>===== Original Message From moq_discuss@moq.org =====
>
RISKY: -- Freedom of speech involves limitations on the government to restrict
>speech, not broadcasters/advertisers (too oversimplify just a bit)
>
ERIN: Okay but doesn't it scare you that he got such treatment about
expressing his political views on his show about expressing political views.
If you support this then well in my opinion it is a large step in the
direction of giving up freedom of speech. I found it deeply disturbing. Hell
let's give King Bush our privacy rights along with our freedom of speech..
RISKY: >And I am not accusing Bill of anything. I was trying to summarize the
>argument against him. He was under a lot of pressure for a few weeks. If
>those weren't the exact words he was criticized for using, they are close.
>My point was simply "Bill was under fire for his comments after 9/11"
ERIN: If you read the transcript of the show and can honestly say that was a
fair argument then I would say you are blinded by the righties unfair
argumentation.
TRANSCRIPT THAT GOT BIG BAD BILL INTO A BULLSHIT TUB OF HOT WATER
Bill Maher: Good evening.
Tonight, I've invited three of the most thoughtful people I know to help me
talk about and, hopefully, make some sense of the horror of last week.
In addition, all this week on "Politically Incorrect," we're going to leave
one chair empty as a tribute to Barbara Olson, who was a cherished guest and
friend of our show who died last Tuesday on a plane that was carrying her here
to do our show.
Now, I wanna ask this panel one fundamental question tonight^--
Can we change? Can people change enough to survive, which is what animals do
-- good ones, anyway? Which part of our polarized human mind is gonna win out, the part that's smart enough to invent nuclear weapons or the part that, next time, is gonna use one in order to get to heaven? Yeah, we all roll our eyes at that, but violence in the name of religion has a shoddy history on our side of the world, too. So the idea that this beef that we have with the Muslims could go nuclear -- that is on my mind right now. And I do not relinquish, nor should any of you, the right to criticize, even as we support, our government. This is still a democracy, and they're still politicians. So we need to let our government know that we can't afford a lot of things that we used to be able to afford, like a missile shield, that will never work, for an enemy that doesn't exist. We can't afford to be fighting wrong and silly wars -- the Cold War, the drug war, the culture wars, busting television producers at the airport for taking funny mushrooms to Las Vegas while the terrorist-looking guys with the knives get right on. We have to outgrow childish and antiquated stuff real fast. Can we? Can we change? Now, I hope, panel, that you'll answer with total candor, because political correctness itself is something we can no longer afford. Feelings are gonna get hurt so that actual people won't, and that will be a good thing. In fact, if this jolting, sobering and horrible event causes us to get a little serious and, in doing so, grow and progress and change, then those poor souls who gave their lives will certainly not have given them in vain. Okay, so that's --So there you have it. Can we change enough to survive, 'cause that is sort of what is at stake.
Arianna: We can change, but it would help if we had leaders who could lead us to a cause greater than a $300 rebate, for example. And the one thing that you said, Bill, that I totally agree with is that we should not feel that, because we have to rally behind our government, we should stop being critical of some decisions that the government has or may take.
Bill: Right.
Arianna: But to go back, before we even would get here, for years now, politicians of both parties have buried their heads in the sand and tried to pretend that all was well, and basically, they'd fight with each other who was gonna be the guardian of our prosperity as though we didn't have any major problems. We knew that terrorism was a major problem. We had, for example, the report from the commission chaired by Senator Harkin and Senator Bingaman, which was completely ignored by both administrations and by the media.
Bill: No, they -- they have believed in a religion, if you will, which I think is the root cause of this whole problem -- but there's lots of religions. And one of them is that a missile shield in space is going to protect us, which is ridiculous. That's -- you know, we left the front door open, and we -- you know, we guarded the roof.
Alan: I think we're forced -- whenever one comes face to face with death, as we have done in these past days, life takes on a much more serious note. We've got to -- we've got to change. Our perspective will change. America will never be quite the same again. Something has happened to us that has changed life as we know it.
Bill: But it -- how -- how much has it changed if our answer to this attack is to go right back to, "Well, you know what, our guy in the sky is more powerful than your guy in the sky"? It seems like that isn't changing.
Arianna: Well, Bill, that's not the answer.
Dinesh: I think that there's been an -- you know, an easy confidence in the last few years that Ameri -- the American is going to be the way that everybody lives and that the American idea is going to spread throughout the world. And I think what we see here is that the American idea is running into some pretty fierce resistance. I think, under --
Bill: What is the American idea?
Dinesh: The American idea -- see, the American idea is quite unique in the world. We have a society in which it is not the theocrats -- it's not even the politicians who rule. We have a commercial, technological society. Our society is founded on three interlocking freedoms -- economic freedom, political freedom and freedom of speech and -- and religion. Now, many countries don't share those assumptions.
Bill: Right.
Dinesh: And yet those assumptions are contagiously spreading, and young people love the idea of having the freedom to -- to write the script of their own life. And so I think you are seeing, in some parts of the Islamic world, a reaction against that.
Bill: But religion teaches that you must -- must, more importantly, write the script of your death.
Arianna: No, no. I think, Bill, you are really caricaturing religion. Just because --
Bill: Really?
Arianna: Yes.
Bill: Did you see what Jerry Falwell said?
Arianna: Yes, I did. And I think what Jerry Falwell said was really an abomination. And I think the president should condemn what Jerry Falwell said, because for him to say that we deserved what happened because of the abortion, the gays, the lesbians --
Bill: Right.
Arianna: -- The feminists, the ACLU, the people for the American way is truly a travesty of religion. He's doing as much harm to Christianity as the Islamic fundamentalists, the terrorists, are doing to the fundamental religion of Islam, which is not what they're purporting for it to be.
Alan: I don't think it's fair to --
[ Applause ]
I'm not sure it's fair to judge religion by extremism.
Bill: But religion is extremism. It's extreme to believe in things that your rational mind knows are not true. I mean, they wanna know what's on this black box from these flights. I'll tell you what it is. It's a guy in Arabic going, "God is great" at the moment of the impact. That's what's on the black box. Save your trouble. You don't have to find it. That's what's --
Dinesh: You said religion is believing what you know isn't true. Do you know that God does not exist?
Bill: I -- I believe God -- I believe God exists, but they believe, as we believe, a lot of stupid Muslim tricks and stupid Christian tricks, okay? They believe a lot of things, and it's such a fundamental belief that, if the other guy doesn't agree with you, he's gotta go.
Dinesh: But here's the difference.
Bill: And we're guilty of the same thing.
Dinesh: Historically, it is true that Christianity believed in a jihad. You look at the crusades, for example.
Bill: Inquisition, the crusades.
Dinesh: However, in the West and in Christianity, a tradition of religious freedom has gained strength so that, today, there are extremists on our -- in the West. But they are somewhat marginalized. They don't run countries. They don't -- they don't occupy 50% of the Senate.
Arianna: But then what's more important than that is the perversion of the fundamental truth of all great religions, which is about loving one another, which has nothing to do with violence in the name of your God or what Jerry Falwell claims, which is that you can speak on behalf of God as though you are E-mailing him or getting E-mails from him on a daily basis. That is what is a perversion of religion, and it's equally absurd for you to call that religion.
Bill: No, I think that's the perversion of spirituality. I think that's what religion is. Religion is a bureaucracy between man and God.
Arianna: Actually, "Religion" comes from the Latin "To reconnect with the divine."
Bill: Of course she'd know that.
[ Laughter ]
Arianna: So basically --
Dinesh: Not to mention, Bill, that our whole -- our whole tradition of compassion, of equality, comes out of religion. It is -- it is the Christian idea that all men are created equal in the eyes of God that led to the anti-slavery movement. It led to the notion of Democratic equality. Why do you think these things developed --
Bill: You've gotta be kidding if you think that --
Dinesh: Why do you think --
Bill: First of all, women in most religions are certainly not created equal. They don't even get a voice --
[ Applause ]
I assume those were the women applauding.
[ Laughter ]
[ All talking at once ]
Bill: All right, I'm sorry. I have to take a commercial. We're still on that little track here, but we'll come back to this discussion.
[ Applause ]
Bill: Okay, we had been talking about religion, and we will again talk about religion on the show. We're gonna be talking about this subject of "America the changed" for weeks and months to come, so if you're looking for another discussion of that, I'm sure we will have one. But there's so many aspects of this I want to get to, and we're gonna get to little bits each night and follow up on that kind of a basis. One of the things I said in my opening was that we can no longer afford political correctness. I have been fighting political correctness for eight years here. I never thought this -- it would come to this. And it's certainly not worth it to come this way. But, you know, political correctness, in my view, was always about pretending that certain things were when they weren't. And we pretended, for example, that the next terrorist could just as easily be Swedish. That's political correctness. Well, we can't afford that anymore, can we, folks? I mean, the people who hate us aren't Swedish, they're not even North Korean. The people who hate us are the ones who blew up those planes. And the ones who do it next time, and it could be even worse, they're gonna be from the same group. So don't we have to change our ways and put political correctness out to pasture?
Alan: One of the things I --
[ Applause ]
One of the things that I think it's going to be very important for us to understand in America is what prompted that hatred in the first place.
Bill: I agree.
Alan: When we -- when we have begun the investigation, as we have, of course, and it finalizes, hopefully, with the arrest and subsequent -- perhaps even execution of Osama bin Laden, if in fact that is the culprit, as we deem him to be, that will not -- that is an immediate solution. It won't be a long-term solution.
Bill: Right.
Alan: And we've got to think -- we got to get out of the box of immediate solutions to long-term solutions.
Bill: Yes.
Alan: We've got to break that cycle of violence.
Bill: We got to stop thinking that the problem is way over there.
Alan: That's correct.
Bill: These guys were in this country for years. They learned to fly planes here. They could learn to build nuclear bombs here. I think we should take that off the Internet, too. I know there's a civil liberty that goes down the drain.
[ Applause ]
But as somebody once said, the Constitution is not a suicide pact. They're here. There is a fifth column in America, I'm sorry to say that. It's not 99.9% of the Muslims in America. But the trouble is going to come from a --
Arianna: We have to learn to halt to contradictory thoughts at the same time. I mean, that's really the point.
Bill: Yes.
Arianna: We need to stop practicing political correctness when it comes to the truth you spoke, which is that Arabs are more likely to commit these crimes then Swedes or Greeks. But at the same time --
[ Light laughter ]
But at the same time, we should remember that there are millions of lawful Arab-Americans in this country.
Bill: Almost all. That's why they came here, because they wanted to get away from those terrible oppressive regimes they came from that make death appetizing compared to the life that they give their people.
Arianna: So that means that there should be zero tolerance for any crimes against those Arabs who live in this country, 99.9% of whom are completely on our side.
Bill: But now is not the time for them to be bitching about political correctness. Now is the time for them to do what loyal Americans need to do, and they have a better position to do it than the rest of us, which is to help identify who is in the fifth column. Because the guys who are learning to build --
[ Applause ]
The guys who are learning to build a nuclear bomb somewhere, like they learned how to fly that plane, are doing it right now. And we got to know that.
Arianna: But also --
Dinesh: Bill, there's another piece of political correctness I want to mention. And, although I think Bush has been doing a great job, one of the themes we hear constantly is that the people who did this are cowards.
Bill: Not true.
Dinesh: Not true. Look at what they did. First of all, you have a whole bunch of guys who are willing to give their life. None of 'em backed out. All of them slammed themselves into pieces of concrete.
Bill: Exactly.
Dinesh: These are warriors. And we have to realize that the principles of our way of life are in conflict with people in the world. And so -- I mean, I'm all for understanding the sociological causes of this, but we should not blame the victim. Americans shouldn't blame themselves because other people want to bomb them.
Bill: But also, we should -- we have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it's not cowardly. You're right.
Arianna: You make such an important point. When you talk about the American idea and the American way of life, all, you know, worth dying for. But let us not forget how many innocent civilians we killed when we bombed Yugoslavia to rubble, because we did not want to have a single American soldier die. And now we have over 5,000 innocent civilians die because we were cowardly when it came to our military personnel. And that goes across the board to Iraq, many parts of the country where we bombed innocent civilians.
Alan: I don't think we should get in to the blaming mode, as you've suggested. But it seems to me that blaming is somewhat different from understanding why people hold the animosities they hold. And I think it behooves us, as Americans, to ask ourselves some foundational questions as to what prompted these folks to do what they did.
Bill: You're right.
Alan: Because, even if we resolve this solution, there is no -- there's every possibility that this will happen again and again and again.
Bill: But you've got to fight it on a long range and a short range basis, right?
Alan: Exactly.
Bill: The long range, we do need to find out. And I want to do shows with young Muslim men and ask that exact question -- why do you hate us? I don't think Americans have a clue why we're hated. Some of it is our fault. Some of it is the fault of the countries they come from. Yes?
Arianna: But there's another piece of political correctness that we need to fight. And this is the assumption that, right now, nothing matters except a military buildup. In fact, the domestic agenda still matters tremendously, because, although "Time" magazine is out this week with a cover that says "One nation indivisible," the truth is that there are millions of Americans who are marginalized. And it's out of that pool of marginalized, disfranchised Americans and 9 million children who live in terrible conditions -- there are 11 million uninsured -- all these people who are -- we have not taken care of, from whom major destabilizing forces can emerge. You should not ignore that fact.
Bill: Okay. We have to take another commercial. We'll be back.
[ Applause ]
Bill: Okay, we're back talking with our expert panel on this. Obviously, everybody has the same feeling, I think, today and last week, which is that everything we were thinking about and obsessed with a week ago seems completely trivial and inappropriate. I never realized how much that "Seinfeld" show captured the zeitgeist of the '90s, being a show about nothing, because everything we were obsessed with in the '90s was nothing. Impeachment was nothing. Elian Gonzalez was nothing. Smoking -- nothing. I made a list of things, and I hope you'll just -- you can chime in here.
Arianna: Let me disagree about smoking because smoking -- smoking kills 400,000 people a year.
Bill: But it's their choice. It wasn't the choice of the people in those towers.
[ Cheers and applause ]
It's nothing.
Arianna: It's not nothing, and we should stop making comparisons.
Bill: Gary Condit -- nothing, right?
Arianna: Right.
Dinesh: "Survivor." [ Laughter ]
[ Cheers and applause ]
Bill: You're right. Well, that's a good point. I mean, the reason we needed reality television was because our own reality was so soft that we had to create people. Well, now there's a real "Fear Factor," okay? We don't need the show.
Arianna: Okay, I have two other "Nothings" for you.
Bill: Sharks.
Arianna: Nothing.
Bill: Nothing. Gary Condit --
Arianna: Way nothing.
Bill: Way nothing.
Alan: But, you know, when a shark attacks someone, that one person, it means a great deal. So what you're saying is it's not that these are nothing, it's they pale by comparison.
Arianna: No, no, what we are saying is that the media should stop obsessing front-page stories, endless coverage about one shark attack. What we are saying is the media should stop obsessing about overage Little Leaguers. There was one Little Leaguer who was 14 and not 12 on the front page of "The New York Times." Excuse me?
Bill: Do you know what the issues on airlines were before this? Peanut-free zones. Remember that? People allergic to peanuts so we cannot serve them. And economy class syndrome which was the seats were too crowded, so people were getting blood clots in their legs.
[ All talking at once ]
Alan: What is not important?
Dinesh: I think what's going on is this. If you look back -- you know, everyone is celebrating the greatest generation -- the World War II generation -- and many of the virtues of the greatest generation, if you think about it, came out of the depression and World War II. Those two events gave moral seriousness to that generation. Now, Democratic societies in the time of peace and prosperity become sloppy, and so you have a lot of entertainment, and you have a lot of vulgarity, and you have a lot of silliness. And that's no different than the ancient Athenians. We're not a militaristic society like Sparta, but every now and then when an event occurs like this one, it focuses the mind. And so it creates moral unity.
Bill: But even when we're decadent, the government, their one job is supposed to be to protect us. That's job one. I don't care about funding for the NEA and a bunch of other crap that they say is job one. Job one was to keep us safe, and they [ bleep ] it up.
Arianna: But the problem is --
[ Cheers and applause ]
Bill: You can say that now, we're in a war.
Arianna: [ bleep ].
[ Laughter ]
Arianna: I said it before, but they [ bleep ].
[ Laughter ]
It sounds different with a Greek accent.
[ Laughter ]
Because, basically, at the moment our government operates on the strength of who is giving whom the most money, who was the biggest law base in Washington. Trust me.
Bill: You're right.
Arianna: If counterterrorism had to lobby -- if they were giving money to Democrats and Republicans, they would have done something about that before.
Bill: And that's why I wanted you here. You are always the voice of truth and wisdom. That is so true. I have to take a commercial.
[ Applause ]
Bill: All right, well, listen, I want to thank you guys for helping us through this first night. We are going to be here on the watch and having more shows about this subject for quite a while, so stay tuned. Thank you very much and take care.
[ Applause ]
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --
Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher
Executive Producers Bill Maher Nancy Geller Kevin Hamburger Marilyn Wilson
Supervising Producer Sheila Griffiths
Created By Bill Maher
Directed By Hal Grant
Writing Supervised By Billy Martin
Writers Kevin Bleyer Brian Jacobsmeyer Bill Kelley Bill Maher Ned Rice Danny Vermont Eric Weinberg
Coordinating Producer Claudia Cagan
Producer Carole Chouinard
Associate Director Bob Staley
Stage Manager Patrick Whitney
Announcer John Cramer
Produced by: Dean E. Johnsen
Executive in Charge of Production John Fisher
Executive Producers Brad Grey Bernie Brillstein Marc Gurvitz
abc.com 2001 Follow Up Productions, Inc.
ERIN: No my point was that your statement was even't close to close.
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