The bulk of Bill Maher’s monologue Friday night concerned the inexplicable, continued rise of Ben Carson. “The more we find out how crazy he is, the more the base loves this guy,” the HBO host remarked adding, “his latest is a doozy,” referring to the new frontrunner’s theory about the Egyptians pyramids. “The real seventh wonder of the world is how Ben Carson ever got out of medical school,” Maher joked.
Maher and his panel—The Atlantic’s David Frum, National Review contributor Jillian Melchior and former Rep. Anthony Weiner—spent most of the first half of the show reviewing the various GOP victories in this past week’s off-year elections, including a potentially devastating blow for the recently-insured in Kentucky and a marijuana defeat in Ohio that Maher was not quite as upset about as you may have expected he would be.
But things really started to heat up once Maher’s end of the show guest, director Quentin Tarantino, came out to address the recent controversy over his comments about police killings. Police unions have called for a boycott of his upcoming film The Hateful Eight after the director said at a rally last month, “When I see murder I cannot stand by. And I have to call the murdered the murdered and I have to call the murderers the murderers.”
“What happened to you reminded me so much of what happened to me after 9/11,” Maher told Tarantino, referring to the comments that got his previous show on ABC, Politically Incorrect, canceled back in 2001. Specifically, he expressed the opinions that the hijackers may have been despicable human beings, but they were not, as so many people were calling them at the time, “cowards.”
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times earlier this week, Tarantino clarified his remarks. “All cops are not murderers. I never said that. I never even implied that,” he explained. “Instead of dealing with the incidents of police brutality that those people were bringing up, instead of examining the problem of police brutality in this country, better they single me out.”
“We need to talk to the cops about this, we need to get to the problem,” Tarantino said on Friday night, vowing to continue to press the police violence issue instead of allowing his critics to silence him.
“They want us to think they’re so brave, but that’s not brave,” Maher said of cops after showing the latest fatal police shooting caught on camera. “You have to call murder, murder, even if it’s from the cops,” Maher said, echoing Tarantino’s words and perhaps inviting police unions to come after him next.