Politically Incorrect
26 octobre 2000/October 26th, 2000
Veuillez noter que cette entrevue est disponible en anglais seulement. Il n'est pas dans mon intention de la traduire, vu la longueur.
Please note that it not not my wish to translate this article in French, because of its lenght.
Bill : Thank you very much. [ Cheers and applause ] Ah, stop it. Okay. Thank you, and let us meet our panel. She is a Nixon biographer and political commentator for Fox News -- Dr. Monica Crowley. Doctor? [ Cheers and applause ]
Monica : Hey, Bill, how are you?
Bill: I didn't know you were a doctor. You weren't a doctor before. A popular singer/songwriter, his new cd is called "Beneath the Velvet Sun" -- Shawn Mullins! Cheers and applause ]
Bill : Doctor, how are you? He is the host of "Monday Night Live" and a sports anchor right here on ABC -- Bill Weir! Bill! [ Applause ]
Bill Maher : Bill, how are you, buddy? Good to see you. And he, of course, was TV's Superman, the star of "The Broken Hearts Club" and Hallmark Hall of Fame's "Runaway" December 10th on another network -- Dean Cain is right over here.
[ Cheers and applause ]
Bill Maher : How you doing, buddy? Good to see you.
Dean : Good to see you.
Bill Maher : Okay. All right, well, it's less than two weeks before the election. It's sort of come down to -- I call it the "Cheers" election. We have one know-it-all like Cliff. Everybody hates him. And one guy like Norm, everybody wants to have a beer with. He's an idiot. [ Laughter ]
[ Cheers and applause ]
Bill Maher: So that's it. But, you know, the know-it-all or the idiot, and they're all pandering to get different groups voting. Here's a group I hadn't heard about until yesterday -- the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill. Folks, I couldn't make this up. [ Laughter ]
Bill Maher: They are having a "get out the vote" campaign. [ Laughter ]
Bill Maher : Mike Fitzpatrick, the regional director, said, "Our purpose is to establish a mental illness voting bloc." [ Laughter ] I am not making this up. Just to give you some facts, some states allow the retarded to vote. Others allow the insane, but not the retarded. 35 states draw the line -- you can't vote if you're insane, incompetent, incapacitated, an idiot or a lunatic. They -- [ Laughter ]
Bill Maher : But one of the spokesmen said the mentally ill should have the same right to make a mistake as anybody else.[ Laughter ]
Bill Maher : Bill?
Bill Weir : The voices in my head tell me this is okay. [ Laughter ] And here's why.
Monica : So I guess you'll be voting in two weeks.
Bill Weir : Here's why, because when you start taking away people's Constitutional rights, for any reason, it's a slippery slope. I mean, I've got family members who aren't, you know, clinically retarded, but we don't let 'em play with the remote control. You know what I mean? [ Laughter ] And they get to vote. So, like you say, there's so many different -- and if the kid from "Deliverance" can put down the banjo and find a polling place -- [ Laughter ]
Monica : Wait a minute, wait a minute.
Bill Weir : -- more power for them.
Monica : Mental illness is a pretty broad category. I mean, clinical depression is not schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is not homicidal mania. Obviously there are varying degrees here. And if somebody's incarcerated for being criminally insane, obviously they should not have the right to vote. But if somebody is, say, institutionalized for mental illness and the doctor can show the state that medication or therapy has stabilized the patient, the patient knows what's going on, he's aware of his reality --
Shawn : I wonder how you can draw the line, though.
[ Talking over one other ]
Monica: -- He's not delusional, then he should be allowed to vote.
Bill: But, we're talking about the mentally ill. You can -- all your flowery words, Doc. [ Laughter ]
These are schizos and psychos. And, I mean, my inclination is to be with you on this and say, "You know what? How can we let the mentally ill vote?" But then again, when I read about the moronic reasons people are voting for one of these two guys, I don't think it makes a difference. [ Laughter ] I was saying to Joe Lockhart the other day --
[ Applause ]
And I'm not for either one of them -- these clowns. But people think that Gore is more competent, more caring, and more with them on the issues. They prefer Bush, 'cause they'd rather have a beer with him. Now, is that any better than a total retard in the booth? [ Laughter ]
[ Applause ]
Dean: Probably not, but I gotta say, you know, if someone doesn't know the difference between right and wrong, if they literally can get off, like a murderer, by reason of insanity, not guilty by reason of insanity, I don't wanna 'em to vote.
Shawn: I wonder where we're gonna draw the line. Where do you say, "Okay, this person is almost crazy enough"? So you've gotta draw the line somewhere. I think there should be someone --
Bill: Do you know that they say one in five of us in America, in a given year, suffers from mental illness? That's what the National Institutes of mental health say, one in five.
Bill Weir: So all those swing retard states are really what's gonna decide -- [ Laughter ]
Bill: We gotta take a commercial. We'll be right back.
[ Cheers and applause ]
Last night was Hillary Clinton's big birthday bash. She was 53 years old. The stars all came out in New York for this. De Niro was there, Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz, Cher, and of course the President himself. Cameron Diaz must have been very excited to meet the president, because afterwards, her hair was standing straight up. [ Laughter ]
Bill: A new U.N. study says that global warming is worse than ever. They predicted in a short amount of time crops will fail and the polar ice caps will start melting. But George Bush -- of course owned by the oil companies -- said, "On the bright side, from now on our Navy ships will be able to refuel in the relative safety of Kansas." [ Laughter ]
[ Cheers and applause ]
Okay, we have some sports people here today. I've seen you play baseball. I saw you -- you jerked a few out in that all-star game. You can hit 'em. And you're a sports guy. And I know you were a nose tackle, Monica, for the Pittsburgh Steelers in the '70s, weren't you? So I wanted to bring this up. In North Carolina, there's a football coach who is reminding people of the guy in "Remember the Titans." I don't know if you saw that movie. But he's a high school coach who is a drill sergeant. That's what I remember coaches being like. Okay, he got fired -- he was a very popular coach -- after 28 years, because some kid was not playing up to his expectations, he was a little complacent, and the coach said to him, "You may as well go ahead and put a gun in your mouth and pull the trigger." And, uh --
Shawn: That's pretty harsh.
Bill: That's pretty harsh?
Shawn: I was in the Army, I played sports growing up, too, but that's pretty harsh.
Dean: I gotta say, a football coach is a teacher. And I played professional football. I played football at every level. I have a 4 1/2-Month-old son. If a football coach spoke to my son that way, then it'd be worse than getting fired. Because then he'd have to come deal with me. 'Cause, I gotta tell ya, that's the most ridiculous thing anybody --
[ Applause ]
Monica: I agree. I agree.
Dean: I just think it's -- if you're gonna teach and you're gonna coach, you teach and you coach correctly. I mean, one of the best coaches in the world, as far as I'm concerned, was my head coach at Buffalo, who was a very calm, very relaxed -- Marv Levy. Those words would never come out of his mouth. And I find it offensive --
Bill Weir: He lost four Super Bowls.
Bill: Yeah, exactly.[ Laughter ] What a bunch of losers they were!
Dean: I think that coach should be banned from coaching for life.
Monica: But has this coach been watching the news over the past few years? What planet has he been living on? The school violence occurring in this country has been horrendous over the past few years.
[ All talking at once ]
Bill: And that's because kids are coddled. Because nobody stands up to kids and gets in their face. That's why you have the school --
Monica: I agree with that. But, you cannot --
Shawn: I agree with you on that.
[ Applause ]
Bill Weir: Absolutely.
Shawn: That's true.
Monica: I agree, Bill. But you cannot have a coach using a gun metaphor given the context of the times we're living in. This is a person who's educating or working with our youth. And I think, you know, what he said was highly insensitive, it was not appropriate, but it was also protected by the first amendment. So in terms of punishment, I don't see what the school board can do, apart from the principal calling him in and saying, "Cut it out. Don't ever use that kind of language again."
Shawn: And they fired him, right?
Bill: They fired his ass.
[ Cheers and applause ]
Dean: They should fire his ass.
Shawn: It could have been like, for me, he could have said something like this -- "If you're happy with the way your life is and the way that you're playing, you might as well quit." If you're an athlete and you're really into the game, that's enough, man.
Bill Weir: But you gotta take it in context. Coaches, anything they -- I had a high school football coach, who, first practice, to prove his machismo would take a bite out of a shot glass and then wouldn't dismiss the first practice until everybody on the squad had thrown up. Was he a jerk? Yeah. Was it abuse? Yeah. But at the time, you know --
Dean: Was it stupid?
Bill Weir: Yeah.
[ Applause ]
Dean: That's not how you coach. That's not how you teach. You say, "If you're not gonna play, look at the rest of the teammates that you're letting down." Or bench his ass.
Bill: But you know what bothers me is that, in this world we live in, at least this country, it seems like it's so easy to lose your job if you say one wrong thing. They can't fire you if you're incompetent anywhere. You have to make a case for that. They can't fire you if you're insane. We were just talking about the insane. That's not a reason to --
Dean: But you can vote.
Bill: But you can vote. Good point. They very often can't ask if you have a criminal record or fire you for that. But if you say something insensitive, you can't keep your job. That is a worse crime.
Monica: Bill, in light of Columbine and all of these school shootings, the context now is so intense that you cannot use a gun metaphor if you're a teacher dealing with our country's youth. You have to be more sensitive than that.
Bill: It was in the paper that a very, very small percentage of kids who die, die at school. Like 1.4%. It's in the home that they're --
Monica: I understand, but this is a highly visible situation 5in the United States today. Even though it is relatively rare, it does make the news.
Bill: Extremely rare.
Monica: And so teachers have to be more careful about their use of language.
Bill Weir: You know, if the coach had said, "shoot yourself -- and take out the running back who keeps fumbling" -- [ Laughter ] Then --
Shawn: Take out the running back first?
Bill Weir: Yeah, and then -- before he offs himself.
[ Applause ]
Dean: He reminds me of those guys like the hockey father, who, like, killed another hockey father.
Bill: But that's killed! This is just said something a little wrong. 28 years goes down the drain because you say one wrong thing?
Shawn: I don't think he should have been fired over it. I think it should've been a big old slap on the wrist, "And we're gonna be watching you now. We're gonna be watching what you're saying." Firing somebody over that? I mean, I know how coaches get. They get built up. They get burning in the locker room, they're, like, saying everything. It's a big screw-up, but I don't know about firing him.
Dean: They should fire him and ban him for life. I don't think it's even a question. Think about if it was your son he said that to. Those kids are impressionable at that age. It's not a professional athlete.
Monica: And a lot of people do have zero-tolerance, where you can't even use --
Bill: Oh, I have such zero-tolerance for zero-tolerance. [ Laughter ]
[ Applause ]
Zero-tolerance is another way of saying, "We don't have to think about anything. We don't have to make judgments or use our minds. We just follow the chart." It's like the bouncer who cards me. I'm 44 years old -- "I gotta card everybody." [ Laughter ] Really? You think I'm under 21? The sign of a small mind.
Monica: They're trying to protect themselves from liability. Let's say this kid was mentally imbalanced somehow or was going through something. The next thing, he brings a gun to school and blows away a bunch of people and says, "Well, you know, the coach put the seed in my mind" --
Bill: Yeah, yeah.
Bill Weir: If the kid is that unbalanced to begin with, that's just natural selection.
Bill: Exactly. [ Laughter ] All right, we gotta take a break. We'll be right back.
[ Applause ]
Announcer: Join us tomorrow when or guests will be -- recording artist Charlotte Church, actor and comedian Guy Torry, recording artist Mos Def and film critic Holly McClure.
Bill: Our old friend Larry Flynt is making news. Now he is telling people that George W. Bush was involved in an abortion years ago. And apparently this is how bad Bush's drinking was -- he can't remember whether he was involved in an abortion or just using a coat hanger to get into his truck. [ Laughter ]
[ Applause ]
Bill: What? The crowd is cheering. What's your problem? Doctor? You're a doctor. When did you become a doctor, by the --
Monica: That was irresponsible of Larry Flynt to put that out there without any kind of evidence. And it was irresponsible of CNN to put him on the air to regurgitate that.
Bill Weir: Don't let the fact get in the way of a good joke. [ Laughter ]
Monica: Joke about an abortion?
Bill: Well, Larry Flynt was the guy who got Bob Livingston to resign, who exposed -- I don't know if he exposed Henry Hyde. But, I mean, he exposed a whole --
Monica: If he has some kind of evidence, let's see it. He doesn't have any. To do this now, two weeks out of the election, that's totally irresponsible.
Bill: Well, he said -- here's his quote. Larry Flynt said, "We found out in the early '70s, he, Bush, was involved in an abortion in Texas. And I just think that it's sad that the mainstream media, who's aware of this story, won't ask him the question."
Monica: Well I think it's irresponsible --
Bill: And he said, "And we've got all kinds of proof on this issue."
Monica: Well, where is it? Why haven't we seen it? And Larry flynt? He's hardly credible on this sort of thing. Anyway --
Bill Weir: Maybe he used the electric chair in the abortion process. Maybe it was the chair. [ Laughter ] Did he off the pregnant woman at any point? Did we check the rosters?
Bill: But, I mean, Republicans are notoriously hypocritical about the abortion issue. Bob Barr -- one of the amazingly right wing "Clinton should be hung and burned at the stake guys" -- turned out he had how many abortions? And he drove the women there. And he was having practically an abortion set up at the mall. [ Laughter ]
Okay. All right. We'll leave that alone and get onto something much more -- this is really much more prevalent. Economy-class syndrome. Ladies and gentlemen, this is what has got me upset. Listen to this. Travelers on airplanes are dying at shocking numbers, 100 a year, from DVT -- deep vein thrombosis. Sounds dirty, doesn't it? [ Laughter ]
Basically what it is is they're sitting on their fat ass throughout the entire flight, and so they get a blood clot in their leg because they don't move, and it goes to their heart or their lungs and they die. 100 a year. Okay. And they're calling it, I love this, economy-class syndrome.
Dean: Apparently no first-class passengers are dying of it.
Bill: No, because they have plenty of leg room. But, I mean --
Monica: Plenty of places to sprawl. Right. But this is ridiculous. Airlines shouldn't be held responsible for this. There is still an aisle. And it's up to passengers to maintain their own health and well-being on a long flight. Get up and walk.
Dean: Well, apparently, you've never flown overseas economy class, have you? I won't do it.
Shawn: Hey, I tell ya -- I think this woman who died recently was going to Australia, right?
Bill: It's a specific woman who has a specific case, but she cites that there's 100 people a year who die from this.
Shawn: Well, I've been to Australia a couple of times. It's a 20-hour flight. It's a big flight. I agree that you should get up and stretch your legs. But I also think that the airlines should also widen the economy seats a little bit. Come on. You don't have to stuff us in there like sardines. [ Cheers and applause ] Come on!
Bill Weir: We've all experienced this. It's the most frustrating thing.
Shawn: People are dying.
Bill Weir: I know you're with me on this. You've got the tray table down in front of you. The person in front of you reclines their seat, making it almost impossible to masturbate to the in-flight movie. [ Laughter ] Right?
Shawn: Almost.
Bill Weir: Haven't we complained enough about this? [ Cheers and applause ]
Bill: But, I mean, everyone cheers when you say the airline should, of course. But then they would charge more. Because there would be less seats. I mean that's the problem is that nobody makes the connection between --
Monica: The airlines only have one responsibility -- that's to get you from point "A" to point "B" in a safe environment.
[ All talking at once ]
Bill: -- We're not even responsible anymore.
Monica: To get up and walk around.
Bill: To get up and walk. It's not like they strap you -- oh, they do strap you in. [ Laughter ] But, I mean, how about just doing this?
Monica: You can get up and walk around. Let's say somebody who's in first class, right, with plenty of room to spread out. And they don't get up in a five-hour flight. They could develop a clot if they didn't get up, right?
Bill: What about half of America doesn't get up during all Sunday football? [ Laughter ]
[ Applause ]
Monica: My point exactly.
Bill: Why don't they sue the NFL? "Your product is too addictive, I'm watching you all afternoon."
Shawn: It's called butt syndrome.
Bill: Yeah, I mean it's --
Bill Weir: It's only a matter of time before the airlines just put the subway straps down the middle of the aisle, because it's become public transportation. So at some point, the capitalist system has to be -- there's gonna be a consumer backlash. And an airline is gonna figure it out, widen the seats, they're gonna get all the customers.
Bill: But don't you feel that people have no perspective any more if they're suing airlines? I mean, these are not Mexican immigrants stuffed into an oil drum or people on a slave ship. They're middle-class people going on an international vacation.
Monica: Right. And it's not like most people haven't done this before. Most people know what to expect when they buy an economy-class ticket, that they're gonna be squished like sardines. And therefore it's up to them, it's their responsibility, to take charge of their health while they're on a long-term flight.
Bill Weir: This chair's a little tight, Bill. I feel a clot coming on. [ Laughter ]
[ Applause ]
Bill: Considering that you're waking up in your home and going out to the airport, and then after the journey is over you're in Australia. Compared to -- how long did it take the people two centuries ago to get, you know, the covered wagons -- the thing where they had to eat each other. What was that?
Dean: Donner pass.
Bill: The Donner pass. Thank you. See? Superman, smart guy. [ Laughter ] I mean we have no sense of what hardship is.
Monica: That is true. We've become very soft.
Bill: Where is it written that life must be completely pain-free, that there is no inconvenience, nothing comes upon you?
Monica: And also a symptom of this is blaming other people or big corporations for something that happens to you that you have some control over.
Shawn: But we also have the responsibility of doing what I said before. And we can make a difference if people would get out there and start raising cane enough with the airlines to make the seats wider. I mean, I've gone coach and first class. And if you go first class, I'm telling you, you have no problem going to Australia. Try coach. I mean, it --
Bill: I have tried coach. I didn't like it. I worked my ass off.
Shawn: And went first class the next time?
Bill: Well, not the next time. But I never flew first class until I was in my late 30s, because I worked up to it. Sometimes in a TV show they'd give you first-class ticket. You'd trade in it and make like two grand. [ Laughter ] "The Tonight Show" -- "Hey, I don't care how I do on the show. I made two grand on the ticket." What happened to motivation? What happened to pain giving you motivation?
Bill Weir: Because we need the stewardess to instruct us to clinch our buttocks. You know when they do the opening thing? Show you how to work the seat belt, remind you to clinch your buttocks.
Bill: Speaking of which, I have to clinch mine and take a commercial right now.
[ Applause ]
Bill: All right, one more factoid about economy-class syndrome. It's the third-leading killer on planes after heart attacks and suicide from sitting next to the crying baby. [ Laughter ] I kid about that. All right. Shawn's record, "Beneath the Velvet Sun." Tomorrow night, we have Charlotte Church -- 14-year-old opera singer -- Guy Torry, Mos Def -- I said that like Chris Rock -- and Holly McClure. See you then, folks. Thank you.
[ Applause ]
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