Transcript for Monday, June 24, 2002

Bill: I'm gonna get that flagged when I go.
Okay, welcome to "Politically Incorrect." Our last live Monday show.
And we have a very special panel, I think.
People I like a lot.
Holland Taylor, I'm glad you came back one more time.
"Baby Bob" on CBS, your new show.
You'll probably win an Emmy for that, too.
Mondays at 8:30 on CBS.
Peter Roff, thank you for coming back.

Peter: How are you?

Bill: We read you all the time, you're the political analyst for upi.
Sydney Hay, long-time gop activist, former talk-show host, currently running for Congress in Arizona's first district, good luck out there.
And my boy, Jay Mohr.
"Mohr Sports" on espn, Tuesdays at 8:00.
Give a hand to this panel, if you would.

[ Cheers and applause ]

All right, one quick announcement, my website, you know I've suddenly become a big webber.
Oh, I'm [ bleep ] into the 'net.

Holland: Oh, my God.

Bill: And I'm also on the Web.
My Website, it's now officially up and running.
Before it was unofficial, they were constructing it.
Thank God they finished with the hammering.
Jimmy Carter came by.
It's now up and running.
Billmaher.tv.
I'll be giving an online chat July 16th.
People say "Why did you get on the web suddenly after all those years of knocking it?" Because I got fired because I need a place to alert my "Politically Incorrect" sleeper cells of my next big thing.

Jay: Now you have the time.

Bill: That too.

Holland: And you will have a next big thing.

Bill: Okay, all right.
Speaking of big things --
thank you.
Speaking of big things, President Bush made a pretty big speech today.
Something I'd never heard a president say before, which was basically, he said to the Palestinians, "If you want to see some change, your boy's got to go." He finally put Yasser Arafat in the axis of evil, where he has belonged all these years.
Okay, but he also --
as long as we're knocking down myths that we've had to live with for a long time, because we did live with that myth for a long time that Arafat was helping.
Okay.
Bush also said "A Palestinian state will never be created by terror." Well, the truth is that this Palestinian state is going to be created --

Jay: --
Was founded.
After the '72 Olympics, all the countries got together and said, "Maybe if we give them a seat in the United Nations, they'll kill less."

Bill: That --
you know what, I never thought of --

Jay: You can be quiet if you want, but that's what happened.

Holland: No, you're right, I completely forgot that.

Bill: That's an interesting --

Jay: 1972.

Bill: Right.

Jay: It was a long time ago, and we're talking about the same thing.

Bill: Right.

[ Talking over each other ]

Peter: They've been going after this problem for 30 years and it always falls apart and there's been one constant over 30 years and that's been Yasser Arafat.
It's about time somebody said, "Hey, maybe he's the problem."

Bill: Right.

Peter: Maybe he's the reason that we can't stop this indiscriminate murder.

Bill: But it's not gonna change what I think is more fundamental, and Ted Turner was getting it this last week and he got in trouble for what he said, which is something I've said for many years.
He's basically said, "You know, why do we call one side, what they do, terrorism?" War, please, let's get real, is terrorism.
All of war, it doesn't matter whether you're doing it with a suicide bomber or if you're in a foxhole --

Jay: I disagree.

Sydney: I don't agree with --

[ Talking over each other ]

Jay: Damn you, bill.

Bill: Hiroshima, exac --

Holland: There is a difference between terror and making the Japanese government surrender in a minute.

Bill: Exactly.
Hiroshima.

Peter: Actually, it took two bombs to get them to surrender, 'cause we had another one at Nagasaki, but the important thing here is that war is between two countries, two nation-states, generally declared.
What Arafat is doing --

Bill: No, that is your definition of war.
People don't play by what --

Holland: Vietnam didn't think that.

Bill: Yeah, Vietnam.

Peter: What Arafat has is a bunch of people who run around indiscriminately trying to kill civilians to prove a point.

Bill: Right, they do it indiscriminately in an unorganized way where as we got a plane and a bomb and we all have uniforms and we salute and we drop the big bomb on Hiroshima.

Jay: Okay, great.
However, on our trip back we dropped food for the civilians 'cause we're so evil.
We're so bad.

[ Applause ]

Bill: We're not bad.
We're not bad.

Jay: I'm tired of it.

Sydney: One thing here that is very, very important, and let's say that the Palestinians do follow President Bush's leadership and elect someone else besides Yasser Arafat, it is still very, very important that we not negotiate with any leader, even so elected, that continues to promote this bombing, these homicide bombings.
We cannot negotiate with anyone that uses children as weapons.

[ Applause ]

Against innocent other children.
That is a definition of terrorism.
We cannot negotiate.

Holland: Arafat only promotes it when he's speaking in Arabic.
When he's speaking in English --

Jay: Let's bring him out.
Ladies and gentlemen, Yasser Arafat.

Holland: When he's speaking in English he's always --

Sydney: And he's also promoting it by potentially financing it.

Bill: I find it so interesting that people who, you know, refer to the terrorists as "Evildoers, evil, and they're evil," but the Palestinians, who, if they're not terrorists themselves, 100% support the terrorists, including the ones who attacked us.
They're not evildoers, they're a downtrodden people who deserve a better life.
Which they do and they are, but come on, they are the same thing as the evildoers, okay? So either we want to get real with who they really are, which is people who are at war.
We're at war with people of a different point of view.
We use terror, they use terror.
That's what war is.

Jay: How many Palestinians are on the globe?
[ Talking over each other ]

How many Palestinians are there?

Bill: What's this?

Sydney: There is no moral equivalent here.
We're talking about people that willingly, knowingly, use their children as human bombs and target other innocent children.

Bill: Darling --

Sydney: That is not the same.

Bill: What do you think happened --

[ Scattered applause ]

Is anyone here from any Southern states?
[ Silence ]

Jay: Almost everyone.

Bill: Apparently not.

[ Talking over each other ]

Peter: I see where you're going with this, Bill, and that is equally --
blowing up churches to kill little black children.

Bill: That's not where I was going with that.

Holland: Where were you going?

Bill: I was saying Sherman, in the Civil War, when the United States, the Northern government wanted to win this civil war, Sherman cut a swath to the sea and left nothing in his wake.
It was a direct attack on all the civilians and that was people in our own country.
Our own countrymen.
Ask anyone in the South today.
They remember it.

[ Talking over each other ]

Holland: That was how to finish it.

Peter: You still can't be a Southern politician and talk about Lincoln in lots of parts of this country.
Particularly because of Sherman's march to the sea.
But the fact is that as modern military policy, we do not send people on to crowded buses with bombs strapped to their bellies.

Bill: No, I'm saying we get them up in planes.

Peter: To blow them --
but we are seeking to eradicate combatants.
They're are trying to kill civilians to get the Israeli government to go away.

Bill: What was Dresden, what was Hiroshima, what was Nagasaki, what was --

[ Talking over each other ]

Attacking civilians.
The difference is that we were right.

[ Talking over each other ]

Our cause was right.
That's the difference.

Peter: They were also all industrial centers of the German and Japanese war machine.
There was a component there.

Bill: Hiroshima was an industrial center?

Peter: It was an industrial center, it was part of the Japanese war machine.

Bill: Oh, come on.

Holland: It was done to demoralize the Japanese utterly.

Bill: Of course it was.

Holland: That's all it was.

Jay: I thought it was done to save a million U.S. troops' lives.

[ Talking over each other ]

Holland: After demoralizing the Japanese government so the emperor would --

Jay: Who cares about --
they attacked us.
I don't care about demoralizing a government after they sink a freaking battleship in its own harbor.

Holland: I don't either.

Jay: I don't care about demoralized.
I want to demoralize them.

Holland: It wasn't to break them militarily, it was to break them spiritually.

Jay: And going back to the point with the Palestine and Israel, they fight over land, they fight over land.
What kills me is when the Palestinian state says, "And we want that land back we lost when we attacked you."

Bill: Right.

Jay: No, you lost it when you attacked us, good bye.

Bill: So the difference is that --

[ Applause ]

Jay: You see what I'm saying?

Bill: War is horrible, war is evil and war is terror on both sides.

Jay: The band?

Bill: What it comes down to is who is right in the war? We were right to drop the bomb on Hiroshima.

Jay: I think you said it best when you said, "If Palestinians had nuclear weapons, would they show the same restraint Israelis have shown?"

Bill: Right.

Jay: And I think that was as concise as you've ever put it.

Bill: Okay.
We gotta take a break.
We'll be back.

[ Applause ]

Joan: And this would make a great gift for gay weddings.
Of course, if Dole gets in, we won't have any gay weddings.
Sorry, Martina.
But --

[ Laughter ]

Oh, grow up.

[ Laughter ]


[ Applause ]

Bill: I love Joan Rivers.
Okay.
So I've been waiting to talk about this Elizabeth Smart case.
Now, she's been missing for about three weeks now.
I saw the poor mother.
We feel horrible for these people, obviously, but she said to the news media the other day --
she said, "I thought you'd be gone by now." Oh, man, I guess you should have been watching the news the last 15 years in this country.
They are not going away.
And I love it when the media talks about the media, because now that's what they --
now they've gone through this cycle, and there's no new news, so they have to talk about themselves so there's a guy, you know --

Jay: Media.
On the lawn.
I'm on the driveway.

Bill: I mean the media, the ones --
what's on the lawn? I'm over here on the driveway.

Jay: I'm in the tent down the street.

Bill: The media's overblowing this.
I'm not the media.
They're on the lawn.
I'm on the driveway.
Anyway --

[ Laughter ]

You're right, they just stare.
Anyway --
so the big thing now that they're saying in the self-recriminating media way, pointing fingers at themselves, is that white America only really cares about white America because no one is following the cases of the many missing black children there are in this country.

Jay: Okeydokey.
All right.

[ Scattered applause ]

How could you --

Bill: Look, first of all --

Jay: Time out.
How could you clap for that? I'm white, and I'm American.
Do you really think I'm sitting here, and I'm bean-counting how many FBI agents go to a missing child? How dare you?

Bill: What are you talking about?

Jay: I'm talking about the white media --
someone's applauding that the white media's ignoring black missing children and spending too much time on white missing children.
And that's the most insightful, ridiculous thing I've ever heard.
It just got an applause break.

Sydney: The important thing is that every child in America has a tremendous, immeasurable worth.
That's why I've always been very, very pro-life.
And I think it's very important that we find the perpetrator of this act --

Bill: No kidding.
I'll file all that under "No kidding."
[ Laughter ]

Peter: But there are a number of problems here.

[ Applause ]

There are a number of problems here, bill.
First of all --

Sydney: It doesn't matter.
It's a child --
white, black or Spanish.

Bill: I know, but it doesn't matter, except --

Sydney: We have to find the perpetrator because they'll strike again and again and again.

Bill: Okay, but there are, factually --
excuse me --
a lot more media and fbi agents on this one case.
So if all children are equally valuable, how come there's 100 FBI agents for this girl? That's what we're saying.

[ Applause ]

Jay: How would you or I know --
I have a question.
How would you or I know, as private citizens, how many fbi agents are allocated to each individual case?

Peter: Well, in this case, the fbi has put out a press release, and they've told everybody.

Bill: Yes, thank you.

Jay: You want to know why? Because it happened in Utah, they saw the guy in West Virginia and Texas.
To me, maybe two or three fbi agents, considering he's crossed the country, is not enough.
How about --

[ Talking over each other ]

Peter: But the first problem here is that the vast majority of missing children in this country have been abducted by a noncustodial parent or guardian.
And that's the first lie, is that there are not creeps in raincoats sitting on every street corner waiting to grab your child on the way home from school.

Bill: Right.

Peter: Now, in this case, the reason it is getting so much attention from the government is because it's getting so much attention from the media because --

Bill: Right.

Peter: --
The sister saw the abductor.
It's new.
It is the new version of the little girl who wins the beauty contest being found dead in the basement or the football star who decides to repossess his wife's breast implants with a long knife at her house, and it goes back to Adam Walsh, who was grabbed out of a --
--
Out of a department store.

Holland: I think there's a fundamentalist human foible even more at fault here, which is that we were fond of things in an emotional way, and it's up to the --
I mean, the public does.
And it's up to the media and to our institutions, like the fbi or the police, to curb those human impulses.
Compare, like, for instance, the death of Princess Di and Mother Teresa.

Bill: Right.

Holland: You know, there is a case where the imagination of the public was seized by the beauty of this young, silly --
this gorgeous --

Jay: No, no.

[ Talking over each other ]

Peter: The reality is that most people probably would not have even noticed that Mother Teresa had died because of this love affair they were having with Princess Diana.

Holland: You missed my point exactly.
I'm saying that there's a natural human impulse to respond to the poetry of something and get caught up in it on almost a sentimental point of view, and the press must take responsibility for keeping itself from doing that.
And a perfect example would be --

Bill: You mean the ones on the lawn? Not the ones on the driveway.

Jay: You brought it all back.

Bill: The driveway --

Holland: But the institutions --

Bill: That's not the media.

Holland: For example, 9/11 will always be thought of in terms of the twin towers collapsing because there's a hideous poetry to that image.
That image captured the imagination of the public.
People do not think about the Pentagon.
It's exactly the same kind of thing.

Peter: But in your point --

Holland: The imagination of the public has seized that.

Peter: The poetry is the Catholic nun who spends her entire life working with the poor in Calcutta, caring for them, trying to heal their diseases, trying to teach them --

Holland: That's not sentimental poetry.
I'm talking about sentiment.

Peter: --
Versus this spoiled woman who gets killed trying to run away from photographers with her Egyptian boyfriend.

Bill: Right.

Holland: I'm talking about what the public's imagination is.

[ Applause ]

Peter: I think the value system in the way the media covered Princess Di versus Mother Teresa was entirely out of whack.

[ Talking over each other ]

Peter: Then we're agreeing.
It's indicative the general stupidity --

Bill: Yes, you actually are agreeing --

Peter: --
Of network executives.

Bill: --
Although you're both so intense on not agreeing that you don't notice that.
But --

[ Laughter ]

Holland: Then why is it --

Bill: And you're not saying that lady Diana was a bad person.

Peter: No.

Bill: I didn't, either.
I got so much hate mail about that.
All we were saying is, she was a wealthy housewife who did some nice charity work.
Not a saint, period.

Holland: She captured the imagination of the public in a different way --

[ Talking over each other ]

Bill: She captured the imagination of people --

Peter: Going back to the missing child --

Bill: Yes.

Peter: Okay?

Holland: And the public.

Peter: There are lots of kids in this country who are missing.
The reason that Elizabeth Smart is getting so much attention is because of the new unique factor.
It's poor news judgment.

Bill: But Bin Laden is missing, too.
And --

[ Laughter ]

You know, to --

[ Applause ]

To put --
I don't care if it's a black kid or a white kid.
To put 100 fbi agents in time of war just shows that nothing has changed since 9/11.

Jay: No, no, no, that's not true.

[ Talking over each other ]

Bill: Nobody has learned anything.

Jay: FBI agents are not putting on fatigues, and they're not in trenches firing M-16s.

[ Talking over each other ]

Bill: I believe the war on terrorism has --

[ Talking over each other ]

Sydney: This perpetrator will strike again if not caught.

Bill: I think the fbi is still --

Sydney: How can you say that's too many, to go after any child? This perpetrator will strike again --

Bill: Because there are a finite number of --

Sydney: --
And again and again.

Bill: Because how many fbi agents are there? How many can we afford to take all --
to put on a little girl?
[ Talking over each other ]

Jay: Would you have the same opinion if it was your child? If it was your child, would you say, "There's too many people looking for my child"?

Bill: No, but you know what?

Jay: No, but what?

Bill: You don't get ice cream in the mail, either.
You don't get everything you want in life --

Jay: I've never gotten ice cream in the mail.

[ Applause ]

Peter: Bill, it is the fbi's job --

Bill: And if I was a parent, and an fbi agent explained to me, "You know, we'd like to put a little more men on this case, but there's a war on, and you're gonna have to suck it up because there are bigger problems than" --

Sydney: They have a job to do, and they have to do it.

Peter: It is the fbi's job to investigate kidnapping.
It's in their jurisdiction.

Bill: 100 agents?

Jay: Sure.
Why not 500?

Bill: Why not 500?

Peter: It is not their job to go to Afghanistan and find Bin Laden.

Jay: It's a missing child!

Bill: There's a war on that affects everybody.
Somebody might be bringing a dirty nuclear bomb in.
You don't think that's more important?

Jay: I know it's more important, and I know my country has an eye on that, also.

[ Applause ]

Bill: Well, you know what? I'm sorry, but you can't do everything at once.
There is finite time and finite manpower.
I know we'd like to believe we live in a world where all things are possible and you can have it all, but you can't.
You can't have it all, I promise you.

Jay: The point in the beginning, though, was that there were more fbi agents going after this young lady because she was white.

Bill: That's true, too.

[ Applause ]

Jay: And you can applaud until your hands hurt, but I will never, ever, as an American, believe that my government is bean-counting its federal bureau of investigation employees judging by the color of the child.
I will never --

Bill: Well, of course they are, but they're being led by the media.

Jay: That's horrible, insightful, and I'll never agree with you on that.

Bill: Okay, we'll take a commercial then.

[ Applause ]

Chris: What's the first thing they say when they talk about Colin Powell? What's their complement? "He's well spoken." Well spoken's not a compliment.
Well spoken's something you say about people you don't expect to be able to speak.

[ Laughter ]

How do they expect Colin Powell to sound? "I'm gonna drop me a bomb today."
[ Laughter ]


[ Applause ]

Bill: All right.
A couple of other points about Elizabeth Smart.
Now, I understand where you're going with this, with the black/white thing.
I can understand why white parents would relate to the person who looks like them.
I don't think they should have to feel so guilty about that when it's their own kid.

Jay: You think there's an fbi agent saying, "No, no, no, no, she's black"?

Bill: I think there's an fbi agent responding to the fact that the media puts the pressure on the police, just like they did in the Chandra Levy case.

Peter: Chandra Levy, O.J., I mean, there's a whole list of high-profile things you can go through where the police reaction was driven by the media coverage.

Bill: Right.

Peter: Go back to Rodney King.

[ Applause ]

When I was in fifth grade in Atlanta all the black children were being murdered and it was all that was --

Sydney: Nationwide manhunt.

Jay: It was the only thing that was in the newspaper for my entire fifth grade.

Bill: But you just said, "All the black children."

Jay: Well, I didn't mean to.

Bill: Okay, but what you're saying is that it was a huge --

Jay: It was like 17 black children.

Bill: It was a massive --

Jay: But it became that during the manhunt.
After the media got ahold of it and then it spiraled because more kids were dying even though the FBI was into it.

Bill: Okay.
The other question about Elizabeth Smart is, if she was not such a pretty young girl.
Because this is a country that responds to looks.
I mean, if she was a homely redhead with glasses, I don't know if people would be that --

[ Talking over each other ]

Holland: --
Are venals, that doesn't mean the media and our institutions should follow.

Jay: Great word, venal.
It's in "Taxi driver."

Sydney: Okay, going with your point.
You know, we have created a culture in our society today that does view certain children as being able to be thrown away.
And that's why, i, again, bring it back to, when you create a culture where you can kill children within the very process of --

Jay: You're pro-choice, correct?

Holland: --
Being born.
We create a culture that does not value our children.

Bill: You're really trying to link this with abortion?

Sydney: You can.
You absolutely can.

Bill: How about the faith program? Can we link that to abortion?
[ Applause ]

Sydney: How about those?

Bill: What about R. Kelly?

Sydney: How about those? When you create a culture that wants to throw people away at the end of their lives as well?

Bill: We don't want to throw people away at the end of their life.
We want to help them die with dignity.
Yeah, throw them away.
"You've got dandruff, good bye, get Kevorkian."
[ Laughter ]

Sydney: We want to say that you no longer have any worth because you're old.
We want to say that you no longer have any worth because you're old or infirm or handicapped.
That's what we've done in our culture.

Bill: They're not old, infirm and handicapped, they're miserable and they cannot function as human beings.
That's what the right to die is all about.

Sydney: No, it is not.

Bill: I got to take a break.

[ Applause ]

Bill: All right, here's "Politically Incorrect" for you --
--
from Utah --
maybe she ran off and got married.

Jay: Bill Maher, ladies and gentlemen.

Bill: Not funny.

Holland: Bill Maher, ladies and gentlemen.

[ Cheers and applause ]

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