Riding With Bill Maher

On Sept. 17, 2001, six days after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, Bill Maher made this now-infamous remark: "We have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building? Say what you want about it, it's not cowardly."

Those words ran afoul of Press Secretary Ari Fleischer. They also aggravated ABC and Disney, which insisted that Maher's comment and some sponsors' cancellations had nothing to do with his show's eventual cancellation.

"Politically Incorrect," which Maher created in 1993, won four Cable Ace Awards at Comedy Central; after it moved to ABC in '97, it was nominated for several Emmy Awards. His newest book is "When You Ride Alone, You Ride With Bin Laden." His new show, "Real Time With Bill Maher," will debut on HBO at 11:30pm on Friday, Feb. 21.

Maher recently had the following conversation with Terrence McNally, host of the radio show, Free Forum.

Terrence McNally: How did "Politically Incorrect" happen?

Bill Maher: I did an election night special in '92 for Comedy Central. It went well, and they were a new network open to ideas. I didn't even do a pilot. I just said: I've always wanted to do a show with an Algonquin type roundtable of mismatched characters who'd otherwise never be caught dead together in the same room.

You've said you were shocked that it lasted nine years.

I'm shocked that we lasted six on ABC. ....Though, I'll tell you, as time goes by, whenever I hear my comment from last September 17 it seems less and less radical. I'm more and more befuddled how anyone could've twisted it into a critique of the military, which it wasn't.

I don't think anyone if they heard it today would be that upset. Which just shows you where our heads were right after that attack.

But you know, there was a good side to that time too. For about a month or two, this country was ready to change. And I will always hold it against this president for not taking advantage of that and asking people to really do anything to change.

...Except to resume shopping.

Right. "Go see Cats! Take the wife out to dinner. Keep that economy pumping."

And you point out that sacrifice has always been -- at least through Roosevelt and Kennedy -- an American trait.

Right. That's a lot of what the new book is about. There was a World War II propaganda poster: "When You Ride Alone, You Ride With Hitler" -- trying to get people to join a car-sharing club. And that message is just as relevant today because we're also in a war that involves oil.

... much more so.

Yeah, a lot of people say the Japanese attacked us because we cut off their oil supply and they saw no other way out. I don't know about that. But I do know that Bin Laden and his ilk get their money, albeit indirectly, from oil. They don't get it from drugs like the Administration would like you to believe. It's not the Medellin Cartel that's sending them money. People get their money from their relatives. And excuse me, but these are Arabs attacking us and Arabs make oil. Period.

Oil money goes to finance Madrases, which are of course prep schools for hate. ...and oil money pays for telethons for suicide bombers. How did Bin Laden get rich? Well, it's because the people in Saudi Arabia got rich from oil and they paid his family to construct things there.

Every time there's an oil interruption, a problem in Venezuela or Ecuador or somewhere, Saudi Arabia makes a big announcement: "We're going to pump another 500,000 barrels this month to ease prices." Then they're the big heroes.

Therefore, we can't really be dispassionate about the other side of the equation, which is, this is where the hate is coming from. I don't care what they try to sell you. The center of that religion is Mecca. It's literally a Mecca for the very radical form of the religion that is practiced over there. Very radical, very hateful. You look at the textbooks in the schools over there, and the basic idea is: Non-Muslims are infidels and Americans are pretty evil. But we can't really hold their feet to the fire on stuff like that as long as we're so beholden to them on the oil issue.