Real Time with Bill Maher - Overtime - Episode #443:

Episode Date: November 4, 2017

Bill and his guests – Col. Jack Jacobs, Rob Reiner, Christina Bellantoni, Jeffrey Lord, and Graeme Wood – answer viewer questions after the show. (Originally aired 11/3/17) 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... Rob Reiner, is there anything new, anything in the newly released JFK files that surprised you? Well, not yet, because they haven't really released the new JFK files.

They're waiting until April, and I think that the CIA is going to do some... They're getting out there, SOS and Brillow Pads. They're doing some scrubbing. Are you on the page that it was a conspiracy? or that it was a lone gun? No, I don't believe that Oswald could have done this by himself. Everything that I've studied...

I mean, I've been looking at this for 50 years now, and I've read everything that's conceivable and every bit of forensic and all of that. In my opinion, there's no way in a million years. This guy could have done it by himself. Okay. Rob, what is the aim of your group, the committee to investigate Russia?

Well, the main aim of it is to let people, know the gravity of the situation and what the Russians were able to accomplish. I don't know if you saw James Clapper. He's one of our advisors on the advisory board. He's the former head of the director of national intelligence. And he is not given to, you know, hyperbole or anything like that. But he is, I mean, if he had any hair, it'd be on fire. But he basically said that he's never seen anything quite like this kind of security breach.

and the fact that we don't have a leader, our president, who is acknowledging it, is making us very, is making us unsafe. And going forward, we need to let people know how important this is. So I think, I personally think that our democracy is at stake because we're being eroded. Oh, yeah. Colonel, Jack Jacobs, what do you make of Trump's efforts to overhaul? the VA?

Well, he hasn't made any effort to overhaul the VA. You're looking at somebody who believes that it's kind of weird to have a parallel system of medical care, which is very, very expensive and not particularly efficient. I think if you've served in the military and you've got an honorable discharge, here's your Medicare card, you can go anywhere you want, and that's the end of it. That's all we're talking. What about the rest of them? When we get that, you're in trouble.

Somebody wants to tell me, says, well, it's okay with you. You've been in the Army, and so you get free medical care. I said, if I hadn't been in the Army, I wouldn't need any damn medical care. That's right. Lucky you with your purple hearts and your medal of honor. It always seems to me too that veterans are like an afterthought.

Like, you talk about them right before the election, and you hear people say, like, we really want to support the veterans and bring them out of the convention. But there's not, like, a really set plan for addressing things that we know are. No, and there won't be. You know, there is not a constituency among veterans. We have a relatively small number of people who have served. Most Americans don't know anybody in uniform.

We have one-half and one percent of the American public in uniform. We've effectively outsourced the defense of the Republic to a very small number of young men and women who are willing to do that. So there's not a natural constituency. I'm not surprised nothing has ever done. Do you find it disturbing that almost half of Republicans say they want Trump to attack North Korea? Do they really? Yeah, 46% say. Let's go.

Well, they should suit up and go do it themselves. Graham, what is it that causes young American men to abandon their comfortable lives and go fight with ISIS? Yeah, I mean, we see this time and time again, which is why it's so hard to detect,

that a person is really living a parallel life. One side of their brain is living a typical American life. Very often the wife doesn't even know. Often they're actually really comfortable, too. It's not just that they're not lacking food, they're not lacking even jobs in many cases.

But it's almost like it's a hobby that grows out of hand. You know, some of the people I've spoken to, some of the people I've looked into, they have... A hobby. They should take up stand collecting. It's almost as if it's like a video game hobby where they're sitting in their basements, they're working on

being the top of this video game, but the video game is global jihad. And they don't even... They don't tell their They just suddenly... Is that a real thing? The video game? No, the global jihad is real, but the video game is just like the kind of subculture

that they're part of. And then they get this idea in their head that maybe they've been bad. Maybe they've... The same kind of... Right, they kind of want to pun it. They feel guilty. Yeah.

See, that's the clash of cultures. Right, we have democracy. But they're doing it. They're atoning for that guilt. The recruitment starts with saying, you're a bad guy. You drank alcohol. You gambled.

Guess what? There's a way out, and it starts with getting a suicide vest and going to Syria. Not Alcoholics Anonymous, that's for sure. Oh, yay. Okay. Christina, should Diane Feinstein take her primary challengers seriously? Diane Feinstein, our senator here. I'm glad somebody asked that.

That's a super interesting question. First off, her primary challengers are going against her for two comments that were put in a 70-minute conversation that have been boiled down to, like, six words. We should have patience with Donald Trump, and he can be. be a good president. She went on and on and on and gave a lot of context, which we at the LA Times have been covering. But, you know, look, this is a democracy. Anybody has an opportunity to run in this race? And I think that that question, you could have asked the same thing, shouldn't Hillary Clinton have just gone unchallenged in 2008, right? I mean, everybody was a

better politician for having a contested primary, which ultimately led to Barack Obama's president. So, yeah, she should take them seriously. She has a ton of money. She's got institutional support. We have a poll coming out soon that I imagine she's going to have strong support here in California for re-election, but like anything is possible. And there are not just one challenger. She's got three on the left challengers and probably more and a lot of small challengers. So the question will be, will she debate all of them? Yeah, I mean, she's been a fine senator, and it's not the age issue. You know, I'm very anti-ageist.

She's strong. She's still really strong. Well, she wasn't on that. And experienced. You know. Right. She said something that was inartful, but she's also got a lot of experience. I just think the Democratic Party needs new blood. Fresh blood. And people know how to

fight! They don't have people who know how to fight. They don't go for the jugular. They get rolled every time. I think both parties need that. Neither party has good leadership. They do. You think the Republicans don't have to go for the jugular? No, they don't have any leadership. They're all

fragmenting. I would say working with Russia is going for the jugular. That would be, you know, my view of that one. But if that's what you've got to do in order to get into office, you've got big problems. And then once you're in office and you can't get anything

accomplished, you have no leadership in the United States. The real problem. They're getting plenty accomplished. The real problem. Getting plenty of confidence. Having banning government, when your party's in power for eight years in the White House, it's like a thermometer. The energy level drops.

Right? And meanwhile, the people out, Republican or Democrat, are building up. I think that what you've got here with Senator Feinstein is, she's been around for so long, she is fine senator in that sense for California. But she has been around for so long that she's just,

people are looking at her and saying, I think it's time. And I think that every politician faces that if they said too long. Suggesting low T is her problem? Or they think it's their own time. It's not necessarily that they're saying it's her time's over, it's they're saying it's now is our time. Like we're in our 40s or 50s.

Well, then go. Then go. and sign up and try to beat her. I mean, you know, if you can beat her, you're fine. I saw her the other day. She was pretty damn good against that, the person from Facebook and saying, we're not going to let you get away with this. She was pretty tough.

And she's the one of the toughest on gun control of any senator in power in the Senate. She's saying very little. But can I push back a little on this idea that Trump isn't accomplishing anything? He's accomplishing a lot of stuff. We just don't hear about it because he distracts us with bullshit.

about the anthem and whatever the fuck, the war widow and this over. Everybody's talking about that for a week. And meanwhile, very slowly, they undo everything Obama ever did. They passed the bill where people can't sue the banks. You know, trying to repeal Obamacare and sabotaging

that. The EPA. They're accomplishing lots of horrible things every day. Terrorizing immigrants. I mean, believe me, they're accomplishing. Assholes. And that's where we should keep our eye on. Final question, don't applaud.

I know how you feel about this. Should Twitter kick Donald Trump off... I know how you feel about it. Kick like its... Well, but then, you know, this is the old thing. He's not going to be president. Please, Jesus, forever. So what happens when the next president says something

somebody else doesn't like? So should they kick Trump off the platform like its rogue employee did? for 11. I don't think they should kick anybody. I agree. You can't start down that road. Who has access, right? Here's the thing. His Twitter has the ability to move markets, the ability to piss

off dictators, the ability to, you know, cause a lot of... That's true. Chaos, positive or negative, however you feel about it. So who has access to that? And who could send a tweet that could make Kim Jong-il do something like bat-shit crazy? Like, that's what's scary to me about that, the security level of how someone could just turn off

the president. What's real significant is not what's happening now with respect to that, but what you think is going to happen in the future. We're in the middle of the biggest revolution of the distribution of information since the invention of the printing press. And we're less informed. And we are less informed. I defy anybody to roll the tape forward and predict what's going to happen five years ago from this big, big problem insoluble. Okay. Thank you, panel. Thank you, audience. I appreciate everything. Join us next week. Watch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10 or watch them anytime on HBO On Demand.

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