One-on-One with Bill Maher; Bill Maher On Marriage, Overactive Libidos
PIERS MORGAN, CNN HOST: Fasten your seat belts, America. Bill Maher is here.</s>BILL MAHER, HBO'S "REAL TIME WITH BILL MAHER": I'm against building mosques, church -- churches, synagogues, temples anywhere because I'm an atheist and I think these are places that perpetuate mass delusion.</s>MORGAN: Always outspoken.</s>MAHER: They gave all this money to the banks. No regulation, no strings, and these guys just basically stole it.</s>MORGAN: Always controversial.</s>MAHER: Every modern and just realized Western democracy is a hybrid with elements of socialism in it. It's not evil.</s>MORGAN: What on earth will Bill Maher say tonight?</s>MAHER: I want to feel like I broke into the studio and took over and made them mad. If I'm not doing that, I'm not doing my job.</s>MORGAN: Nothing is off limits on his show, but tonight he's on my show. I'm going to grill him about everything from the race for president, the government going bust. Also tonight, Morgan Freeman with extraordinary 40-year career and his work honoring Nelson Mandela. Morgan Freeman is man Hollywood calls the voice of god. So of course I have to ask him to do this.</s>MORGAN FREEMAN, ACTOR: This is</s>PIERS MORGAN TONIGHT. MORGAN: Bill, welcome.</s>MAHER: Hi.</s>MORGAN: I feel like I'm -- you are such an institutional guest for Larry before. It's the first time I've had the pleasure of you here.</s>MAHER: I was. It's great to be back in the time slot.</s>MORGAN: I thought about the ways we could start this. And I think there's probably nothing more pertinent, I would say, than the state of America's debt. And I want to play you --</s>MAHER: A sexy topic.</s>MORGAN: A sexy topic. But probably, I mean, everyone talks about everything else at the moment.</s>MAHER: It actually is because there's a lot of drama in it.</s>MORGAN: And it's a key issue to me. I mean if America go bust, that's it. So --</s>MAHER: It's astounding to me that we're actually having an argument over whether America should pay its bills.</s>MORGAN: Isn't it? I totally agree.</s>MAHER: It shows you where the insanity has gone in this country. I don't think people realize it because I don't think people follow an issue like that, I think -- especially the people who are pushing to hold the line. And so what if the debt ceiling -- I think they think it's money that we haven't spent yet. You know? That if we -- if we just cut it off, starve the beast, everything will be fine and we'll get our fiscal house in order. No. This is money we already spent. George Bush and the Republicans, they sat down and ordered a lot of food. And then they got up from the table before the check came. Now somebody has to pay that check.</s>MORGAN: Well, the person who's in charge of trying to pay it is of course President Obama. If I was a Republican the way to beat President Obama, the way that the job figures stand at the moment, 9.2 percent, the state of the economy generally, turmoil around the world continuing -- the way to probably beat him is to take him on on the economy. The best way to paralyze him is to continue doing what they're doing. It's not in their interest to do a deal, is it?</s>MAHER: No probably about it. That's exactly what they're doing. Yes, I -- Ann Coulter was on our show Friday night and she had written a book called "Treason Once." Treason. You know? A little over the top. But I said as a long you --</s>MORGAN: I'm sorry, I mean she actually thinks we're bombing Egypt at the moment.</s>MAHER: Yes. Well -- but on this issue, you know, as long as you're going to be the one to invoke treason, I mean, are the Republicans really doing what's in the best interest of America or are they doing what's in the best interest of their party to win the next election? They know the economy has to stay sucky in 2012 for them to win. If the economy is doing a lot better, Obama wins going away. And I don't think they're doing anything. John Boehner tweeted to Obama the other day when he was doing his town hall on Twitter, you know, after record binge -- spending binge, where are the jobs? Well, I don't know. You're in the Congress. Isn't it the Congress' job to present a jobs bill?</s>MORGAN: Well, I like this quote from Warren Buffett who says the way to get rid of the deficit, we should pass a law that says any time there's a deficit of more than 3 percent of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for reelection. And I like that.</s>MAHER: Well, you know.</s>MORGAN: But that's how a businessman would run his company.</s>MAHER: Well, that's another fallacy.</s>MORGAN: Depends on the business.</s>MAHER: Somehow, you know, businessmen are going to be good at running the government. They're not the same thing. You can't fire the Congress the way you can fire your board. Mitt Romney is running on that silly idea that I ran a business. I know how to create jobs. No, actually what he did was fire people. You know he knew how to destroy jobs --</s>MORGAN: But isn't he doing that --</s>MAHER: -- to create profit. That's what business does. It creates profit.</s>MORGAN: But isn't -- in Mitt Romney's case, and we're going to come to the candidates in a moment. But I think it's quite a clever strategy by him to focus purely on economy and present himself as the guy that understands it. Isn't that clever? But at politics by him.</s>MAHER: Well, it's clever for a country that doesn't pay attention and where people don't think too much about any issue. But the truth is that government is there to do the things that are not supposed to turn a profit. I heard Tim Pawlenty say the same thing. Amtrak. Amtrak doesn't make a profit. It's not supposed to make a profit. It's like saying why doesn't the Marine Corps make a profit? That's the difference between government and private enterprise.</s>MORGAN: But isn't America, though -- but America is a country that, unlike in Britain, we have the class system, where depending on where you went to school and what your parents did, and who you were bred into, that is, you know, often the way you get on in life. In America, and I've spent, you know, probably four or five years now immersing myself into this culture, the class system is based around hard work, success and achievement. So it's all surprising to me that the people governing the country pander to that by this rhetoric of everything has to make a profit because that's the way you have a yardstick of success here, isn't it?</s>MAHER: Well, if you're talking about social mobility, yes. That is always what's been defined as the American dream, the ability of one generation to do better than the generation that spawned them. That was always something that was quintessentially American. Well, we're tenth in the American dream right now. We're tenth in social mobility compared to other countries around the world which is like Sweden coming in tenth in Swedish meatballs or something, you know? It's just a shame.</s>MORGAN: Well, I find it interesting. I happen to be on Donald Trump. And I know your views on his presidency campaign pretty strike like many people's. I like him. I've been on one of his shows obviously. And when he went lashing into China, I thought he slightly missed the point. I said this to him because it seems to me the trick that America should be now deploying surely as one of the great producers in the past is to produce stuff that countries like China need. And the reason I say that again to you is there was a brilliant report this week that in China the need and demand for American crops, for example, corn, is absolutely going through the roof. This is the way that America should be thinking. It should be identifying what these countries -- they're not emerging countries. China has emerged. What do they need that America can provide them? Put the foot on the gas. Don't say these people is a threat.</s>MAHER: Or green technology.</s>MORGAN: Yes.</s>MAHER: Stem cell research. You know one of the reasons why America falls behind every year more and more is because we're a superstitious, hyper-religious, intellectually backward people at this point. Not compared to a lot of countries but compared to the leading countries in the world, we are. If we could have had stem cell research, you know, there's so many patents for so many scientific areas that come out of that, but we're falling behind in that area, too, as we are because we don't put a premium on science anymore. Science is suspect in this country.</s>MORGAN: Well, China has now overtaken America in the production of unscientific research.</s>MAHER: Absolutely.</s>MORGAN: I found that staggering.</s>MAHER: Yes.</s>MORGAN: But you know, I know that, you know, in schools I've seen in Europe and so on, which are now full of, especially the private schools, of these very smart, very hard-working young Chinese who come in. You know I played a game of soccer with my sons recently. And I managed miraculously to score a good goal. And I was doing my-dad- triumphant thing. Two of my sons spontaneously said dad, that was so Chinese. Now I thought it would be racist. This is the new school ground compliment around the world. Being Chinese is what being American used to be.</s>MAHER: I got to have kids to keep up with --</s>MORGAN: It is how you find out what the future is.</s>MAHER: Wow.</s>MORGAN: These kids use being Chinese as a compliment. This is the best compliment they could pay me. That was Chinese, dad. I found it an extraordinary moment.</s>MAHER: That's one of the scariest things I've ever heard in this time slot.</s>MORGAN: Why is it scary?</s>MAHER: Because it shows we're falling behind China.</s>MORGAN: Yes, but isn't it your own way of saying embracing all these new economies now rather than seeing them as some great threat? Can America afford to see everything economically, militarily and so on as a threat in the way it has before?</s>MAHER: But we would have to reconfigure all of our priorities. I mean what do we spend all of our money on? Debt, paying off our debt, and the military. I mean while they're talking about all this budget stuff in Washington and dickering over $100 million here and there, they just passed and nobody even questioned it -- the new Pentagon spending bill, $648 billion, which is more than I think the next 17 countries combined or something like that. You know we could cut this in half, I think, and still be probably safe in the world. Who's the threat that's going to invade us?</s>MORGAN: See, many Americans, it seems to me -- I mean you say this stuff and I bet you get deluged with people calling you unpatriotic, un-American. These are not -- it's not American to admit that you shouldn't be spending money on the military, that you shouldn't be doing things the old American way. But, I mean, is it time that America completely changed its philosophy on these things?</s>MAHER: What's patriotic is wanting your country to succeed. And our country is not succeeding right now because our military is too big. And by the way, people call it the military and then they, hands off, you can't -- you know what, it's not military. It's defense contractors. It's welfare for people who make weapons that we don't need. Most of our weaponry is ridiculous. It's not -- it's for fighting the Russians in 1978. We don't need that. What would make this country stronger is economics. That's where the -- that's where the future is. That's what makes a country strong. If you're not strong economically you're not going to be --</s>MORGAN: That's where America is increasingly weak. So by any comparison --</s>MAHER: But this is one reason. You know we could solve this debt/deficit problem if we would do two simple things. Tax the rich like they used to be taxed. Not a hell of a lot more, just what they were under Clinton, for example, and bring the troops home. Not just from Iraq and Afghanistan, but we have a half a million troops on bases in over 100 countries across the world.</s>MORGAN: How many do the --</s>MAHER: This is --</s>MORGAN: How many do the Chinese have?</s>MAHER: None. I don't think.</s>MAHER: They don't have troops.</s>MORGAN: Hardly anything. They have no imperialistic ambition.</s>MAHER: Right. Because they know this is not the way you achieve hegemony in this world. This is not the 14th century.</s>MORGAN: I did a documentary in Shanghai recently. A fascinating time to be out there. And that this dynamism that you felt all around the city. But one young -- frosting young multi millionaire. There are 125,000 millionaires in Shanghai alone. I mean staggering statistics.</s>MAHER: How many?</s>MORGAN: A hundred and 25,000 millionaires in Shanghai. A city of 25 million people. And he just looked to me, and he said, look, we -- he said, I don't want to kill you. I don't want to take over your land. He said, I want to sell you a duvet. And he laughed. And he said, we want to be number one in selling you duvets. I want to sell you everything in your home but I don't want to kill you.</s>MAHER: Right. And that's how they will be number one. You know they're building $300 billion, I think, of high speed rail. This country trying to get the money to build, I think, it's $8 billion? They want to lay it between, I think, L.A. and Las Vegas, which I think it's funny that those are the two cities that have to be connected, or maybe between L.A. and San Francisco. But we have none at the moment.</s>MORGAN: Well, we're going to have a little break. When we come back I want to ask you which of these two people, do you think, has the best chance of putting America back on its feet? Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann?</s>MAHER: Well, that's what they call a Hobson's choice.