Real Time with Bill Maher - Overtime - Episode #417: Correspondents Dinner, GOP vs Trump, Climate Science

Episode Date: March 4, 2017

Bill and his guests - Jeffrey Lord, Bill McKibben, Rosa Brooks, Charlie Sykes, and Joy Reid - answer viewer questions after the show. (Originally aired 3/3/17) See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late-night series Real Time with Bill Moore. Okay, okay. Do you think, Jeff, do you think that Donald Trump made the right decision by skipping the White House correspondence dinner? Oh, something we're going to agree on.

I do. Do you? Absolutely. It's bullshit. Who gives a shit? Here's my thing. You know, this is all about scholarships for kids. They pick a lot of kids

who are liberals from liberal colleges. So basically, they're using him. to fundraise to create future generations of liberal journalists. So the Correspond's dinner is a charity. It fundraises for journalists. Young journalists. And that's great. I'm all for that.

But, you know, there needs to be a little balance. First of all, that's not a charity. It always pisses me off that everything, colleges are not a charity either. People you can give to your Harvard as an endowment of $12 trillion, and you can write that off. And also, it's a dumb thing, the correspondent dinner. Have you been? I've been to it. Yes.

You know, take Kardashians go and some sitcom actors. It's just nothing. And they don't air the scholarship part of it. I mean, it is a scholarship dinner, which I didn't even know until the first time that I went. And I sort of even soured on it, even though I went because, you know, quite frankly, it was sort of historic because you have Barack Obama

and you want to go and see him, you know, do this in person. But I went the year that Baltimore was exploding. And here we are at this fancy dress ball. I'm joking. Right. And outside of that hotel where we, unbeknownst to any, of us while we were laughing at jokes, Baltimore was on fire. I grew up...

And so that made me sour on it a bit. I grew up, Joy, believing that journalists were supposed to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, not hobnob with the... Right, yes. Well said. I agree. Good news this year, the same day when we're no longer going to the White House Correspondent Association, that's the day, April 29th, there are going to be several hundred thousand climate demonstrators in D.C. So there'll be something for all those journalists to do. to do.

They can go to that. Rosa, do you think drones are an effective weapon in the war on terror? It depends how you use them. I mean, that's sort of like asking whether I think guns are an effective weapon in the war on terror.

You can use them to do smart things. You can use them to do stupid things. Mostly, I think, in the last 15 years, particularly the last eight, we've used them kind of stupidly. Really? You think Obama used them stupid? Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, the one and only thing

I will agree with Michael Flynn on is that when you look at the results of this whack-a-mole approach to counterterrorism. We managed to take a situation where we more or less doubled the number of active terrorist groups and tripled the geographic spread of terrorist groups. You know, I think that that's extremely ineffective. It's probably given more strength to terrorist recruiting efforts than anything else, partly because it kills civilians, which is, to some extent, unavoidable in a war, obviously, but also, you know, even the terrorists have friends and relatives and so on, and it pisses people off.

Oh, yes. Okay, Charlie, at what point do you think Republican leaders like Paul Ryan will stand up to Donald Trump? Oh, good luck, waiting for the... Yeah. You know, that was actually painful watching Paul Ryan, you know, standing and applauding while, you know, Donald Trump was laying out all of his spending plans, you know, watching the Vichy Republicans, you know, showing that they have been completely taken over. I mean, you know, it's been painful, actually, to watch the absolute capitulation of the... conservative movement in the Republican Party to Donald Trump. I mean, it's a laugh.

Didn't you love their matching tie? He and pens. Yeah, I was going to wear the blue tie. But, you know, at some point, they're going to have to say, I'm not going to continue taking the bullets for this guy. But I don't know. You know, this has been the rolling, this has been the rolling process of the last year. You know, you have the full-out collaborationists like you, Mr. Lord.

And then you have the Vichy Republicans, like, you know, like, you know, Some of us who feel that the Vichy Republicans were on Capitol Hill all this time, cooperating and not pushing forward with their agenda as they promised they would when they were elected. Which agenda is that these days? You mean 50 times trying to vote to repeal Obam wasn't enough? When they had the power of the purse, they didn't use it. They didn't use it. So now you have the power of the purse.

You're going to spend out of the purse. So, you know. And they're going to clap like trains. Watching conservatives go, you know, we have to be, you know, fiscally conservative. We have to be ideologically pure. And then they go and they embrace. Well, that's what was happening with the issue Republican. Well, the Cheetahe-O-Jesus, you know, and he's going to do...

But let's not have this... So I don't know. This Republican on Republican violence. But what is going to happen with this budget fight? I mean, it looks so much like Reagan. Defense build up. We don't cut entitlements. And we have a big tax cut.

And, of course, George Bush was the first called that voodoo economics. and, of course, it did run up the debt. Reagan did run up the debt. That's undeniable. Those are facts. It just looks like that's happening again. Do we just have amnesia about that? Ronald Reagan did not have control of the purse

with the tip O'Neill and Jim Wright who control the house. Well, that's the way this works. When Newt Gingrich became Speaker, he got together with Bill Clinton and said we are going to cut spending. They did do it, and it did balance the budget. You've got to have control of the purse.

which is how they bounce the budget, but they raise taxes. I mean, that is how Bill could. Not that. Which got no, which got no Republican votes, zero votes. No, and put the economy. Not back to the 70% it was under Ronald. No, who's going to raise taxes back to 70%. The other thing, the thing that worries,

I don't think Republicans will ever turn on Trump because Paul Ryan has made it pretty clear that he is going to use Trump's right hand as he right-handed to get the things that Paul Ryan wants. And Paul Ryan essentially wants to repeal the 20th century. He wants to privatize Social Security. if you can, gut Medicare, gut Medicaid, gut food stamps, essentially throw the poor onto the mercy of charities and churches,

turn everything into a fistful of vouchers. A voucher for you to go to school, which you're now going to have to pay for, because Ms. DeVos wants to privatize it, a voucher for you to buy health insurance. Good luck if the voucher isn't enough for you to pay for a policy that can actually help you when you're really sick. And that fistful of voucher strategy, they can throw it on Trump and say, well, Trump signed it.

Seriously, do you really want to bankrupt Social Security? Are you kidding? Social Security. See, that's the biggest myth. that Republicans push. Social Security is not going to be bankrupt. Social Security has a 70-year-old life chance. You say that because you want to privatize it. You guys have been doing that since the past.

You never wanted it. No. Republicans have never wanted it to exist. Haven't. Look, when we got to the 1980s, huh? You don't want it to exist? No, I do want it to get it. Oh, you do?

Heck, I'm going to be on it. But listen, you, you, how much is our debt here? What, $22 trillion? $2.23. Whatever. We, we, no, didn't. He added $8 trillion to this. The point is, if we bankrupt the country, then we are going to do this.

But Donald Trump has given up on cutting the deficit and the debt. He doesn't even talk about the debt. He doesn't even pretend to be a fiscal conservative. He basically said, so here he stands up there and he's going to say, we're not going to touch any of the entitlement programs. Joy and I disagree on this. So, you know. So Donald Trump would Joy agree? Isn't that blessed?

Yes. But, you know, he goes out and he says, yes, but we'll cut foreign aid. Or we're going to cut the national endowment for the guards. Right. These things, big, big, big spending on it. You could not find with a jeweler's hog if you look in the budget. Yeah, it's complete magical thinking. I mean, listening to Trump's speech a couple days ago, I was, you know, we're going to have dying industries.

We'll roar back to life. We will just unleash our dreams and make it happen. I thought, whoa, and Tinkerbell is going to come down too. Lower the oceans. Kind of like Trump University. Well, at least. I know that's a big laugh line for you, slowing the rise of the oceans. It's not funny.

The fact that the oceans are rising and getting not just warmer but more acidic, correct? Did he do it? Of course he did make a start with the Paris Climate Accord. You know how hard that is to get 200 countries to sign on to something? And now your idiot is going to rescind it. But yes, I mean, did he do it? No, he didn't do it in the time. Tommy was in office. Eight years. That's good. Okay. We're talking about carbon in the atmosphere.

It took 200 years to get there. Well, then why did he say he could do it? He didn't say. He said we're going to begin to slow the rise of the oceans. Your guy. And he didn't. He did if you count. Your guy. Your guy wants to speed it up. I mean, this afternoon, this afternoon that one of the things that Obama did that was very smart, was managed to get through the mileage regulations that said that we would be by the middle of the next decade be having 50, averaging 50 miles to the gallon or 54 or whatever for cars. Something that technologically we're completely able to do without any problem. I mean, we live in a world where, say, Norway has announced that all cars will be electric there by within five years. Today,

today it became clear... Isn't that where Nordstrom's is? Today it became clear that the EPA was not only going to gut that, not only going to take back, at the request of the automakers, take that back.

They're talking about taking away the one thing that's really California's particular ability, California is the one state that has its own ability to regulate pollution. But, Jeff, they take that away.

In general, I asked this bill before. We brought it up. You know, you do believe in theory, of course, I'm guessing, of things that we can't see, like germs and atoms. God. Ha-ha. You got me on that one.

Way to throw a monkey right to do that. But germs and atoms, you concede. I would concede. Okay. So, then by that logic, global warming, we can't really see it. But we see its effects all the time. Bill, all I'm saying, I'm a skeptic, not a, I don't say hoax.

But scientists aren't skeptics. Scientists aren't. Bill, this is the problem, as I see it, is that too much politics has infected all sorts of sectors of our society, including science. I want the science. Bill, when I hear the term that 97% of the whatever scientists and have reached a consensus, consensus, Bill, is a political word. It is not a scientific word. There is...

Wait, is there a consensus that the earth is around? It can be both. Whether there is or not, it's a fact. But you do understand that the scientific method is that if you do an experiment a hundred times and you get the same result 99 times, you get a 99% consensus

that this is true. Here's what they mean by consensus. That's what they did, right? Like, when, when Darwin published Origin of the Species in 1859, it was many decades before there was a consensus about it because the other scientists in the world were like, well, that's interesting.

Let's see if we can prove it wrong. That's how science works. And after many decades, they were like, well, we can't. Darwin's right. And now we're at that point with this particular issue. In this case, we were out of a long time ago. Yes, we were out of long time. Listen, good investigative reporting in the last few years has shown that Exxon

knew everything there was to know about climate change by 1977 to 1981. Their scientists were telling their senior management exactly how much it was going to warm, and their senior management was taking it seriously. They began building their drilling rigs to compensate for the rise and sea level they knew would come. Rex Tillerson of Exxon is the one who doesn't want to pull out of the past one. The Exxon guy is our best hope. He's the mad dog Mattis. Who appointed him?

That's a reason. I love this guy. Thank you darn much, everybody. Watch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10, or watch them anytime on HBO on demand. For more information, log on to HBO.com.