there was a Shiite and a Sunni sectarian issue going on
over there ... I said to someone, ‘That’s impeachable
that the president would go to war in a country and not
know the first thing about it, not know that there were
Sunnis and Shiites,’” he said last October on MSNBC’s
Scarborough Country. “And this person said to me,
‘Well, come on, Bill, five years ago, did you?’ And I
said, ‘Well, first of all, yes, I did. And second of all, I’m
not the president. I’m not taking my country to war.’
It doesn’t really matter if I knew about the Sunnis and
the Shiites. But when you’re the president and you’re
sending people to die, yes, I think that’s something
probably you should have studied up on.”
Maher is flattered when told that this is the sort of
swift, analytical thinking that makes him the smartest
guy in any room, but he provides a sincere rebuttal.
“I’m not that guy in the room,” he says. “I simply do
not have that kind of IQ power. I think of myself as
the guy in the room with the most common sense.”
Whether it’s IQ wisdom or common-sense smarts,
Maher’s observations have gotten him in trouble.
Ben Affleck
“The hardest thing in the world is to
find stars who are really, really good
at panel discussions. Ben is just an
extremely bright guy who’s sincerely
interested in national affairs. He’s our
best celeb guest, clearly.”
PHOTOS: VINCE BUCCI/CORBIS (ABOVE), NBC UNIVERSAL (TOP)
And one got him fired. On Politically Incorrect, on his
first show after the Sept. 11 attacks, he came up with a
comparison of American politicians and al-Qaida that
was, in retrospect, stated at the wrong time. “We have
been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000
miles away,” he said on Sept. 17, 2001. “Staying in the
airplane when it hits the building, say what you want
about it, it’s not cowardly.” Americans, still rattled
and emotionally spent by the attacks, were understandably outraged. The show’s sponsors pulled out.
Maher and his show were shown the door.
Maher realizes that, had he waited six months
to say those words, he wouldn’t have faced such an
uproar. Now, more than five years later, it’s clear that
the bigger picture within his remarks—that criticizing the government is hardly an act of treason, even
in the immediacy of a post-9/11 America—has been
validated in part by the 2006 elections and the resulting Democratic takeover of Congress. “Like they say,
it’s the pioneers who get all the arrows fired at them,
don’t they?” Maher says, laughing. “But, yeah, my
timing was off on that one. What still bothers me is
that my audience had no problem with the remarks
even at the time I made the statement. I mean, it was
called Politically Incorrect after all. But it was people
who never, ever watched the show who got angry and
forced sponsors to cancel their ads. It did not bother
me at all that the show came to an end. It had gone on
long enough. It probably ran its course. What bothered me is that people [who] didn’t even watch the
program made it go away.”
Not that Maher would ever stay out of work for
long. Thanks to an already amicable relationship
with HBO, he hooked up with Real Time by 2003.
And in 2006, Maher began hosting Amazon.com’s
Amazon Fishbowl, a more mainstream, one-on-one
entertainment interview program. He writes books,
The pièce de
résistance for any
up-and-coming
comedian: Johnny
Carson invited Maher
to take the coveted
Tonight Show seat
beside him in 1985.
