Real talk with Bill Maher

How do you size up the way the Democrats have handled the maneuvering around how to block the surge?

It looks gutless from the outside. I'm not a parliamentarian, so I don't know the ins and outs of how that kind of business is conducted in Washington. I'm sure there are difficulties I don't know about. But just as a citizen who watches the news every night, when he hears seven more U.S. troops were killed today... "Goddamn!" -- it looks like all that hopefulness we felt in the fall, with the election and the Iraq Study Group, was for naught. And I'm on the page with -- I guess it's Edwards who's most vocal about saying -- use the power that you have in the Constitution.

Which is, cut the money.

And the reason why the Democrats won't cut the money is that they're always afraid how something will look. In my view, the fatal flaw of the Democrats is not having confidence in their own ability to make a case, to say, "We're not against the troops when we're cutting the money. Of course we're not going to abandon them on the battlefield with no money and no weapons." It's not that hard a case to make, to decouple the idea of cutting funding from the idea of abandoning the troops.

I find it frustrating as well, because clearly, they're getting advice from political consultants and there's all this concern about the riskiness of seeming to do anything to harm the troops. But if you look back to 2002, it was the same kind of fear and cowardice that led them all to vote to authorize war; it was a similar political jujitsu that they are now regretting. Each '08 candidate -- I think Edwards has been the best on it, Hillary not quite as forthright -- has come up with ways to say, "Boy, we were wrong. And boy, we're sorry," but they don't seem to see the parallels, and that there are actually political risks to looking like a bunch of spineless cowards.

Yes, you'd think they would have learned that lesson by now. You'd think they would have learned how to win a national election. But they keep making the same mistakes over and over. John Kerry ran pretty much the same campaign that Al Gore did in 2000, which said to the American people, "Look, I'm not going to really outline how different I am from this guy, because I'm afraid there are some things about his positions you like. So I'll just trust that when you get into the voting booth you'll say, 'Well, the one guy is a retard. It's a no-brainer, I'll vote for the other guy.' "

Even though he's a wuss. I'll pick the wuss over the retard.

But the retard knows how to at least stand up for something. People like that. And Al Gore, we love Al Gore, he's got a big issue there with the environment, but he didn't mention the environment when he ran for president.

Right, he did not run on that in 2000.

That was his issue, he owned that issue, and he didn't bring it up. John Kerry didn't bring it up in 2004.

After 9/11, you were one of the few people who paid a price in that climate. You've landed very well at HBO, but there were real consequences for you when you challenged Bush's calling the hijackers cowardly. I was feeling optimistic in November that maybe one thing we could say with certainty was that, in the war over patriotism, and over having the freedom to dissent while still being patriotic, our side maybe had won, and that the climate was freer. I'm wondering how you look at it. Have things gotten a lot better since October of 2001, or a little, or not at all?

Well, certainly things are different than October 2001. America was in a traumatized state at that point; we were not ourselves. And it's a shame in many ways that we didn't stay in that state, to a degree. I would have liked to see America remain vigilant and in the mood to sacrifice. But that went away quickly.

We weren't really asked to sacrifice, right? If you ride alone, you ride with bin Laden, as somebody said.

Absolutely. That was the window when we could have been asked to do something. That was one of George Bush's main failings, that he let that moment pass.

And what I felt was the anger of the country. They weren't really angry at me. I think they knew that I wasn't trying to criticize the military, as some tried to characterize it, but they just needed to be angry at something. Being the first person in the whole country who said anything about it except "God bless America," I was sort of asking for it. I sort of set myself up to step into the role of national vent-on-this-guy for a couple of weeks.

Yes, you said something politically incorrect on a show called "Politically Incorrect." What were you thinking?

But this was a new era. This was our little time of trauma. We were angry. The president didn't focus that anger. He did not channel that anger anywhere it could have done some good. If he had made a speech and said, "You're angry at these people? Well, these are the people who are filling your cars with the substance that funds their terrorist activities," you could have passed a pretty comprehensive energy reform bill, just the way Reagan, after he was shot, could have passed significant gun control legislation. Who could have challenged the president, as he was sitting in the hospital with a bullet an inch away from his heart, on gun control? Even the NRA would not have dared to speak too loudly about that. But he let that moment pass. Now, LBJ, after Kennedy was shot, he pushed through that civil rights legislation. That probably would have been a lot more difficult to pass if it had not been over the body of our slain president.

As I think many people have pointed out, in Chinese the character for tragedy is the same one for opportunity. And there are opportunities in tragedy. So it's sort of a double tragedy when we let them pass.

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