Right below is the MSNBC video link and below that is the transcript of Bill Maher being interviewed by Chris Matthews on Hardball from Wednesday, September 13.
This is a very interesting interview in my opinion which very candidly talks about why Bush and the GOP are as successful as they are even when they mess up while the Democrats are not very effective at countering their "terror" message!
Please forward this on because ALL Democrats need to seriously think about what was said this interview to be able to better connect their message with more voters while there is still enough time before election day!
Mitch Dworkin
http://www.securinga...
Listen to Gen. Wes Clark fight for Dems on Sean Hannity's radio program:
An excellent example for all of us to follow and what we all need to be doing to help fight against extreme right wing Neocon smear propaganda which will help our local candidates to win their races!
http://securingameri...
Gen. Wes Clark's endorsement of Jim Webb against George Allen
http://www.webbforse...
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MSNBC Video (11:45)
Bill Maher on Bush
Sept. 13: "Hardball" host Chris Matthews talks to Bill Maher, host of "Real Time with Bill Maher."
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'Hardball with Chris Matthews' for Sept. 13
Read the transcript to the Wednesday show
Updated: 10:28 a.m. CT Sept 14, 2006
Guests: Howard Fineman, Chuck Todd, Michael Isikoff, David Corn, Bill Maher, Karen Hanretty, Sidney Blumenthal
MATTHEWS: Welcome back to HARDBALL.
Bill Maher is back in full swing on his HBO show, +óGé¼+ôReal Time with Bill Maher+óGé¼-¥ which airs live Friday nights at 11:00 every Friday night. Here+óGé¼-£s a preview of Bill Maher in action.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BILL MAHER, +óGé¼+ôREAL TIME WITH BILL MAHER+óGé¼-¥: Bad presidents happen to good people.
(APPLAUSE)
MAHER: Amid all the 9/11 anniversary talk about what will keep us safe, let me suggest that in a world turned hostile to America, the smartest message we can send to those beyond our shores is we+óGé¼-£re not with stupid.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MATTHEWS: He+óGé¼-£s funny, he+óGé¼-£s smart and he+óGé¼-£s with us now live from Los Angeles this evening. How are you doing, Bill?
MAHER: Chris, I think your music is too violent.
MATTHEWS: I didn+óGé¼-£t design it. I think John Tesh did it for us. Just kidding. Look, did you watch the president give his speech Monday night?
MAHER: I did.
MATTHEWS: And?
MAHER: Well, I think like most reasonable Americans, I was outraged that he asked for network time to give us a speech that supposed to be non-political, that was just supposed to be, I guess, more wallowing in 9/11, and it turned out to be extremely political.
He tried to jam down our throats one more time that the war on terror is about the war in Iraq, and I think most Americans have heard that. We listened to the speech and we said you know what? We get it. That+óGé¼-£s your opinion. You think the war on terror is the war in Iraq. We+óGé¼-£ve made a judgment. It+óGé¼-£s not, so shut up about it, especially on this day.
MATTHEWS: Who would you+óGé¼GÇ¥the Democrats are out there beating the drum saying they want equal time or they want something like the fairness doctrine brought back. They+óGé¼-£re not going to get that from the FCC, but who would you put out there if you had to pick a big Democrat to match Bush on this point you raise?
MAHER: That+óGé¼-£s a really good question. Maybe somebody+óGé¼GÇ¥you know, first of all, somebody who can talk, can string a sentence together, maybe Joe Biden, John Edwards, somebody like that. I+óGé¼-£m not that crazy about the leadership that they have.
I mean, some of them are right thinking but they+óGé¼-£re not very charismatic. Others are a little more charismatic but they stumble on their words. They don+óGé¼-£t have a lot of stars in the Democratic Party. It+óGé¼-£s true.
MATTHEWS: But isn+óGé¼-£t that the problem, that if you were to give a guy on your show+óGé¼GÇ¥and your show is pretty racy, but if you were to say to one of these mainstream Democrats who got elected to the leadership, here, talk to the American people, regular people right now and tell them why the president is wrong, do you think they could do it in a cogent way?
MAHER: I don+óGé¼-£t know why they don+óGé¼-£t. They have all the facts on their side. All they really would have to say to the American people is the Republicans chose to fight the wrong war and then they lost it. They lost the war. How about that?
MATTHEWS: Let+óGé¼-£s talk about what we saw this weekend and it may be incidental, but it struck a lot of people that five years ago, 3,000 people were killed at the World Trade Center towers and yet we have a hole in the ground. After all these years, a hole in the ground.
MAHER: Yes, and let+óGé¼-£s not also forget about the hole in the ground that Bush flew to on 9/11. You know, he talks constantly about how we can+óGé¼-£t forget 9/11. How about let+óGé¼-£s not forget where he was on 9/11. You know, he went to New York and Pennsylvania and Washington to commemorate this 9/11 five years later, he should have gone to the places where he went on 9/11.
He was in Florida, and then he heard there was a attack on New York so, of course, he flew to Shreveport, Louisiana, and then he heard that there was another plane that went down in Pennsylvania so naturally he went to Nebraska. So I think to commemorate 9/11 he should have gone to Florida, Louisiana and Nebraska.
And, of course, I also read that on the night of 9/11, he was in bed by 11:30. Yes, on the day that changed everything, Chris, he still hit the hay before +óGé¼+ôNightline.+óGé¼-¥
MATTHEWS: Is that bad? I guess you+óGé¼-£re saying it+óGé¼-£s bad, like he+óGé¼-£s nighty-night on the biggest day that he should be staying up all night thinking about how to deal with this thing?
MAHER: Well, it+óGé¼-£s not as bad as sitting there for seven minutes after you are president of the United States and you hear the words +óGé¼+ôthe country is under attack.+óGé¼-¥ If the country was under such an attack that he had to fly and find a hole in the ground because it could have been a nuclear attack+óGé¼GÇ¥which takes, you know, less than an hour for a missile to be launched and hit the continental United States+óGé¼GÇ¥I would think seven minutes is kind of a long time to be sitting there.
MATTHEWS: But if he had been ...
MAHER: And I know I sound like a ...
MATTHEWS: Well, let me try something else buddy. Suppose the vice president, who seems to have been the day officer that day, the officer of the day, had said to the president come on back to Washington, land at Andrews and come back and he had been blown up. I mean, would that have been a good thing?
MAHER: Yes.
MATTHEWS: OK.
MAHER: No. Chris, I kid about that, it+óGé¼-£s never a good thing and we can+óGé¼-£t even joke about that and we shouldn+óGé¼-£t joke about that.
MATTHEWS: Yes, but I mean, you+óGé¼-£re saying it+óGé¼-£s wrong for him to go out
(CROSSTALK)
MAHER: But you did set me up.
MATTHEWS: Yes, but you+óGé¼-£re saying it was wrong for him to go up to SAC headquarters when they thought that was the most secure place for him to be if there was going to be an attack on the White House, and we still don+óGé¼-£t know whether that 93 flight+óGé¼GÇ¥United flight 93 -- which came down over Pennsylvania because of the heroism of some of the people on that plane could have been headed right toward the White House. He could have done the smart thing maybe, don+óGé¼-£t you think?
MAHER: Well, he could have. It didn+óGé¼-£t look that good. And what I+óGé¼-£m trying to say here is that you can+óGé¼-£t have it both ways. The attack can+óGé¼-£t be such that you can waste seven minutes just sitting there and also be so dire that you have to go underground. I think you kind of have to pick.
MATTHEWS: Yes, well, let me ask you about it. You know, there is an interesting thing here about the political smarts of both sides and I think in your hesitation about naming Democrats who would be going at addressing this from the Democrats side against the president, it seems to me if you look at, as you said in the beginning, who is holding the cards, the Republicans and the president and the vice president together admit there was no WMD a long time ago.
They admit this weekend there was no link to 9/11. Both admitted it. The president said nothing, no connection. The president sort of got that out there to Tim ...
MAHER: Russert.
MATTHEWS: So Russert got it out of him.
And then, of course, the third thing, Cheney admitted he didn+óGé¼-£t know there was going to be a war in Iraq. I mean, they admitted everything, that they were wrong to say it was easy, wrong to say it was necessary, and yet they still say we+óGé¼-£re sticking to our guns, even if all this wasn+óGé¼-£t true. We+óGé¼-£re still going to stick to the arguments that we made, even though they+óGé¼-£re all proven to be retractable or retrievable and yet the Democrats can+óGé¼-£t make a case based on the facts. The Republicans don+óGé¼-£t need the facts. They just keep going.
MAHER: Exactly, and the Cheneys and the Bushes and the Rumsfelds, they don+óGé¼-£t even care when they get caught in lies. Tim Russert presented a lot of tapes of Cheney lying about this and Cheney+óGé¼-£s response basically was well, yes, those specific lies, OK, you got me on those, but my overall lie still pertains. We still need the war. And, you know, I just think the American public at a certain point, I would never accuse them of being quick, but I do think they will catch on to the idea that if a president keeps having to remind you that you+óGé¼-£re at war, you+óGé¼-£re not, OK. Our troops are at war. We+óGé¼-£re shopping.
MATTHEWS: Yes, sadly true. Let me ask you about the big charge against the Democrats. The Republicans say when they+óGé¼-£re shrewd about this, OK we+óGé¼-£re bad, but they are worse, that+óGé¼-£s the way they sell it these days, from the frying pan into the fire. If you vote Democrat, they say, look, if the Democrats win they+óGé¼-£re going to use the subpoena power, people like John Conyers of Detroit and Nancy Pelosi as speaker and Henry Waxman from out in L.A. and people like that are all going to use their subpoena power to have endless investigations and maybe even an impeachment effort. What do you make of that theory?
MAHER: It+óGé¼-£s possible and it certainly would be appropriate. It certainly wouldn+óGé¼-£t be unjust considering what Clinton was impeached for. And it+óGé¼-£s not just Democrats. We have Pat Buchanan on our show in the satellite this week and I know that he thinks that Bush should be impeached for certain reasons. I think that has to do with Mexicans coming over the border at an alarming rate to Pat. But, you know, it wouldn+óGé¼-£t be the worst thing in the world if he was impeached.
I think a better solution would be if this country would change its constitution and have a vote of no confidence. Because, let+óGé¼-£s be honest, if George Bush was president in a parliamentary democracy, he would have been gone a long time ago. This is what the Republicans would like. They would like to be able to retain the White House but not have the bad leader and that+óGé¼-£s what a vote of no confidence offers you.
MATTHEWS: If you+óGé¼-£re that confident, why do you think it+óGé¼-£s still a big, and I think it+óGé¼-£s a big question, in fact I+óGé¼-£m beginning to think it+óGé¼-£s not in fact likely, that Republicans are going to lose control of the House. I think they could very easily hold onto 218, squeak it, and if that+óGé¼-£s the case, that means more than half of the American people or roughly half are voting Republican despite everything you say being true, perhaps.
Everything could be objectively true about the case being misled for war and how they didn+óGé¼-£t have the facts about anything right, and yet the people, half of them are ready to vote Republican now, what does it say about the Dems? What does it say about the Republican case?
MAHER: The Democrats do not know how to fight back to the fear argument. The Republicans keep winning the election based on the idea that there is a Werewolf out there in the woods and we+óGé¼-£re the only ones who have a silver bullet. If you don+óGé¼-£t go along with their idea that indefinitely occupying the country of Iraq is the way to fight terror, then you+óGé¼-£re one of the al Qaeda types, which is completely ridiculous.
It+óGé¼-£s like saying to the exterminator, look I don+óGé¼-£t think that hitting the vermin on the head with a hammer is the way we should get rid of them and being accused of being for the rats. But the Democrats don+óGé¼-£t seem to know how to make that counter-argument and say to the American people no, we+óGé¼-£re patriotic to. We want to fight the war on terrorism, but we just don+óGé¼-£t think this is the right way to do it.
MATTHEWS: Why can+óGé¼-£t they say that?
MAHER: Because the Republicans keep scaring people with terms like Islamo fascists, which is so ridiculous because there is nothing that an Islamic militant has in common with a fascist.
MATTHEWS: OK, I+óGé¼-£ve got on good authority, by the way, I+óGé¼-£ve got on good authority that nobody, two to one or three to one, the American people don+óGé¼-£t buy that Nazi connection, but yet the Democrats, you+óGé¼-£re right, maybe they+óGé¼-£re still afraid of being called Nazis or communists or whatever to the point where all you have to do is say something bad about them and they go hide or talk to their fund raising machines, say can we still afford the ads now or whatever they do when they disappear. I don+óGé¼-£t know where they are because they+óGé¼-£re not on television. They+óGé¼-£re not speaking up. They+óGé¼-£re not being clear. You are.
MAHER: Right, and as many people have pointed out before me, if this really is World War III and bin Laden and Hussein are really Hitler and they+óGé¼-£re fascists, would we really be fighting the war the way we are fighting it, on the cheap, not getting the home front involved, not having a draft. If it really was World War III, wouldn+óGé¼-£t you think you+óGé¼-£d have to draft people to fight that war?
MATTHEWS: That+óGé¼-£s your best line of the night, Bill. Thank you sir. Bill Maher. On Bill Maher in Real Time. I did grade you. That was the best. +óGé¼+ôReal Time+óGé¼-¥ is coming up again Friday night at 11:00. It+óGé¼-£s always on Friday night at 11:00. If you+óGé¼-£re home that night, watch this show. It+óGé¼-£s always great. The guest this week is Robin Williams. For more information check out HBO.com\BillMaher.
When we come back, Sidney Blumenthal will talk about his new book called +óGé¼+ôHow Bush Rules.+óGé¼-¥ This is HARDBALL only on MSNBC.