Bill Maher is often confronted with the accusation that he’s switched from an ultra-liberal to a more conservative stance. He may have added fuel to that argument with the subect of Friday’s Real Time, which focused on what he called “Biden’s Brain.” It’s a topic that broke out this week from hushed backrooms to the mainstream, thanks to a Dept. of Justice report and the President’s own attempts to refute it.
Maher started his jabs at Biden in the monologue. Talking about the President’s decline of a Super Bowl interview, Biden noted, “It’s not like they were asking him to appear on Dancing With The Stars.”
He then ran down a few of Biden’s confusions, including mixing up politicians. He also said Biden blew his press conference to fight back against the DoJ report when he walked in the room and asked, “Why did I come in here again?”
This week’s panel discussion further heated things up. Emmy-winning sportscaster Bob Costas and Caitlin Flanagan, the latter a staff writer at The Atlantic and author of the new collection of essays, “On Thinking for Yourself: Instinct, Education, Dissension,” also held the presidential feet to the fire.
Maher started things off by repeating his contention that BIden is Ruth Bader Biden, a politician who “stayed too long at the fair.”
Costas leaped into that with “the truth that nobody wants to say out loud,” saying that Biden should have run as a one-term president, and that “the only reason he won is he’s not Trump.” He added, “If he doesn’t understand that, he has to be shown the door.”
Costas said that if Trump is a threat to democracy, “so, too, are the Democrats” if they have Biden as their champion. “If Trump is a monster, you’re going to send this guy out to slay the dragon?” Costas said.
The talk turned to possible Biden replacements, with Gavin Newsom prominent. Flanagan brought up the deterioration in Oakland, where hospital staff were warned not to leave on lunch breaks because of the danger.
“That’s on (Newsom). I can’t imagine him having the gall to run when he’s run this state into the ground.” She added, “He looks very shiny, but he is not willing to do the hard things to make this state better.”
Maher was stuck for a rebuttal. “I am hoping running nationally will bring him more to the center,” he said.
Earlier, Maher interviewed Coleman Hughes, host of the “Conversations With Coleman” podcast, contributor to The Free Press, and author of the new book, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America.
Coleman claimed that social media and smartphones gave an unrepresentative picture of race relations in America.
