Bill Maher Backs Canned Pundit Jeffrey Lord; Says “This Has Got To Stop”
Bill Maher, guesting this morning on CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS, defended the network’s recently ousted pundit Jeffrey Lord as a victim of political correctness.
Lord, formerly CNN’s resident Trump supporter, was fired by the network last week after tweeting “Sieg Heil!” at a member of liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America.
“I don’t know how long I’m going to last, really,” Maher told Zakaria, bemoaning what he sees as today’s political correctness. “It’s worse every year. The things that they go after people for now. Your colleague – I don’t agree with him – Jeffrey Lord, CNN got rid of him because he said sieg heil on a tweet. It was a joke.
“This has got to stop, this idea that people have to go away if they’ve offended me even for one moment. How about just move on, turn the page, go to the next thing in your life?”
Maher, who taped the interview with Zakaria Friday evening after Zakaria’s appearance on his own Real Time show, blamed millennials’ political correctness on “bad parenting,” a standard bug-a-boo for the HBO host.
Maher also spoke about his underestimation of Donald Trump’s political success and overestimation of Wall Street’s motives. “I thought the stock market hated volatility and uncertainty,” he said, explaining why he believed the financial community would reject then-candidate Trump. “But I underestimated their greed, because they still want their tax cut.”
Taped prior to yesterday’s violence in Charlottesville, Maher said racism is part of Trump’s “appeal” to certain groups, and that his “dog whistle was louder than any we have heard.” But he also noted that Trump “played” into the nation’s hatred of political correctness, conceding that he himself, despite the title of his old Politically Incorrect With Bill Maher, has “failed miserably at driving a stake through its heart.”
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