Going for the Jugular

Bill Maher. He performs stand-up today through Sunday at The Orleans in the room formerly reserved for comedy hero George Carlin. As usual, Maher doesn’t pussyfoot around.

He goes for the jugular on his HBO political-comedy show, “Real Time,” and onstage, where lately he takes guesses at which former presidents did and did not have sex with their wives.

“FDR? No, he was in a wheelchair,” Maher tells me, quoting his onstage joke. “And he was still fooling around. Which tells you a lot about men. He can’t feel his penis, but he still wants some strange.”

But let’s get back to Palin. Maher and I start by talking about how she appeared with host Matt Lauer on the “Today” show last week, when her 6-year-old daughter, Piper, was walking around on TV in high heels.

“No one says it out loud, but this is not a good mother,” Maher says. “I saw her with Matt Lauer, and he was saying, ‘Gee, you took Piper out of school for two months. How is that?’ … Piper (answered), ‘Yeah, I did kinda miss a lot. I don’t feel like I learned anything this year.’

“And Sarah Palin said, ‘Yes, but she got so much life experience.’ I don’t know about that. Would a really good parent take their kid at that age out of school for two months so she could pimp her on the campaign trail?”

Then, Maher mentions Palin’s pregnant teenage daughter, and the son who signed up for the military reportedly after he succumbed to various habits under Palin’s roof.

“I just don’t think this woman lives up to her reputation as the great hockey mom,” Maher says.

Some of Maher’s “Real Time” guests have suggested he should let go of McCain-Palin, since the election is over. But it’s not really over for either, since Palin appears to be running for the 2012 GOP nomination already and continues to bash Obama, and McCain is campaigning for a Senate candidate in Georgia.

“McCain did not run a noble campaign,” Maher says. “What was noble about picking Sarah Palin? What was noble about accusing Obama of having sex with kindergartners or whatever that commercial was?

“He has a long history of doing things that are not noble and then holding a press conference and saying, ‘I don’t know what happened to me. That’s not me. And I’m so sorry.’ He did it with the Keating Five. He did it with (at first denying, then embracing) the Martin Luther King holiday. He did it with the Confederate flag” flip-flop.

“And I think he’s going to do it again. I think he’s going to hold a press conference one day and say, ‘I’m sorry I called Barack Obama a socialist, I don’t know what I was thinking, it’s not me.’ But it is you. It’s a long pattern of you.”

Some “Real Time” viewers used to think of Maher as primarily a libertarian. But Maher, who is unafraid of marijuana, says his libertarian instincts are not as political as the phrase sounds.

“I was never a member of the Libertarian Party, which is a radical version of the philosophical notion of libertarianism, which I always took to mean … as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody else, you should be able to do it.

“But the Libertarian Party is a bunch of whack jobs that don’t want meat inspectors. They just take the concept to a ridiculous level.”

As for Coulter, they used to be friends, but she has disappeared from his life and his show for years.

“All I know about Ann Coulter anymore is what I read (or see) on television, and it just has become increasingly weird. I used to defend her as somebody who, OK, I disagree with her, but at least she has the balls to say what she thinks, and sometimes she says unpleasant truths.”

It may be hard for some liberals to fathom, but Maher claims she used to be a “great person” to hang out with.

“We used to have so much fun together. When she lived in New York, and I would come to New York, she would go out with me and my friends,” he says. “She was witty and she was a real partyer. She would drink and smoke — not pot, of course.

“She seems to have gone in the underground bunker with Dick Cheney. I think she ended up with security issues, and I think that may have made her a little bit crazy, because I know she is always at an undisclosed location.”

By the way, Maher went to Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. — as did MSNBC’s liberal Keith Olbermann, political punk rocker Greg Graffin and … Ann Coulter, although she signed up for Cornell some years after Maher and Olbermann finished there.

So, what is up with Cornell as this hotbed of outspoken figures? He has no theory.

“Cornell — nothing happened in Cornell, is the problem,” Maher says. “It’s still cold. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of girls. You know, I got a good education at Cornell, but I surely didn’t have a good time. … There were no ‘Girls Gone Wild,’ at least not in my room.”

Doug Elfman’s column appears on Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Contact him at 702-383-0391 or e-mail him at delfman@reviewjournal.com. He also blogs at reviewjournal.com/elfman.