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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Bill Maher interview
You have a show now where you can say anything you want, and you've been overtly critical so far of the White House's march toward war. But what do you do now?
Maher: I think the key thing that's different from other wars with the wars we fight now is that they're really short. So I don't think it should be too much of a burden for anybody to hold their tongue for the three days to a week that it takes us to fight a war. If it drags on, I think absolutely we have the right to speak out. It has to be that way -- we can't shut up indefinitely if we think our country is headed in a horribly wrong direction.
The two points I would make is that given that wars are so short, and that there's fighting in the field, they do get conflicting signals, the message doesn't necessarily get through that we support them even though we protest the policy. Again, I don't think it's too much to ask that we hold our tongues for a few days. But not indefinitely.
Earlier I asked Janeane Garofalo about how she would deal with critics of protesters, say mothers of G.I.s who will go on TV and and say that protest is disrespectful of their sons. But do the mothers have a point?
Maher: One of the themes of my stand-up show, that I'm about to do on Broadway, is that it's important to be able to keep two opposing thoughts in your mind. Thats what we seem to have such a hard time doing. It drives me crazy when they say things like, "You're pro-Saddam if youre opposed to this method of fighting terrorists."
I read an editorial, I guess it was in the New York Times, that said the United States State Department lists 13 countries that have chemical or biological weapons; it lists 16 countries that have at least the shadowy links to terrorists that Iraq does. That's what we're afraid of. It's not direct enough, and this idea of a "war of choice," well, some of us think that there should never be such a thing, that war should be only when you absolutely have to. That Afghanistan was a justified war because we were going after the guy who hit us. A kid threw a rock through our window, and we went to his house to kick his ass. And on our way home, we're apparently kicking his cousin's ass. Who didn't really have anything to do with throwing the rock through the window.
I think that's the point the protesters are making, and it's a commonsensical approach.
OK - so why can't they keep saying that now, while we're at war?
Maher: Well, look, for six months, we've all been making these arguments about whether we should do this or whether we shouldn't, so we've heard it all. We've heard their side, they've heard our side. So at the point when we go into war, those arguments are a little dated.
My side says, "He never really was in league with al-Qaida, that's a trumped-up charge." And that's what bothers me about this. Wars that start on shaky premises, be it "Remember the Maine," or the Gulf of Tonkin, or that Saddam Hussein is working with bin Laden, whatever it is, when you start a war on a shaky premise, it makes me nervous.
However, now we've heard it all, so there's no need to keep rehashing it. That, to me, is beating a dead horse. Now we're on to a different phase. The war has started, let's just hold our breath and hope that the human suffering is minimal and then start arguing about what we do now that we own Iraq.
