You know it must be a Saturday when the front page of RedState has a couple of stories about Bill Maher who is the host of Real Time With Bill Maher on HBO. In his first show back since the writers' strike ended and his false start of bringing back his show earlier this month Maher was raring to go and as usual, hit all sides with aplomb.
My colleague Bonchie had this piece earlier about how Governor Ron DeSantis handled his appearance on the show:
WATCH: Ron DeSantis Kills It on Bill Maher, Has the Lib Audience Cheering
It only took a few seconds for DeSantis to get his first round of applause, touting that he made vaccine mandates illegal in Florida. Given Maher's skepticism about left-wing COVID hysteria, that was a smart strategic play to soften the room before getting into the tougher questions.
Maher took a few shots after, which shouldn't anger any Republican because that is the point of his show (everyone should learn to laugh a little more). DeSantis then got serious when pressed on what makes him unique in the field, noting that the nation needs actual accountability for the government's COVID regime, including mandates and lockdowns. The audience ate that up.
Next, Maher brought up the idea that DeSantis campaigned for supposed "election deniers" in 2022, including Kari Lake. He was ready, though, and turned the issue around on Democrats.
Maher then tried to trip DeSantis up and the Governor from Florida smahed the question with his answer.
MAHER: That's not a dealbreaker issue for you? That's not democracy?
DESANTIS: Well, okay, let's go back to 2016. Your friends in Hollywood were cutting ads telling the electoral college to vote against Trump in the electoral college because it was stolen. They said Russia stole the election. For years they said. So don't act like this is a unique thing in the modern history of the country.
True and brilliant.
Now here is where Maher will start to get a bit sketchy and his bleeding heart for feelings over obvious facts kicks in.
Someone has to convince President Biden that if he runs again, he’s going to turn the country back over to Trump and go and go down in history as Ruth Bader Biden, the person who doesn’t know when to quit and so does great damage to their party and their country. All of us who like Joe Biden have been struggling lately with the political situation in the Democratic Party, an incumbent we admire who acquitted himself well in the first term, but who even members of his own party don’t want to see run for a second. Despite a touching letter of recommendation from Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis. I kid. They shouldn’t have gotten shit for that. If you ask me, do I think Joe Biden can do the job of president? My answer is an unequivocal yes. He can do the job. Do I love everything? No. But that’s every president. But government work is done in small, quiet rooms like the Oval Office. And in that setting. Joe’s compassion and centuries of experience are pluses, and he’s generally made good decisions that got us out of Afghanistan, handled Ukraine, kept the economy chugging, finally got us rebuilding, infrastructure returned a sense of normalcy. There is a term for Joe Biden, but not two. Because while he can do the job, what he can’t do is run for it.
No one who truly thinks rationally and also believes that Joe Biden is capable of doing the job as President. No one. He is at best a caretaker for the office that needs to be taken care of and strictly monitored. I could spend the rest of this article just posting mess-ups that he has done in the public realm and you can't tell me that privately in the Oval Office, he's 100 percent different. Somehow, he is seen as strong and decisive and calmly giving orders to his staff.
The examples that Maher gives are quite telling that this is a man and a Presidency adrift.
Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan was an absolute disaster and gave the green light for Putin to invade Ukraine because the Russian President recognized the guy in the Oval Office was bumbling already. The whole plan looked like it had been drafted on a cocktail napkin on K Street and somebody had spilled their drink on half of it but went ahead with it anyway.
Biden has never explained to the American people why supporting Ukraine and their fight to repel the Russians is in the American interest. That's mostly because Biden probably doesn't know where Ukraine is on a map, he just knows that it might have something to do with his kid and he is still ticked off that he left that laptop at a computer repair shop and never went back and picked it up.
Also, if the economy chugging along is record high inflation food and gas prices soaring through the roof, and with seemingly no relief in sight, I'm glad Bill has millions in the bank to help absorb the cost of all these things for Biden's chugging economy. For the rest of America, it sounds like and looks like a chugging economy that's about ready to stall.
I don't really think Bill believes that's a sense of normalcy back in America he's just got to pay a little lip service to his natural base on the left whom he's been at odds for the past couple of years with how they've handled things. As I wrote earlier here today at RedState it seems that the only person in the country doing a worse job than Biden is the duly elected chair of the Michigan GOP.