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Bill Maher on not pulling punches
If you catch yourself laughing at something Bill Maher has said lately on HBO’s “Real Time,” his Friday night perch for the past 21 years, just be careful: next time, the joke could be on you. No one is spared Maher’s humor, or as he sees it, truth-telling – not the right (“If you’re gonna turn over your party to a foreign power, at least pick the right one. Russia? Are you kidding? It’s like the Republicans looked over all the companies they could merge with and picked Sears!”), nor the left (“You call yourself the resistance? Then fight behind enemy lines. That’s what a ‘resistance’ does. That’s the difference between blowing up a tank and tweeting about it. Get out of your echo chamber and infiltrate theirs!”).
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Asked if you can make an audience laugh and think at the same time, Maher replied, “Totally, of course. The great thing about laughter is that it’s involuntary, so if you laugh at something, something in you tells you that’s true. It must be true; I laughed at it! Maybe I wasn’t supposed to.“
He said the throughline for everything he writes and says is, “Keep it real. Don’t be tribal. Don’t say something just because that’s going to make the audience of one side applaud, or boo. Practical solutions as opposed to ideological. And don’t pull a punch.”
The 68-year-old Maher has been swinging at targets high and low his entire career, taking his own share of knocks along the way. But he still gladly courts controversy, as when he told the “Real Time” audience, “The right response to speech you don’t like is more speech, not the lazy, cowardly response of ‘canceling’ people.”
That attitude explains the title of his new book, “What This Comedian Said Will Shock You” (to be published May 21 by Simon & Schuster). It’s compiled from years of Maher’s commentaries on “Real Time.”
Simon & Schuster
“I wanted to see if the world had changed or I had changed more,” he said. “I was excavating, reading over all these editorials from years and years and years, and I wanted to find that answer. I speak for the normies. You know, I speak from that, I think, vast middle that is tired of the partisanship. I don’t want to hate half the country, and I don’t hate half the country.”
Costa said, “You write a lot throughout this book that the left irritates you, frustrates you at times, but the right often alarms you?”
“Yes, they’re very alarming!” Maher replied. “They’re extremely alarming. More alarming.”
But if he finds the right more alarming than the left, why not shine the spotlight on them only? “The truth isn’t one-sided like that,” Maher said. “The Democrats constantly are running against Trump with the idea, You people out there couldn’t possibly vote for this guy. And people are saying, Watch me. Hold my beer. Watch me to vote for him again. Instead of just saying, Oh, he’s lied. Like, we know he’s a liar. He’s Donald Trump! He can’t help himself. He’s crazy. I mean, I think literally crazy. I think there’s a kind of a level of malignant narcissism, which is not just a personality quirk, it’s diagnosable, and he suffers from it.”
Costa asked, “If you had him on ‘Real Time,’ what would you ask him?”
“Would you please go away?” Maher laughed.
He said that Trump has been invited to be on the show: “Of course, we’ve asked everybody, I mean, of that stature. He knows he has an open invitation to come on, but I don’t think he really hates me, because the amount of times that he goes after me.”
“He watches the show,” said Costa.
“Accidentally! It’s always accidentally,” Maher said. “He watches it ‘accidentally’ every week. It’s amazing!”
In fact, conservatives don’t shy away from “Real Time.” Trump’s Attorney General William Barr was a guest last year. Maher said the reaction from liberal circles “was exactly what I hate about this country: How dare you? How dare you platform somebody?
“So, you’re going to have to talk to people, and maybe you’ll find out that they’re not the monsters you think they are. I mean, do I apologize for Bill Barr’s (I thought) horrible behavior when the Mueller Report came out and he basically lied about it? I don’t. But look, this is what I call a good-as-it-gets Republican. He came out and said Trump lost the election. That’s the main thing in the Republican Party right now: Do you believe elections count only if you win?
“As good as it gets” could well be Maher’s motto for politics, and for life – not wishing for what could be, but recognizing what he sees is real (and taking you on if you’re not).
READ AN EXCERPT: “What This Comedian Said Will Shock You” by Bill Maher
The new book by the host of HBO’s “Real Time” takes aim at those who brazenly invoke the standards of today to rewrite history in ways that even “Star Trek” would think go too far.
For more info:
Story produced by Ed Forgotson and Robert Marston. Editor: Joseph Frandino.
The Missouri Supreme Court halted the immediate release Wednesday of a man whose murder conviction was overturned — just as the man was about to walk free.
A St. Louis Circuit Court judge had ordered Christopher Dunn, now 52, to be released by 6 p.m. CDT Wednesday and threatened the prison warden with contempt if Dunn remained imprisoned. But Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey has been fighting Dunn’s release.
The situation was chaotic as the deadline set by the judge approached. Corrections Department spokesperson Karen Pojmann told The Associated Press that Dunn was out of the prison facility and waiting for a ride. His wife told the AP she was on his way to pick him up. Minutes later, Pojmann corrected herself and said that while Dunn was signing paperwork to be released, the Missouri Supreme Court issued a ruling that put his freedom on hold.
St. Louis Circuit Judge Jason Sengheiser overturned Dunn’s murder conviction Monday, citing evidence of “actual innocence” in the 1990 killing. He ordered Dunn’s immediate release then, but Bailey appealed, and the state Department of Corrections declined to release Dunn.
St. Louis Circuit Attorney Gabe Gore had filed a motion Wednesday urging the judge to immediately order Dunn’s freedom.
“The Attorney General cannot unilaterally decide to ignore this Court’s Order,” Gore wrote.
An attorney for the Department of Corrections told a lawyer in Gore’s office that Bailey advised the agency not to release Dunn until the appeal plays out, according to a court filing. When told it was improper to ignore a court order, the Department of Corrections attorney “responded that the Attorney General’s Office is legal counsel to the DOC and the DOC would be following the advice of counsel.”
Dunn’s attorney, Tricia Rojo Bushnell, the executive director of the Midwest Innocence Project, expressed her frustration.
“What is this bringing to taxpayers in Missouri? What is this use of our resources and our state’s time getting us?” she said. “All it’s doing is keeping innocent people in prison.”
Dunn’s wife said while driving to the prison that they were numb when he didn’t get out earlier this week.
“If you know a little about the story, you know we’ve had a lot of disappointments where we thought we’d finally get his freedom and it was snatched away,” Kira Dunn said. “So we were just bracing ourselves.”
Dunn’s situation is similar to what happened to Sandra Hemme.
The 64-year-old woman spent 43 years in prison for the fatal stabbing of a woman in St. Joseph in 1980. A judge on June 14 cited evidence of “actual innocence” and overturned her conviction. She had been the longest held wrongly incarcerated woman known in the U.S., according to the National Innocence Project, which worked to free Hemme.
Appeals by Bailey — all the way up to the Missouri Supreme Court — kept Hemme imprisoned at the Chillicothe Correctional Center. During a court hearing Friday, Judge Ryan Horsman said that if Hemme wasn’t released within hours, Bailey himself would have to appear in court with contempt of court on the table. Hemme was released later that day.
The judge also scolded Bailey’s office for calling the warden and telling prison officials not to release Hemme after he ordered her to be freed on her own recognizance.
Dunn, who is Black, was 18 in 1990 when 15-year-old Ricco Rogers was killed. Among the key evidence used to convict him of first-degree murder was testimony from two boys who were at the scene of the shooting. Both later recanted their testimony, saying they had been coerced by police and prosecutors.
At an evidentiary hearing in 2020, another judge agreed that a jury would likely find Dunn not guilty based on new evidence. But that judge, William Hickle, declined to exonerate Dunn, citing a 2016 Missouri Supreme Court ruling that only death row inmates — not those like Dunn sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole — could make a “freestanding” claim of actual innocence.
A 2021 law now allows prosecutors to seek court hearings in cases with new evidence of a wrongful conviction.
Although Bailey’s office is not required to oppose such efforts, lawyers for his office said at the hearing that initial testimony from two boys at the scene who identified Dunn as the shooter was correct, even though they recanted as adults.
He also raised opposition at a hearing for Lamar Johnson, who spent 28 years in prison for murder. Another St. Louis judge ruled in February 2023 that Johnson was wrongfully convicted, and he was freed.
Another hearing begins Aug. 21 for death row inmate Marcellus Williams. Bailey’s office is opposing the challenge to Williams’ conviction, too. Timing is of the essence: Williams is scheduled to be executed Sept. 24.
Steven Puro, professor emeritus of political science at St. Louis University, said Bailey is in a highly competitive race for the attorney general position with the primary quickly approaching on Aug. 6.
“Bailey is trying to show that he is, quote, ‘tough on crime,’ which is a very important Republican conservative position,” he said. “Clearly, he’s angering members of the judicial system that he will have to argue before in the future. But he’s making the strategic notion that he needs to get his name before the voters and try to use that to win the primary election.”
Michael Wolff, a former Missouri Supreme Court judge and chief justice, agreed, saying it seems this has become political for Bailey.
“But one of the things is that no matter what your beliefs are, if a court orders something to happen, it’s not your purview to say no,” he said. “The court has to be obeyed.”
The U.S. military intercepted several Russian and Chinese bombers in international airspace near the coast of Alaska Wednesday.
Two Russian Tu-95s and two Chinese H-6s entered what is known as the Alaska Air Defense Identification Zone, North American Aerospace Defense Command said in a statement Wednesday night.
The aircraft were “detected, tracked and intercepted,” NORAD said. They remained in the Alaska ADIZ and did not enter U.S. airspace.
The bombers were intercepted by U.S. F-16 and F-35 fighter jets, along with Canadian CF-18s and other support aircraft, a U.S. defense official confirmed to CBS News.
The official said that this marks the first time ever that Russian and Chinese aircraft have jointly entered the Alaska ADIZ, and the first time Chinese H-6s have encroached off Alaska.
While the Alaska ADIZ is considered part of international airspace, it is defined as an area where sovereign U.S. airspace ends but “that requires the ready identification of all aircraft in the interest of national security,” according to NORAD.
The activity from the Russian and Chinese bombers was “not seen as a threat,” NORAD noted.
Sefa Karacan/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
In February, the U.S. detected four Russian warplanes flying in the Alaska ADIZ, as was another Russian military aircraft in May 2023.
And in February 2023, Russian warplanes were intercepted there twice in one week. And that same month, a Chinese spy balloon was detected near Alaska before eventually making its way across the continental U.S. and being shot down off the coast of South Carolina.
— Eleanor Watson contributed to this report.
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