HBO’s Bill Maher scolded the media on Friday’s edition of Real Time Overtime for their claims that Donald Trump called for former Rep. Liz Cheney to be shot. Maher’s rebuke was not out of any love for Trump, but a demand that the media not “lie to me” because the real context of Trump’s actual remarks was something that “hippies used to say.”
Maher asked his assembled panel, “What do you make of the statement, I woke up today to the headline that Trump had called for a firing squad for Liz Cheney, and this is what I really don’t like about the media: no, he didn’t, he didn’t, you don’t, you don’t have to move me to not like Donald Trump more than I—”
The Fifth Column podcast co-host Michael Moynihan interrupted to concur, “He says so many shitty things, why do you have to do that?”
Maher then continued: “By the way, what if people don’t realize it, he’s criticizing her for being a warhawk. I mean, she is Dick Cheney’s daughter. He said, ‘She’s a radical warhawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay, let’s see how she feels about it. You know, they’re all warhawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, ‘Oh gee, we’ll send tens of thousands of troops right into the mouth of the enemy.’”
Maher rolled on, “Just to be clear, this is exactly what hippies always said. This is exactly what peaceniks always said. This is Fortunate Son, the song. It’s like, you know what, it’s very easy to sit in your building and send young men to die.”