Real talk with Bill Maher

The talk show host sizes up Hillary and Obama, and explains why he's so over McCain.

Editor's note: This interview is a part of Salon's Conversations podcast. To listen to an MP3 of the interview, click here. To subscribe to the podcast using iTunes, click here.

By Joan Walsh

Read more: Joan Walsh, HBO, Hillary Rodham Clinton, TV, John McCain, Politics, Interviews, Arts & Entertainment, Bill Maher, John Edwards, Arts & Entertainment TV Interviews, Iraq War, Barack Obama

Feb. 16, 2007 | HBO's "Real Time With Bill Maher" starts a new season Friday night, and it could be the dawn of a new era for the politically incorrect comedian. After the show's last 13-week run saw plummeting poll numbers for President Bush and Republicans thanks to the disaster in Iraq, plus the Mark Foley and Ted Haggard sex scandals, the season ended with a cliffhanger: The Democrats won back Congress just as "Real Time" went off the air in mid-November.

Now that he's back, is he ready to grapple with a world in which the players and idiocies he's been savaging since the show debuted four years ago have totally changed? "But they haven't," Maher insists, quickly lambasting Bush's so-called surge in Iraq and the Democrats' inability so far to stop it. And he's off.

Maher has been a window through which we can try to assess the state of our political culture: Are we ready for pointed humor about everything, including Bush's terrifying and inept "war on terror," or not? The 51-year-old provocateur was an early casualty of the climate of intimidation that followed the Sept. 11 attacks, when he was pilloried for disputing President Bush's suggestion that the al-Qaida hijackers were "cowardly," and he eventually lost his show "Politically Incorrect" over the flap. It was the hysterical reaction to Maher's comments that Ari Fleischer was talking about when he intoned creepily: "They're reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do. This is not a time for remarks like that; there never is."

Don't cry for Maher; he landed on his feet with the award-winning HBO series, which is meatier and smarter and has a better roster of guests (I'm biased; I was a panelist last season); an all-around better fit for the range of topics he wants to cover than his nightly ABC gig was. And while fans of the show might wish they got "Real Time" in something larger than 13-week doses, Maher is thriving on the schedule, most recently working on a documentary on religion with "Seinfeld" creator and "Borat" director Larry Charles, titled "A Spiritual Journey." No, he hasn't found religion; Maher will be spoofing it, although he insists he's not an atheist. "Religion to me is a bureaucracy between man and God that I don't need. But I'm not an atheist, no," he told the Onion AV Club in a 2002 interview. "I believe there's some force. If you want to call it God. I don't believe God is a single parent who writes books."

Salon talked to Maher last week, on his first day back in the office to plan his new season, about why Hillary Clinton could make a good president (but so far has refused to do his show) and whether Sen. John McCain, a Republican Maher once admired, has officially sold his soul.

You finished the show last season right after the Democrats took back Congress, which was predicted in the weeks before, but not a done deal.

That was a huge change.

Yes, things have changed.

[Laughs] But they haven't.

Well, that's what I wanted to ask you. Were there any big news events since then where you said, "Damn, I really wish I had a show this Friday"?

I've been away; I've been out of the country for most of the time. My head has been on one subject -- we're making a documentary. I'm sure there have been issues that came along --

But you were busy.

I'd be hard-pressed to name them right now. What were they?

The politics of the surge is something I wanted to ask you about.

Yes, that did anger me terribly. Whenever I get that anger, that feeling in my gut, I do wish I was on the air, I do wish I had a platform to vent. And it made me very angry that this man, this president of ours, knows better than the whole goddamned world what to do. The ego of that.

The ego of saying I'm going to send in 21,000 troops -- or however many, we don't even know.

The people in Iraq don't want this. The people in America don't want this. The Iraq Study Group doesn't recommend it. The Democrats are against it. Most of the people in his own party are against it, even though many of them wouldn't say so out loud. But George Bush, he knows better. That is a kind of arrogance that is very hard to swallow at this point, especially when it's costing this many lives. Even the pope -- remember he said something bad about the Muslims a few months ago? The infallible pope came out and said, "Geez, my bad. That came out wrong. I didn't mean that." Yeah, the pope can say he's sorry, but this recovering alcoholic from Midland, Texas, he can't even say he's wrong.

Next page: "The fatal flaw of the Democrats is not having confidence"