Real Time with Bill Maher - Overtime - Episode #455: Family Feuds, Mental Illness, and Learning from our Mistakes

Episode Date: April 7, 2018

Bill and his guests – Geraldo Rivera, Louie Anderson, Max Boot, Heather McGhee, and Eliot Spitzer answer viewer questions after the show. (Originally aired 04/06/18) 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 Maugh. Here we are in overtime. Let's see. We're done good tonight. Louis, do you have any suggestions for keeping a family together in this era of hyper-partisan politics? Well, yeah, I mean, you kind of bridge the divide. You're a Midwestern boy, but you're a steady slicker now. I think, you know, like I visit home, I go back to Minnesota 8 to 10 times a year, which is a lot.

but I work a lot there. But I always see my brothers and sisters all the time. And even the times when you don't have time, you got to check in. And I think it's about checking in and keeping people part of your life. And keep talking, right? I mean, not cut people off.

Keep talking. And even if you're mad at them or they're mad at you, don't let them run away from you and don't let them hide. Okay. Heraldo, after all the work you did exposing mental institutions like Willa Brooke, what do you really think about Trump,

declaring we need to reopen these institutions. I think that there, as Governor Spitzer knows, there's a confusion in the public mind between people who are mentally ill, which includes schizophrenia, post-traumatic stress, you know, bipolar. That's different from my area, which is the developmentally disabled,

the use to call mentally retarded, Down syndrome, autistic, people who were warehoused in institutions, not asylums, but there were warehouses that existed. People forget. Over 5,000 people... Kennedy's put their... And the lobotomy and all the rest of it. It was just horrible, horrible treatment of people.

One has kind of normal IQ and then something off, and those are the people who are, like, running down the street with guns or things that look like guns, and then the developmentally disabled are people whose IQs are below normal, who you want to have as most humane living environment as possible. They're gentle people. They are obviously

very needy, but they can be, you know, get vocational training. They can evolve. They can live longer rather than being in institutions where 60 of them were jammed in a room, naked, smeared with their own feces, unattended, one attendant for 60 people.

So I asked one more Trump thing then. When he did that thing... It was terrible. Okay. It was terrible. Okay. Couldn't help. Yeah, I couldn't help. Max, do you believe that the U.S. has learned from our experience in Vietnam?

Terrific book, by the way. Great book. Great writer. I recommend it highly. Do you believe that the U.S. has learned from our experience in Vietnam or that we are continuing to make many of the same mistakes? Obviously, not in Vietnam, but I assume this person means somewhere else. Unfortunately, I think we continue to make a lot of the same mistakes, and this is a frustration for me as a historical. You can study the history, you can draw the lessons, but getting people to actually internalize them and act upon them is something else.

And for example, today, across the Middle East, when we're fighting the war on terrorism, I think there's a tendency to think, especially on the part of the president, that American bombs and bullets will win the day. And there was a similar tendency in Vietnam to think we could bomb the Viet Cong into submission. General William Westmoreland thought we could kill the Viet Cong faster than they could be replaced. And the guy that I wrote about, Edward Lanslale, said, no, this is never going to work out. The only way to win is to have a viable in-state aid government in South Vietnam that people can actually support. And today, we're not really focused on creating governments that people can support across the Middle East.

We're just focused on bombing and then leaving, and that's not going to be a successful long-term strategy. Yeah, I know he talks about ISIS being annihilated, but they may be annihilated in Syria, but they're just going to take their talents to... South Beach. Well, that's what I was... Right.

But, I mean, in their case, Libya or... No, that's what I was invoking. No, I couldn't know. I mean, remember what happened with al-Qaeda and Iraq? Al-Qaeda in Iraq, which was the predecessor of ISIS, was annihilated by 2011. Then President Obama pulled our troops out of Iraq, a decision I opposed. As a result of that, he created breathing space for ISIS to arise

and to take this vast caliphate across Syria and Iraq. And my concern is that Trump today is going to repeat that very same mistake that he and other Republicans were criticizing not so long ago. Isn't it also true, if I might say, that we always look at our model as the model for other countries, and we have no idea all these tribal things and all these history. And I think we always try to get these people to do things our way, and they don't have what we have to do that.

They define freedom differently. I mean, that was George Bush's big mistake. He was like, everybody loves freedom. We also forget that it's all about religion in the Middle East. We don't understand that the Shiites are different than the Sunnis. We change the order. and the Iraq invasion of O'3 unsettled the society

that had settled. However, maybe unfair, it could be perceived from people in a democratic society. But religion rules in the Middle East. It's been forever. Millennium, it'll be forever. And history that happened 600 years ago

to them is like yesterday. That's not just the Middle East. That's a lot of countries. Yugoslavia, when that place fell apart. You've got to have on the ground understanding, like the guy that I wrote about Ed Lansday, who spent years in the Philippines and Vietnam and really came to understand a society. And he was trying to talk truth to power to generals who thought they could just bomb their way to victory. But today, I see, unfortunately, a similar mindset where, again, there's not in the White House.

You don't see a lot of people who are very worried about the dynamics of tribal society in Iraq or Syria. You know, Trump just wants to, you know, bomb them and then think that we're going to win that way. We have the phrase wag the dog. Other presidents have been accused of starting wars to distract. do you think Trump is above that? No. I think that there's almost nothing that Trump is above, I would say.

The move of the move of the net. Oh, Geraldo. I'll hold him. When you say something like that, what you ignore is we get one president at a time. We get one president at that. When he succeeds, the nation succeeds. When he fails, the nation is failing.

I want to see him succeed. Yeah, so would I. When you alienate yourself from the government, and say nothing they do is worth a shit, then the country... But that's not what we're doing. We're not going to think we don't want him to succeed. What we're saying is that his absence of fact-based decision-making,

and as Geraldo just pointed out... No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, the decision to move the National Guard to the border, I view as a manifestation of a bad week, he wants to distract, he does something that has nothing... Barack Obama did the same thing. No, no, no, no, but not in this moment, not with this... George Bush did the same thing.

No, no, not... With a much higher and not a lot. We all want him to succeed. This guy won't. But by the way... When was the last time you said something nice about it? Ask me that. Ask me that.

When he made the... When Kim Jong-un said, uh, let's meet. And Trump said, great, let's meet. And all the liberals said, that's crazy. And I said, no, you know what? These two guys probably are the two craziest people in the world. They might understand. I also supported...

And I also supported moving the Capitol to Jerusalem. So, believe me, I am perfectly capable of agreeing with him. Another one that's important, the tariffs. You know what? Democrats should stand up and say, you know what, it's time we stood up against China. We should do it as a global coalition, not as

one-off deals. Somebody had to stand up. China was gaming the system. Wait a second. I don't think Democrats ought to be supporting Trump's trying to start a trade war with China. This is not going to work out well. We need to stand up to China on trade. It's about time we did that. But not this way. I said, I said, I said not this massive tariffs. I said, but we need to stand up.

It's a bad time somebody said it? All right, Elliot, what do you think of Republicans deregulating the banks and some Democrats deregulating the banks? Well, here's the thing I'll say. It's been so many years since we had a financial crisis, don't we want one? Yeah. It is the single... Ten years. It's the single most moronic policy move I've seen since moving the National Guard reporter.

It is... I mean, this is... The fact that 10 years after the crisis, we want to go back and recreate the very predicate to the crisis of 08... just makes no sense. Banks are lending. They're lending enough. The economy is booming. Why go back to minimizing

and limiting the amount of capital they need? It's insane. Simply insane. But it's also... I completely agree with you. One of my happiest moments in Washington, D.C., they are few, was when I worked on the Wall Street Reform Bill, sat there at the bill signing,

saw us really try to turn the page from a time when the Wall Street and the banks wrote all of the rules. And the fact is, they still are the biggest donor to Democrats and Republicans in the financial sector. And seeing that list of Democrats that Elizabeth Warren had the guts to call out, that list of Democrats who were just saying, you know what, let's deregulate again, let's go ahead and join with the Republican caucus.

This is why the Democratic Party is not as popular as it needs to be with working in middle class people of all races. All right. Thank you very much, everybody. Thank you, Pattle. We did it again. every Friday night at 10 or watch them anytime on HBO On Demand. For more information, log on to HBO.com.