Bill Maher, host of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, discussed the outcome of the election with Chris Matthews Wednesday night on Hardball.
On his show last week, Maher had declared that whoever won the result would be good news. “It is your choice, America, because for me it’s a win-win,” he said Friday night. “If it’s Obama, America wins. If it’s Romney, comedy wins.”
Maher told Matthews that the Democrats’ victory proof that America was still looking for change — not in the form of the president himself, but in the way Washington works together.
“I made fun of the Democratic slogan, ‘forward.’ But at the end of the day, people who don’t follow this very closely like we do, just came down to, ‘Yeah, ‘forward.’ I’m not crazy about him, but let’s keep moving forward,’” Maher said.
Along with the presidential election, the two discussed super PACs and advertising, legalizing marijuana, and Donald Trump’s call to conservatives to rally in Washington against the president.
“This guy only two years ago was apolitical,” Maher said about Trump. “I didn’t even know what party he was. I don’t know if he knew what party he was. Now he wants to march on Washington? So…it’s not democracy when your candidate loses?”
Maher had previously criticized Trump for his attacks on Obama, calling him “a racist who doesn’t know he’s a racist.”
More from the Hardball interview… On the problem with the conservative right: “Republicans have to start getting their information from a better source than Fox News. I’m not kidding about this. I think this really screws them up…They believed it right up until the end. They were shocked by this election. They have to somehow fix the way they get information, because they only talk to each other and they don’t know what’s going on in the real world. They were rudely awakened [Tuesday] night.” On Rep. Michele Bachmann’s re-election: “It’s very hard to unseat any incumbents. That’s one of the problems we have in this country: people are always complaining about Congress and they hate it and they give it a 9% approval rating, and they they vote the same people back in every time.” On liberty: “This is really American moving forward, and what I find so ironic is that the people who hate this — the Tea Party people who want to restore America and have the country go backward, they’re always the ‘liberty’ people. They’re always talking about liberty and ‘don’t tread on me.’ This is liberty. Liberty is deciding what I put in my body, how I want to get high, who I want to marry, who I want to be with. This is actual liberty. They just don’t get it.”
Traci Lee Recommended
