Love him or hate him, Bill Maher is a man on a mission. Maher, who hit hard on the big screen last year with the audacious critique of organized religion, “Religulous,” has just completed the seventh season of his HBO series, the political-humor-driven talk show “Real Time with Bill Maher.”
Conservatives call for his head, and even President Barack Obama — whom Maher generally supports — finds himself in the crosshairs of the comic’s verbal assault.
No one is safe. And all the verbal carnage, Maher assures, is for a greater cause.
Question: Are the American people really as stupid as you say?
Answer: It’s not getting any better for the American people. It seems to be getting worse. That’s predictable; education is a cycle. Stupidity breeds more stupidity. The teachers don’t know anything. What are the kids going to learn with a horrible education system?
Q: You’ve received some recent criticism for calling out President Barack Obama, specifically about health care. Has the negative backlash first directed at you changed?A: People are sort of catching on to that. I was saying that a few months ago and getting on Obama’s case, and I was getting booed by my audience. They’re not booing anymore.
I was out last night at the HBO party, these are liberals, I imagine, and a lot of people came up to me and said, “Keep giving it to the president.” I said something recently about how the president should stop trying to placate the crazies and the right wing and the Republicans and stand up for the 70 percent of Americans who are not insane and stand up for the people who actually voted for you. That hit a real nerve. I can tell on a sort of anecdotal basis, and from the reaction of the studio audience when we did the show, it’s really shifted.
People do not want to be disillusioned by the new president. The liberals felt, finally, this is our time. Now they’re worried. Now what they see is more business as usual. We all want to give him the benefit of the doubt. We know it’s a tough job and he inherited a mess, but at the end of the day, is it really change we can believe in when there’s no public options and Wall Street reform has no teeth in it?
It really looks a lot like we just changed the color.
Q: It seems that the country’s youths have been pretty quiet. Do you see this changing?
A: Yeah, they don’t seem to be rising up. It takes the youth, really; they’re the ones that should have the energy, it shouldn’t be the old geezers, but the signs are very worrying.
Half of them, apparently, don’t believe in global warming. They think it’s a hoax, which is more of that stupid, stick-their-head-in-the-sand attitude.
