Bill Maher: 'Rand Paul could possibly get my vote'

HBO Real Time host Bill Maher has told The Hill something that would no doubt outrage many of his fans:

"Rand Paul is an interesting candidate to me. Rand Paul could possibly get my vote," the 58-year-old comedy veteran said of the Kentucky senator.

Maher commented on the son of former Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas): "As I always used to say about his father, I love half of him. I love the half of him that has the guts to say we should end the American empire, pull the troops home, stop getting involved in every foreign entanglement… He's way less of a hawk than Hillary, and that appeals to me a lot because I'm not crazy about how warlike she is." […]

When pressed on whether he was leaning towards the Republican lawmaker in a potential Clinton/Paul matchup (neither has announced any 2016 plans), Maher said, "I wouldn't say leaning, but I would say for the first time in a long time I'd be considering the Republican product. I might choose their toothpaste when I'm in the aisle."

Whole thing here. As we've been writing about at Reason for a long time now, a Rand/Hillary matchup could scramble the political spectrum like few things we've seen before.

Comments

[Fist of Etiquette]

Sounds like Maher is confused about what libertarian means again.

[Scarecrow Repair]

Sounds like Maher is confused about what libertarian means again.

FIFY.

[LynchPin1477]

REPENT, THE END IS NEAR.

[John]

Could possibly, as in some alternative universe where the Democrats don't filed a candidate. Whatever Bill.

[Jeff R.]

Yeah, it's probably one of those statements that's intended to signal how open-minded and independent the speaker as rather than a statement of fact.

[EdWuncler]

A lot of my progressive friends hate Paul not because of his views but because he is actually more of a liberal in terms of civil liberties as opposed to the progressive champions such as Clinton and Warren who preach the importance of civil liberties but in reality could give two shits.

[Brian D]

How dare he say things they agree with!

[EdWuncler]

The left's trump has always been the race card and authoritarian card. Now that they possibly have an opponent that they can't smear with that bullshit, they are angry and scared shitless.

[RG]

They pay lip service to civil liberties, race and sex equality, etc and get very angry when called out to be frauds.

In the end, they're either authoritarians or redistributionists, and thats it.

[Francisco d'Anconia]

Can't they be both?

[Not a Libertarian]

I really don't see how it is beyond most of the left to still raise the "race" and "authoritarian" card against a candidate Paul.

[Knarf Yenrab!]

That's why they revile libertarians and classical liberals in particular.

The left wants to take the moral high ground as the party of peace and compassion (through other people's wealth, though they have a hard time understanding how wealth isn't a collective good), but when they encounter a group of people who are dogmatically, fundamentally opposed to aggression in all forms, they find themselves on unstable ground. Which is why Harry Reid spends his days denouncing the Koch brothers while playing relatively nice with John McCain.

[MWG]

This makes sense given that Maher is a libertarian.

[Bobarian (dinosaur hunter)]

That's about the funniest thing Maher has ever said.

But it still didn't make me laugh.

[Palin's Buttplug]

You can't call Maher a TEAM! player because he supported McCain in 2000. It wasn't until the GOP went full scale batshit crazy that he started supporting Democrats. So a Rand Paul nomination would stir things up as unlikely as it is.

The rest of the GOP is still batshit crazy though.

[Sevo]

Whatever, turd.

[John]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_C85RSew6Ao

BUSHPIG!!!!

(Now with cute puppies included in the sound effects)

[Palin's Buttplug]

Speaking of TEAM! players....

GO BIG RED TEAM!!!

[WTF]

Don't lock eyes with 'em, don't do it. Puts 'em on edge. They might go into berzerker mode; come at you like a whirling dervish, all fists and elbows. You might be screaming "No, no, no" and all they hear is "Who wants cake?" Let me tell you something: They all do. They all want cake.

[This Machine Kills 40s]

Speaking of TEAM! players....

Pot, meet kettle.

[CampingInYourPark]

"You can't call Maher a TEAM! player because he supported McCain in 2000."

We can still call him a moron

[Longtorso, Johnny]

And we can still call BPlug "Dave Weigel".

[Lord Humungus]

A fat, spotty one at that.

[ant1sthenes]

Yes, they're nutbags, unlike the people that want to gut the bill of rights, including the first amendment.

[Bobarian (dinosaur hunter)]

he supported McCain in 2000

Fuck off! At best he supported McCain for the Republican nomination.

He claims to have voted for Ralph Nader.

He also claims to be a libertarian, so there is no depth to his moral turpitude.

[Fist of Etiquette]

"I mean, I could say 'Good morning' on Twitter and the first 20 comments [are], 'How dare you, Bill Maher, say, 'Good morning!'" He continues with a slew of hypothetical mean tweets: "'Morning ? are you kidding? Ronald Reagan owns morning. It was 'morning in America' from him and how dare you invoke morning!' So in that atmosphere where people are just laying in wait constantly to attack anything you say, it almost doesn't matter anymore because I know whatever you say is going to get attacked."

That kind of atmosphere cultivated on Twitter is stifling debate; when it's played out on an HBO talk show, it's encouraging dialogue?

[mad.casual]

That kind of atmosphere cultivated on Twitter is stifling debate;

Not to mention; his 'debate' being stifled by chunks of 140 characters. I read this as, "Other people's ability to talk inhibits my ability to show them that they're wrong."

Maher's morning ruined by people who follow, but disagree with him on Twitter. #Ihazfrowny

[Knarf Yenrab!]

So in that atmosphere where people are just laying in wait constantly to attack anything you say, it almost doesn't matter anymore because I know whatever you say is going to get attacked.

How is this any different from anything political?

If you don't have the stomach to be hated for your beliefs regardless of what they, this may be a good sign that debate about politics or philosophy isn't for you. To be fair to Maher, I've never actually heard him debate politics. His style of political engagement tends toward glib jabs followed by a non sequitur.

[BlockadeRunnerX]

Oh please, he's LYING.

Lefties like him make these occasional gestures just to try and act above the GO TEAM fray.

In the unlikely event that Rand Paul gets the nomination, Maher and Co. will return to their Democrat Party battle stations and savage the gut to no end.

It ALL comes down to the expansion of the state with these people. That is the end of it.

Rand could promise to cut the military in half, close all our bases overseas, and authorize marijuana to be on the menu at Sonic, and Maher would still oppose him because "OMG SOMALIA AND BINDERS FULL OF WOMYN."

We're talking about a guy who donated money to Obama in 2012, knowing full well of the drone warfare, the deportations, and the zealous drug war prosecution.

[Jordan]

Yep.

[Palin's Buttplug]

Milt Romney was reason enough to support Obama in 2012. The GOP nominates sociopathic assholes and will continue to lose when Jeb Bush/ Chris Christie / Mike Huckabee gets the nod in 2016.

[Jordan]

Funny how statists always rationalize voting for statists.

[T]

The GOP nominates sociopathic assholes

Because the sociopathic assholes the donks nominate are so much better?

[Longtorso, Johnny]

Hey Weigel.

[John]

I mean Romney was a total sociopath. He is the guy who brags about how good he is at killing people and ordered the murder of a 16 year old American citizen for the crime of being the son of a guy who said a bunch of things Romney didn't like.

It was Mitt Romney who did that right?

We all know you are retarded and have serious mental issues. But Jesus Tap Dancing Christ, calling Mr. Clean Jean Mormon a sociopath while sucking President "I am really good at killing people"'s cock is a new low even for you. Have your doctors considered trying new meds or have they just given up at this point?

[tarran]

FOr the nth time, why are you arguing with it as if it's human?!?

Can you not see that it is mindlessly throwing snippets of text it has harvested by crawling the web at you in order to harvest your responses? It has no clue what the snippets mean because it lacks the capacity to understand any abstract concepts!

It's like an ant, you are angrily choosing to act like its aphid!

[John]

Its just so grotesque you can't look away.

[BlockadeRunnerX]

Hah, right because Obama's face doesn't pop up when anyone says "sociopathic asshole."

Maher's schtick is 100% bullshit. 100%.

If Ron Paul had pulled off a miracle and taken the nomination in 2012, the likes of Maher would have amazingly discovered that he's pro-life, wants to get rid of corporatism, and reduce the fedgov's role in paying for health care. Then he would have clutches his pearls and gone scurrying back to Team Obama, cheerleading for the state.

[MOFO.]

I think you are right, but for the wrong reasons. For people like Maher, party affiliation is part of their identity, they make sounds about how they are really reasonable and could change their views under the right circumstances, but its rarer than a fanboi switching from apple to android or vice versa.

If you look, you will notice a lot of the same behaviors too. The typical android fan will be like "id consider an iphone if they made one that had a bigger screen." Here is the new iphone 6 with a bigger screen. "Id never buy that because its a piece of shit and my android does some shit that ive never mentioned before but now its something i supposedly cant live without."

Or the apple fan: "im so sick of apple's shit, they are always trying to get you to pay more and more and get locked in more and more" "oh look, a bigger screen, i must have!"

The occasional blather about how they might switch is just to soothe their cognitive dissonance where they both believe that they make decisions based on facts and logic, but mindlessly support the same assholes over and over irrespective of the facts.

[The Last American Hero]

Kind of like when Libertarians are presented with Rand Paul and go all No True Scotsman when the most libertarianish choice since Goldwater has a sliver of a chance of getting the nomination?

[Bill Dalasio]

In the unlikely event that Rand Paul gets the nomination, Maher and Co. will return to their Democrat Party battle stations and savage the gut to no end.

Exactly. Hell, Breitbart unraveled Maher's "libertarian" claim on the topic of socialized medicine when he was still alive.

[UnCivilServant]

The only time I paid much attention to anything Maher said was when he showed up as an actor on "Murder, She Wrote" and had plot-relevent lines. PS, rewatching that series has shown a stunningly leftist bias in the writing to the point where they assume everyone will see that their strawmen are irredemably evil for wanting to build a hotel or a cannery on greenfield land and bring honest to goodness jobs to Cabot Cove.

[Longtorso, Johnny]

They should have ended the series by leveling Cabot Cove for a Pfister plant.

[UnCivilServant]

That reminds me of how another series ended. I didn't watch the show, but at some point the ending of "Little House on the Prarie" was on a sindication channel and they went and blew up the town because the land actually belonged to the railroad.

It would have been nice to see the smarmy locals of Cabot Cove hoisted in a similar fashion. (As they are fictional charachters, albeit obnoxious ones).

[The Last American Hero]

No. It should have ended with the town disintegrating into the crushing poverty and social problems that come with insane unemployment levels.

[UnCivilServant]

Cabot Cove has no unemployment because the insane murder rate prevents a build-up of the unemployed.

[eyeroller]

Someone should inform Maher that Rand Paul wants to "destroy ISIS militarily."

[DrAwkward]

Fuck Bill Maher that racialist, pompous shitslinger. He's as libertarian as that dude Rachel Maddow.

[Sevo]

He changes from a 'pundit' when he slips his bullshit through to a 'comedian' when he's caught.
The bullshit, however, is constant.

[The Last American Hero]

So he pulls a John Stewart special?

[The Immaculate Trouser]

Didn't they play this cocktease "I might vote for that Republican over the other mean ones" game with McCain?

Just sayin'.

[jmomls]

You're thinking of the New York Times, who promptly hit McCain with a folding chair the second after he got the nomination.

[The Late P Brooks]

Milt Romney was reason enough to support Obama in 2012.

Yes, of course. Romney was the anarchist (antichrist?) Trojan Horse candidate whose ultimate goal was the complete destruction of the Great Society and FDR's benevolent good works. His whole aim was to use the levers of power to make the rich richer, and the poor poorer. We dodged a catastrophic collapse of society by getting the other guy.

[Homple]

A bit of narrow but deep market research for reason: I stopped reading this article at "Bill Maher", and that was in the headline.

[Zeb]

Yeah, but you still gave them another page view or two to comment, and that's what counts.

[Jayburd]

More 'verbal makeup' from Maher. Matt, get a new pair of glasses and re-read the Objectivist Lexicon before you quote Bill the Shill in your online glossy again.

[jmomls]

Bill Maher is a liar.
Reason is naive for posting this nonsense.

[seguin]

Sweet, looks like Rand Paul has put the mendacious asshole voting block into play!

[INFORG]

Prediction: If Rand Paul starts to get any traction, Maher will "suddenly" learn something about Rand that totally disqualifies him from ever being president...."and this is coming from a guy who was prepared to vote for him", etc. etc.

[HazelMeade]

This.

[dinkster]

Bill Maher, always such a cock tease.