Comic and Real Time host Bill Maher said that his support of the Democratic Party does not extend to highly favored 2016 Democratic nominee former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
In fact, Maher told The Hill's Judy Kurtz in an interview published on Wednesday that he is more intrigued by Libertarian Republican Sen. Rand Paul (KY), saying, "Rand Paul is an interesting candidate to me. Rand Paul could possibly get my vote."
“As I always used to say about his father, I love half of him," Maher went on. "I love the half of him that has the guts to say we should end the American empire, pull the troops home, stop getting involved in every foreign entanglement...He’s way less of a hawk than Hillary, and that appeals to me a lot because I’m not crazy about how warlike she is.”
Talking Points Memo noted that Maher donated a million dollar to President Barack Obama's campaign in 2012, but Maher said he won't be donating to Clinton.
"First of all, I’m not as big a fan of Hillary as I am of Obama," he told Syracuse.com. "So we’ll see who’s running. I’m not even committing to being for Hillary.”
In an interview with Parade magazine this week, Maher expressed his dissatisfaction with the left and the way that "political correctness has gotten even worse" in that "there is absolutely nothing that can’t be attacked."
These days, Maher said, he finds himself sympathizing more with the values espoused by Libertarianism, but not to extremes.
Libertarian, he said, "is a word I used 20 years ago like twice and the label has stuck. If by libertarian you mean a very basic notion that we should be able to do whatever we want to do, as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody else, yes, I’m a libertarian. If you’re talking about the sort of radical version of libertarianism that’s been taken up by people like Ron Paul, where we don’t have meat inspectors because if someone dies from tainted meat, then no one will patronize that meat company anymore, that’s insane."
"I am a libertarian to a degree," he said. "Not to the degree where I want to get rid of stop signs and traffic lights because they’re infringing on my freedoms to fly right through the windshield."
Earlier this summer, Maher surprised many liberal supporters by espousing Israel's bombing of Gaza, calling the Islamic militant group Hamas a "crazy woman" who "you have to slap" to calm her down.
“Dealing w/ Hamas is like dealing w/ a crazy woman who’s trying to kill u,” Maher wrote on the social medium Twitter. “u can only hold her wrists so long before you have to slap her.”
In May, he quipped that Hillary Clinton should choose Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) as her running mate for 2016 to form what he called a "granny ticket."
