On Real Time with Bill Maher on Friday, the host expressed his frustration with the GOP in the past few days.
"I thought after the election, they'd get more reasonable," Maher began after stating that Republicans had "disappointed him" this week. But after "browbeating" Hillary Clinton over Benghazi, Maher said they did the same to Chuck Hagel, who Obama has picked as Secretary of Defense. Hagel, a Vietnam veteran and former U.S. senator, is also a Republican.
"Apparently Obama's cooties are so bad that when Obama picks you, even when you’re a Republican, now all the Republicans hate this guy," Maher said. "[Sen.] John McCain was brutal to this guy," he went on.
USA Today reporter Jackie Kucinich said that "bad blood" between McCain and Hagel goes "way back" due to Hagel's opposition to the Iraq troop surge.
Maher's frustration with Republican grandstanding stemmed from the fact that Hagel, he claimed, had voted in favor of every defense spending bill while he served in the Senate, as well as for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Patriot Act. "This guy's a maverick now? This guy's too far left?" He also claimed that every question was about the past as opposed to Hagel's plans once he is secretary.
Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark, N.J., said that anyone who suggests cutting defense spending has their patriotism attacked: "You can't have it both ways. You can't say that we have a government expenditure problem when one of the biggest expenditures of government, you can't touch that."
“It’s not unpatriotic to say we’re spending too much money. In fact, to me that’s the patriotic thing to say," Booker argued.
Watch the video, via Mediaite, below.
