.

The media coverage, people are engaged with it.

It's something people have finally, I think, come to terms with, that it's a major issue.

But the second point, which is just beginning to develop, is police body cameras.

And I think that will have a sea-change in impact because, frankly, the bad officers, the small minority, are going to be pushed out because they're going to get either sued or there's going to be a federal investigation brought against them by the Justice Department when they have that forensic evidence.

You know, from a legal point of view, that's pretty undeniable if you can bring that to the table.

So

I think the next few years are going to be much more positive.

That is not to say, though, where things have happened,

they are clearly just, they're not just terrible, they're catastrophic because they reflect a social ill.

Do we know have the police who were shot, do we know the motives?

I mean, we can assume some motives and we can look at the bigger picture, but do we really know?

Have they been interviewed and talked to?

Last time I looked, they hadn't been captured.

How would they know what the motive was?

I'm guessing the motive was.

Let me take a wild guess.

Black people in the area who wanted to shoot a cop.

Let me take a wild guess.

Agree.

All right.

So

is anyone familiar with a Republican strategist named Rick Wilson?

I never heard of him, but he wrote on Politico about the Hillary email scandal.

He said, let's stay out of the way of Hillary Clinton's email fiasco.

Let's speak more in sorrow than anger.

He's saying, basically, this is a giant problem for her.

I feel like they're in the bubble again.

That, you know, in the bubble, Hillary Clinton is this lawless monster who has only stayed out of jail by sheer luck.

And yet the poll came out today that said she's trouncing all 11 Republican people who they think might run for president.

What do you think about that?

Well, basically,

the problem is not so much the emails.

It's the way that Hillary responds to the press.

There is that sense that somehow the press is always out to get her and she cannot stand it.

I mean you could see it at the press conference.

I mean she was so pissed at the fact that she was a pain.

I could not disagree more.

You could not?

Absolutely not.

She looked like someone who just is used to taking her beating like a man.

And I thought when I watched I thought this is going to serve her well because that's what America is all about.

It's not about issues.

It's just can you take your beating of her stupid infantile bullshit from our stupid infantile press?

And she said yes I can yes I can

you have to show me where she looked pissed

the way she kept repeating convenience convenience convenience the way she looked as though she would rather be anywhere else but more important but more important more important than that is the fact that

she really needs to realize that's how the press is going to be.

Of course, she doesn't want to argue

from my perspective as a journalist, not politically about who's going to run and what it does to her.

It is important to me.

And looking at the perspective of transparency and openness, I think those emails should have been available sooner.

I don't think they were handled properly.

I filed a Freedom of Information Act request for them that would have covered them back in 2012, and clearly they didn't do a proper search for them.

You can dismiss that and say, who cares, and it's not important, but just from a standpoint of openness and transparency and what the public's entitled to see, that's what concerns me, and I do think it's about the emails.

But there is kind of a whispering campaign about it, which I find very sleazy.

Kind of this idea put out there on the right that, hey, we're not saying that Hillary is part of al-Qaeda.

We're just saying that if we don't read her emails, we'll never really.

We're not saying she's a witch.

We're just saying it's a little suspicious you won't let us dunk her in the pot.

What do you make of the New York Times breaking the story on behalf of, I guess, the Republicans, in your view?

Yeah, I think there are two specific issues here that are a problem.

I mean, mean, number one, it's not just that Mrs.

Clinton used a personal email.

It's the fact that the physical mainframe, the server, was in a private residence.

Now, if you, the foreign intelligence service, a former Secretary of State, if they knew that, which they may well have, that's a gold mine.

You get in there, you gain access to it.

The US government does it all the time abroad, the CIA foreign operations, and potentially you can access some very important material, where there's a relationship with Russia.

She didn't handle it perfectly.

There was the one good piece of news, which is that it pushed Benghazi down to the second threat of humanity.

But don't you understand?

That's what's on her emails.

When they finally get those emails, it's going to say, I hate America, attack Benghazi.

But she said something interesting.

She said, you know, I want to simplify.

That's what her excuse was, convenience.

And I totally relate to that.

And I thought of that.

But you were not Secretary of State.

You can relate to that.

Yeah, all right, all right.

But this week, you know, this iWatch came out, and I thought, do I need another device that I have to plug in at night?

Another thing that the Russians can hack?

You know, I mean,

Apple has been brilliant at marketing things that we never knew we needed.

We didn't know we needed the iPad and the iPod and the phone, and then we did.

I think they've gone one bridge too far with this one.

I don't think I'm ever going to need this.

The thing that they say, the things it does, monitors your heart rate.

When do I ever need to monitor my heart rate?

I get it.

My heart's fine.

When I feel like it's, you know, blowing out of my chest, I'll stop doing blow.

No, I don't.

Whoa, the guy.

He's wooing.

Getting applause.

Actually, I agree with you about the eye watch, but my reason for not wanting an eye watch is because the idea of having perpetual notifications.

So every time you get a text or an email being notified,

my concern is that if Steve Jobs actually had an eye watch, maybe he would never have invented Apple.

Because he always said that his best ideas came after Zen meditation.

He said after he could put all his distractions away and really be by himself, we have become very acidic acid.

He said that was great.

He did.

I think Apple's difficulty is that the reaction to this is that it hasn't been seen as that kind of pivotal moment where it's generated a huge amount of buzz and everyone's like, I've got to go out and get one right now.

But does anybody notice they're trying to go in a circle and reconvince us that stuff that we got past and that we invented better stuff about that we need again?

They're now selling bigger phones.

I thought they were trying to get the phones real tiny, and now they want big screens, and now they want us to wear watches.

That's exactly what they do with clothes: wide lapels, small lapels, skinny ties, fat ties, because they want to sell you new shit.

And that people fall for it.

But I think that

the eye watch is more problematic because we've reached a point where the shower is the only place where kind of we can be alone without a smartphone.

And

that's why some of the best ideas come up with the shower.

I bet any minute now the iWatch is going to be shower proof.

And that's going to be the end of that.

Do you know that 20% of young people actually

use a smartphone during sex?

It's insane.

No.

Some survey that I totally believe in.

We can maybe do do that.

What are they doing on it?

No, meaning that they are checking texts and emails during sex.

Because, you know, come on, sex by itself is too boring.

But, you know, now imagine with eyewatch, it would be so much easier.

You know, you can just look like that, nobody would know.

Ariana, you can't fall for everything the Huffington Post tries to get you to click.

Anyway.

I mentioned in the monologue that the Republican Party has a new star, Tom Cotton, because he wrote this letter disrespecting Obama.

There he is, 37 years old.

And, you know, nothing works for the Republicans like disrespecting Obama.

And of course, like two days after he did this, Fox News is all about this guy should be running for president yesterday.

But he has competition in the Republican Party.

Apparently, there's a guy, Cletus McClintock, who's running in Iowa.

And we got a hold of his campaign ad.

Would you like to see it?

I'm sure you would.

Run Cletus McClintock's ad, if you would.

Some people think disrespecting President O'Bummer means wagging your finger in his face, or screaming, you lie at him when he's speechifying, or writing a letter to the Moolahs in Iran.

But have any of these people ever mooned the presidential motorcade?

Well, I have.

I'm Congressman Cletus J.

McClintock, and I don't want to brag, but I've done more to embarrass this administration than Joe Biden.

I put a flaming bag of poo on the White House steps.

I once taped a sign on the president's back that said Antichrist.

I've spitting his beer.

And I apologize whenever I send an email about him that isn't racist.

And at the receiving line of a recent state dinner, I kicked Obama straight in the nuts.

So vote for me, Cletus J.

McClintock.

Because when the White House phone rings at 3 a.m.,

well, it's probably me crank calling Obama.

Cletus J.

McClintock.

Faith, play,

fuck you.

All right, he is my generation's greatest actor who co-produced, co-wrote, and stars in the new film The Gunman Opening on March 20th.

Sean Penn is over here.

Sean Penn, what a pleasure to finally meet you.

You know everybody here, right?

Okay.

Now I forgot to, I should have mentioned there, you are, Oscar Wood.

You have two Oscars, right?

I do.

Where do you keep them?

Now, I like to ask actors who have Oscars, where do you keep your Oscars, Sean?

I knew where they were until a few days ago because I'm showing the house, so I had them.

You're selling your house?

Yeah.

Well, I'm showing, we'll see.

We'll see what the offer is.

But where did you used to keep them?

There's a closet.

off the dining room.

So your Oscars are in a closet, unlike some of the actors in this town.

So I was reading your resume, Sean.

You are amazing.

You have probably done more than any other human being for Haiti and the situation there.

We all remember

you and the rowboat of Katrina when people were drowning there.

You were helping them.

You went to Pakistan after the floods there.

You got that guy, Jacob Ostreicher, the guy who wouldn't shut up that night at your house,

single-handedly got him him out of prison in Bolivia.

I wouldn't say single-handedly, but you got him out.

We're happy to see him come out.

And you're also an actor, it seems.

Now, Sean, you do realize that there is no heaven.

So all these acts are going to have to be their own reward.

Do you realize that?

That's why I'm collecting them now.

Well, you wrote something, or answered something interesting in the UK Esquire this week when you were talking about going to all these places, these unfortunate places.

And you said, I have exposed a very strong ego to those worlds and it doesn't play, which is a great feeling.

What is that?

What do you mean by that?

Well, I think that, you know, I think

there's a level of truth and self-effacement to it on a personal side, but

that which we carry if we come from a country of relative comfort.

and go into circumstances where most of the people have never seen or experienced comfort on any level,

that

one learns to carry themselves in a way that starts to feel very liberating from the white noise we create for ourselves here.

And so I'd be...

Because they don't care who you are, right?

It's that, but it's also...

They don't like that.

It's also...

They hate that.

You do, yeah.

I think there's this thing,

and it certainly impacts policy decisions.

which is a lack of perspective, a lack of context, and so the way that we would typically assume our culture to most benefit, those things we would even assume create happiness and so on.

We do it with you know with the expectation of the of the West and of America.

And when you travel and you see the diversity of need or the diversity of the way people experience those needs and the kinds of

what actually creates what politics should be defining, which is quality of life.

It kind of clarifies for you what to be looking for in your own life here.

And I think that that's been probably the greatest benefit of travel.

And it's that thing

we talk about.

Yeah, it gives you a lot.

Yeah, and that's one of the things.

You know, President Bush, former President Bush having been one of the great poster children of lack of curiosity, who

virtually didn't use his passport.

Right.

And we have only about, I think there are only about 30% Americans who carry, who have passports.

Right, they don't need them.

Why should you?

Sean's the greatest country in the world.

Why would I want to go anywhere else?

Yeah, well some of it's economic of course.

Or number one.

Yeah.

And everything.

I haven't looked it up, but it feels right.

Yeah, I hope that's not true.

I'm Clintis McClintock, by the way.

So, all right.

Now, I want to relate this a little bit to something we both care about.

Before I do, I should not forget to plug your movie because I watched it this week, and it's it's really great.

The Gunman.

It reminds me of like a 70s movie and I say, I hope you consider that a compliment.

I do.

It is a compliment because it's like

a thriller, an action thriller, but it's intelligent.

You know, it's not like so many of these movies that are just killing people.

And you do kill a lot of people, which is great.

I've never seen you kill people at this clip.

Did you enjoy killing people?

I did.

Yeah, it's so much fun to kill people because we all have frustrations.

But

it's really an entertaining movie.

Are you happy?

Yeah, it's quite.

This director, Pierre Morrell, has a very deft hand in this territory, this filmmaking territory.

Right, he did the Liam Neeson

franchise.

So you know there's going to be some badass shit coming.

That's right.

That's right.

Okay.

All right.

So

I really want to relate this.

this what you were just saying back to something that's very dear to my heart which is political uh correctness because you said at the Oscars, and I texted you, I love this, when you gave out the best director,

what's his name, Alejandro?

Yes, okay.

And you said,

who gave this son of a bitch a green card?

And of course you got worlds of shit.

And I just feel like we're living in this country now where no one can make a joke, no one can have any nuance to what they say.

We are just constantly hounded by the politically correct assholes out there who want to turn this country into a place that I don't want to live in.

Yeah,

I think what it is is we've got, you know, the town hall has been expanded with the internet and with Twitter and all of the social media.

A lot of that is good.

It's as good as those who listen and bring compromise and bring solutions to town halls.

But as we know, most town halls are dominated by those that want to hear the sound of their own voice

and so it gives them something to do

I don't think it's worse than religion it's about

single nothing is but I mean

but I see here's where I'm trying to relate it When I read those things that you did, you'd went to Katrina, you went to Pakistan, you went to Haiti.

You actually are somebody who does something.

I think most of these people on the internet, they've never done anything good in their life.

And they want to to feel like they're the good people.

And the way they feel like they're the good people is they find somebody who's the bad people.

I'm a good person.

I got rid of Donald Sterling.

What a great victory for humanity.

I think there's also become a kind of common sense connection with that which will find a support group.

So people,

when a certain language is used and whether or not it's in an ironic context,

if it's latchonable in terms of that criticism, they will go there because they know they are joining a family and a gang.

Right.

And they'll have approval for a moment and feel human.

All right.

So you've been to Iraq and Iran, right?

Let's talk about Iran.

Let's all talk about Iran.

There's a question that's been asked since the Republicans took over, which is can they govern?

I would say no.

And this letter to the Iranian leadership that was sent by the 47 Republicans this week, I mean, was called by not just liberals, but the Daily News called it traitors.

Listen to this.

The Senate historian's office looked into trying to find another example where one party was trying to deal with a foreign policy against the policy of the president.

They could not.

If this was a Democratic

Congress doing this to a Republican president.

Can you guys honestly tell me?

I can, yeah.

And I think that letter was a mistake, but I tell you, Nancy Pelosi, as Speaker of the House, 2007, with Bashar al-Assad in Syria and Damascus, said that Damascus is the road to peace, as the Syrian regime was providing essentially safe haven to al-Qaeda and Iraq cells who were killing American soldiers.

You think that's an equivalency?

As Speaker of the House, I do.

Yes, I do.

I don't defend the letter, but I do think...

You're a Speaker of the House, you're third in line to the presidency, and you go and tell Bashar al Assad, who has killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Sinners.

Was he not our ally at that time?

No.

No.

What year is this?

2007.

But here we are in a situation where even John McCain has acknowledged this was a mistake.

This is a situation where John McCain said that they were in a hurry, there was a snowstorm, they were trying to get home.

So they just kind of signed this letter.

So not even the people who signed it are defending it anymore.

This was a sort of a nightmarish situation which I think absolutely proves that Republicans are not ready to govern at the moment.

All right, I think you're going to disagree with me, but I'll go ahead and say, I feel like you could argue it both ways, and I can see arguments on both sides, but I feel like what they did as a co-equal branch of government is equivalent to what the president did in deciding he had a moral imperative to go it alone on things that are important to him that Congress may not agree with.

You either think that the president is right in doing that and that Congress did the same thing, that they have an equal right, or you think that Congress is wrong and that the president, as a co-equal branch of government, also should be wrong to take that association.

But actually, in this case, they're not a co-equal branch of government.

It's very clear that they got it wrong.

Congress is a co-equal branch of government.

The executive instance, the Senate, does not ratify treaties.

You know, they said that it takes a lot of time.

They're not ratifying a treaty.

They're just going to say that.

It was absolutely wrong.

When a young William Jefferson Clinton was at Oxford and protesting the Vietnam War and then later ran for President of the United States, they said that he was a traitor for protesting from foreign shores.

And the moment that that letter arrived in Tehran, they were protesting from foreign shores.

And in fact,

I think that where we should be looking at this is not in terms of treason, but mutiny.

And I think perhaps criminal mutiny.

Can I ask this question?

I mean, I saw Lindsey Graham, I think, on Meet the Press, one of those shows, and they asked him if he feared Iran more than ISIS.

And he clutched his pearls, as he always does,

and said, absolutely, it's not even close.

And this idea that Iran is not just an adversary, but the incarnate of evil,

an enemy, not an ad an enemy forever.

And I just think that's wrong.

I mean,

I'm not naive about Iran.

They do some crazy, almost always Muslim shit.

Vice has a great episode coming up about gays in Iran.

I mentioned it there.

They're illegal.

They hang them.

And therefore, lots of gay people, what's the solution?

They have a sex change operation.

There's their solution to being gay.

Cut your dick off.

Okay, but lots of Muslim countries do shit like that.

It's not a deal breaker for America in Saudi Arabia, lots of other places.

This idea that Iran, which also, unlike many Muslim countries, has a sophisticated population, that we could bring over to a more reasonable place,

to treat them the way we treat them just seems terribly wrong and stupid.

My question is.

Why is anybody still listening to Lindsey Graham?

Why is there no statute of limitations on stupidity?

There isn't.

Going back to 2003, I went back and saw what he was saying on Meet the Press then.

And he was so cheerleading the war.

He kept saying, of course, Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction.

All the same stuff that he's saying now about Iran, without any reservation, he was saying about Iraq.

And he doesn't see the connection between what we did in Iraq and how that strengthened Iran, and how, of course, the way that ISIS was

created was because of the complete failure of having a political solution in Iraq.

As we come to this country, point, I'm skeptical about the nuclear deal.

But the military option, I think it's real, I think it has to be considered, and I know a lot of people don't, but it's a bad option ultimately.

If we can get diplomacy to work, we should try that.

Because the consequences of the-

But here's the thing.

But that doesn't mean, and I know you're saying it as well, that you know, be astute to Iran's relationship, but the Iranian political strategy, as much as we should absolutely be trying to empower those people under 30, they're educated, connected with the West population of Iran, we also have to be astute to the hardline.

I mean, Qasem Soleimani, who's the leader of the Quds Force, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards External Action Unit, in Iraq at the moment, they essentially have displaced the government in Iraq, that they are attempting to expand their own frontiers.

You see what they do in Beirut, for example, car-bombing politicians who don't agree with them.

The problem that that causes, and why it relates back to us, and it's not just a Muslim-on-Muslim issue, is that it feeds into the narrative that empowers groups like the Islamic State, al-Qaeda, because it feeds a sense of Sunni disenfranchisement.

So they go to war, and there's the nuclear issue.

But that's that's already happened.

I mean, the line in the letter that got the Iranians very angry was, you may not fully understand our constitutional system.

Very condescending.

They do.

The people who don't are the Republicans in our own government.

Marco Rubio.

Spent a whole day before I saw him.

He doesn't understand ISIS.

He doesn't get it that the people who are fighting now, basically on our side, are the Iranians.

We're both fighting ISIS.

The people who are trying to take over to Crete, it's mostly Iranian soldiers.

The general is right there.

But they are trying to take it over.

Exactly.

Thanks to us invading.

I know, but Iraq, but it won't stop there.

That's the problem.

The problem is that we got rid of Saddam Hussein.

I would disagree with that, but

that is a

line of argument that you unleash the bottleneck.

But also the problem is that the implication of this letter is that if there is a Republican in the White House next, they are going to go to war with Iran.

And there is absolutely no accountability for how they're going to pay for it or what that means.

It's like

we've spent about $4 trillion

on the two wars, Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention what we're spending on the vets.

So now it's like, now we want to ask them, how are you going to pay for war with Iran?

You know, it's not North Korea.

They have malls with Nike stores.

You've been there, right?

Maybe not to the Nike store, but...

North Korea, no.

Not North Korea, but Iran.

I mean, I know people who have been there.

It's not.

No, in fact, it's a country that during the time of the Iran-Iraq war, where they lost a million of their, principally men.

And out of a population of about 50, 55 million at that time, that's an enormous number.

And that's really where the division line is in the generations.

So now, as the Israelis and some of these members of Congress will often say these are the least trustworthy, the pressure is on because the generation of incredible progressive thinking, some of the most

progressive thinking in terms of separation of church and state you will ever find is in the young people on Tehran University.

And lots of

alienate that.

Right.

And the military option, of course, a military option is always perceived, very dangerously perceived,

as a winnable military option.

But in this case, of course, we're also talking about something that's much bigger than a conversation of ISIS versus Iran.

It has to finally do with regional dynamics and nuclear proliferation issues.

If the Waziristan boys decide to do it again in Mumbai, you've got two nuclear countries against each other.

So when you have an executive branch

negotiating on that highest level for 47 senators to do this is to risk our children's lives.

All right.

I know you probably want to respond, but I am out of time, thank you, panel.

But it is time for new rules, everybody.

Just now let's have them.

All right.

New rule, you don't have to ask me if I want to skip this ad.

Yes.

Hello, I'm at work.

I'm spending all morning watching porn,

Russian car crash videos, and a turtle fucking shoe.

And you expect me to take time out of my busy day to watch your ad?

You see the irony.

Okay, um

New Rule, if Secret Service agents are going to get drunk and crash their car into the White House, they at least have to try to hit one of the nuts jumping the fence.

I don't know what's more embarrassing, the accident itself, or the fact that they were so drunk they accidentally locked their hookers in the car.

New rule, name your baby Gary.

Last year, fewer than 450 boys in America and only 28 in England were named Gary.

It's almost extinct.

And what's wrong with Gary?

Gary's the guy at Enterprise who upgraded you to a Chevy Malibu.

Gary's the roadie who checked the mics at the White Snake Reunion Tour.

And who fled to Southeast Asia so he could continue having sex with underage girls?

Gary Glitter.

Gary, it's a great name.

Do something about it.

New rule, in order to advance the cause of racial progress in America, the police have to shoot an unarmed white man.

Doesn't matter who, just pull up to a Pete's or a coffee bean.

Ask the first guy you see coming out the door to prove he paid for that chai tea latte.

And when he reaches in his pocket for the receipt, kill him.

I mean, it's not like he had a choice.

He could have been going for a gun.

Neural, now that Apple is selling a $17,000 version of their new iWatch, they have to start making cocaine.

They can call it iBlow.

blow.

You'll wonder how you ever got anything done without it.

And finally, new rules.

Someone has to explain to me why Republicans believe that not working and getting free money, you know, like the takers,

is the worst, most corrupting thing that could ever happen to a person, except if you're rich.

The very first thing our new Republican Congress tried to do was get rid of any tax on inherited wealth, which call the death tax.

Although, really, what better time is there to pay a tax than when you're dead?

Yeah, we used to understand that, and the estate tax used to be pretty high.

But then, President George W.

Bush came along and

worked tirelessly to make sure that rich, idle, trust fund brats got every penny that was coming to them.

I wonder where he got the idea to reward dumbasses who leech off their dad's success.

Well,

it is true if there's one thing that really chaps the conservative ass, it's the idea of people getting money for nothing and chicks for free.

Paul Ryan says, we have a culture of men not working.

generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value in the culture of work.

Yes, so true.

Like, for example, this douchebag.

This is the youngest heir to the Hilton Hotel fortune.

Paris Hilton's brother, Conrad Hughes Fuckface Hilton III.

Who last year was on a flight from London when he get this, tried to smoke pot and cigarettes up to 20 times in the bathroom, disabled the smoke detector, physically fought with the flight crew, and then told them, I could get you all fired in five minutes.

I know your boss.

And when told he was upsetting the other passengers, he said, I will own fucking anyone on this flight.

They are fucking peasants.

And when the crew finally had to physically restrain him, he said, My father will pay this out.

He's done it before.

Kind of makes you think, why can't we book this kid on a Malaysian airline?

And before you say, but Bill, every kid who inherits money doesn't become an entitled jerk, let me give you two names.

Donald Trump.

Who once said, what I find so morally offensive about welfare dependency is it robs people of the chance to improve.

Again, so true.

Republicans are right.

Not having to work and getting free money does mess people up.

That's why they love to talk about work, the virtue of work, the right to work, work fair, the dignity that comes with work.

In fact, there's only one thing conservatives believe in more than work, and that's the God-given right of rich people to leave all their money to their kids so they never have to work a day in their lives.

I mean, think about it.

Republicans are on board with taxing people's income, their investments, property, food, gas, booths, cigarettes, everything you buy, even your retirement.

Those are all okay.

But the one thing that must remain tax-free is when money falls from the sky and lands in the lap of fuckface Hilton.

But, you know, if the tough love of cutting off free money for the poor is the right thing to do, how can we stand by?

and do any less for the Conrad Hiltons of the world.

They've never known the dignity of work either.

Shouldn't we be helping them by taxing inheritance at 100%?

What about poor Kylie Jenner?

When she turned 16, she got a $125,000 Mercedes and crashed it into some other motorist who didn't understand she was in a hurry.

And here she is this week, a month after her father's deadly accident, texting while driving.

There's got to be some way to get her off the road and into a minimum wage job at Hot Dog on a Stick.

And then there's little Ethan Couch.

He's the Texas teenager who killed four pedestrians while driving drunk and pled, I'm not kidding about this, a condition called affluenza.

Yes, affluenza, which basically says he didn't know boundaries because his rich parents didn't give him any.

And it worked.

He got off.

So ask your doctor if being rich is right for you.

Thank you, folks.

That's our show.

I'll be at the Ulster Performing Arts Center in Kingston, New York, June 6th.

Sand Center at Bethlehem PA, June 7th.

Dreyfus Hall, the Performing Arts in West Palm Beach, June 13th.

I want to thank Tom Rogan, Cheryl Atkinson, Ariana Hubbington, Sean Penn, Annie Clark, and Andrea Pino.

Join us now at Overtime.

Thank you.

All new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 11 or watch him anytime on HBO On Demand.

For more info, log on to hbo.com.