On Friday’s episode of “Real Time with Bill Maher,” HBO host Bill Maher criticized Vice President Kamala Harris and Democratic Gov. Tim Walz for what he described as insulting voters during their CNN interview, which aired Thursday night. Harris and Walz appeared on CNN with Dana Bash for Harris’s first interview since President Joe Biden announced his decision to end his reelection campaign on July 21. Maher took issue with Walz’s assertion that he spoke like “normal Americans” questioning the validity of his claim.
“No, you don’t,” Maher said. “No, you don’t. You’re a huge liar, like all politicians are.” He added: “I don’t care by the way. I’ve always said this about politics, they’re all going to lie they’re politics. It’s what they lie about. I don’t give a shit what you did during the Iraq War, you were in the Guard … I don’t understand why they just can’t and you’re just insulting my intelligence.”
Questions about Walz’s 2005 retirement from the Minnesota National Guard emerged after a 2018 Facebook post by retired Army Command Sergeant Major Thomas Behrends resurfaced following Harris’s selection as her running mate. Republican Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, the party’s vice presidential nominee, accused Walz of “dishonesty” during an August 7 campaign event in Wisconsin. Vance highlighted comments Walz made in a video posted on X on August 6 by the Harris-Walz campaign, where Walz advocated for a ban on “assault weapons” and suggested he had used them “in war.”
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Maher also criticized Harris’s responses to questions from Bash about her reaction to Biden’s decision to withdraw from the race and her shifting stance on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. “When [Bash] said … What did you say when Biden called you and said he wasn’t running? Well, um, I immediately thought of him first. No, you didn’t,” Maher said of Harris’ response. “You know, I mean, fracking. I mean, Dana Bash had her dead to rights. It’s like, you said this, I have the quote, I’m reading it to you, you said there should be a ban on fracking. Why can’t they just go, ‘Yeah, you know what, I got it wrong, I was talking to, uh the wrong people?’”
Walz, who has faced scrutiny over misrepresentations of his military service and accusations of “stolen valor,” struggled under questioning from Bash about claims that he had carried a gun during wartime. Dubbed “Tampon Tim” by critics, Walz offered yet another unconvincing explanation in response to the allegations.
“I want to ask you a question about how you‘ve described your service in the National Guard,” Bash said. “You said that you carried weapons in war, but you have never deployed actually in a war zone, a campaign official said that you misspoke, did you?” Walz’s response was not a direct answer but rather a convoluted excuse. He deflected by invoking children and attempted to frame his misleading statements as simple grammatical errors.
“Well, first of all, I‘m incredibly proud, I’ve done 24 years of wearing the uniform of this country. Equally proud of my service in a public school classroom whether it‘s Congress or the governor, my record speaks for itself, but I think people are coming to get to know me. I speak like they do,” Walz began. “I speak candidly, I wear my emotions on my sleeves and I, speak especially passionately about about our children being shot in schools and around, and around guns. So I think people know me, they know who I am, they know where my heart is, and again, my record has been out there for over 40 years to be for itself.”
Bash persisted. “And the idea that you said that you were in war, did you misspeak as the campaign has said?” He responded: “I said we were talking about in this case, this was after a school shooting, the ideas of carrying these weapons of war, and my wife, the English teacher, told him, my grammar is not always correct.” He added: “But again, if it‘s not this, it‘s an attack on my children for showing love for me or it‘s an attack on my dog. I‘m not I‘m going to do that. And the one thing I‘ll never do is I‘ll never demean and other members’ service in any way. I never have, and I never will.”
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