"Real Time with Bill Maher" 8.1

Bill Maher: New Rule: Stop whining about the French. It takes a lot of guts to stand up to the Bush administration and that's more than I can say about the Democrats! Aaron McGruder: [about the then-newly released "Reagan Letters", which had many re-examining the 40th President's perceived intelligence] Let's say, y'know, ten years from now we discover all these really intelligent things that "Dubya" has written. Does it somehow make it better if he was actually a genius and masterminded the dumb thing in order to manipulate people? Does that make you go back and go "Oh, that's better. He was an evil genius instead of an evil idiot." Bill Maher: New Rule: You can't run on a mistake. Franklin Roosevelt didn't run for re-election claiming Pearl Harbor was his finest hour. Abe Lincoln was a great president, but the high point of his second term wasn't theater security. 9/11 wasn't a triumph of the human spirit. It was a fuck-up by a guy on vacation. Bill Maher: Saddam Hussein is Hitler like Oasis was The Beatles. Bill Maher: White people have always shown their superiority over blacks with their feet, moving out of black neighborhoods with the fear that their kids will turn into one of them. And now, through the magic of MTV, damned if it didn't turn out that way! Bill Maher: New rule: Cornbread isn't bread. It's cake. Bill Maher: I want to see riots! I want to see the kind of riots where cab drivers are afraid to pick up white people! I want to see this guy! [he gives the finger] Bill Maher: You stayed up all night making that papier mache mask of Dick Cheney! Good! Now light it on fire and torch the nearest Gap! You're not going to make the evening news with candle light vigils. Pick up a trash can and throw it through the window of a Starbucks! Bill Maher: New rule: Time Magazine has to change its name to God Weekly. This week, Mary is on the cover again. In the last two years, Time has put out: "The Secrets of the Nativity", "The God Gene", "Faith, God and the Oval Office", "The Bible and the Apocalypse", "Who Was Moses?", "What Jesus Saw", "Why Did Jesus Have to Die?", "Jesus in 2000." If Jesus gets any more free press, he's going to start thinking he's Paris Hilton. Look, I understand we have a lot of Christians in this nation, but how about a little equal time? "Vishnu to Ganesh: Drop Dead". And "Is There No Pleasing Zeus?" Bill Maher:

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New rule: After the plane lands, airlines must stop saying, "Thank you for choosing us." There is no choosing anymore. I took the only flight that left within eight hours of when I wanted to go by the only other airline that went there. Choosing! Nobody chooses Southwest. Southwest chooses you! If I need to be in Spokane, Washington, by tomorrow morning, I either take the flight I'm given or I mail myself in a FedEx box!

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Bill Maher: New rule: Anyone who is elected mayor of a place called "Sin City" is allowed to be a drunk. Bill Maher: If I just sit here every Friday night and spout Bush administration talking points, that's not information or entertainment, it's Fox News! Mario Cuomo: When President Lincoln prayed, he talked to God. When President Bush prayed, God talked to Bush. Bill Maher: [to Richard Perle] I think you guys might have been right about the big picture, and I'm not above saying, you know what, maybe I was wrong. Okay. But on the other half of it, why the incompetence? Why was this war conducted so badly from the beginning? And you have to admit that cost lives. And my theory is because Republicans are sentimentalists. Because you guys have such rose-colored glasses about America that you thought as soon as we showed up in Iraq, they'd be going, 'Freedom! Americans!' And that's why we didn't need armor on the tanks because they'd be giving us flowers and chocolates and nylons. Gore Vidal: We have to move out, not on. We have no business there. We didn't care before what Iraq became and we don't care now. Al Franken: I love this "culture of life" stuff that comes out of the Christian right. But do you hear anything about the genocide that's going on in Darfur? Andrew Sullivan: The "culture of life," I might say, is a phrase invented by the last Pope. And what it meant was, you're opposed to death, in the death penalty, in war, in euthanasia and abortion. The Republicans decide, "Oh, we're a cafeteria. We'll take the abortion and euthanasia but we will launch wars" and we will - I mean, George Bush has signed more death warrants than any other human being in this country. George Carlin: [about the Bush-Kerry Debate] Finally someone stood up to the little oil pimp. This guy who somehow has managed to combine Yale intellectualism with the American cowboy myth and be completely inauthentic in both roles. That's what I see in Bush. He's an empty suit. Tucker Carlson: I mean, look, no matter how you feel about Bush, watching him speak is difficult. It's like - it's like watching a drunk man cross an icy street. Tucker Carlson: Maybe in fact it was better to have Saddam in there. Maybe Saddam, as bad as he was - was not the worst we could get. Maybe chaos was the worst we could get. That's the truth. Michael Moore:

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Well, I've received over 3,000 letters from soldiers in Iraq, emails mostly. And they're very powerful letters. We haven't heard from our soldiers about how they feel about this war. And they very clearly and very powerfully, in these letters, tell me the truth about what's going on over there... They're saying, number one, that they've been lied to; that they are being forced to re-enlist. If they don't, they're being told that they're going to be kept there indefinitely unless they re-enlist for another two or three years. They have told me in these letters that the Iraqis are not happy with the American presence there, and they believe that Bush has simply lied to the American people about the real threat - or actually the "no threat" that Iraq has posed to this country. So it's great to hear from them in their own words about this.