Smallscreen News

Real Time with Bill Maher missteps with Mos Def

By Stone Martindale Sep 10, 2007, 16:49 GMT

06/01/2007 - Mos Def - moron! © Terry Thompson / Photorazzi

Love him or hate him, the one thing you can usually count on with Maher's controversial HBO show, "Real Time," is a decent array of smart guests who know something beyond the ordinary.

Not so this past weekend, where Maher hosted rapper Mos Def and the academic, Cornel West.

Mos Def, a hip-hop musician and actor, showed us all why entertainers should zip it when it comes to serious subjects.  Def inarticulately floated his bizarre 9/11 theory which claimed Osama bin Laden had nothing to do with it, as he also characterized George Washington and the Catholic church as “terrorists.”

Def defended the actions of terrorists to a bemused, then pissed-off Maher, who wasn't having any of it.

Def said: "I don't believe it was bin Laden today, I don't believe it was never him. I think it's some dude just standing, I don't even, I can't even believe. I don't even, I'm sorry, I'm from the projects, I know danger. I don't feel no danger from that sh*t, those mother-f**kers."

Maher looked incredulous: "But you don't think bin Laden knocked down the Word Trade Center?"

To which Def replied: "Absolutely not."

Maher was getting annoyed at this point: "Come on."

Def replies, "I don't. I don't. You know what, I don't."

Maher's B.S. meter was off the charts at this point. "That's where you lose me, my friend, and I'm so on your side, but you know what."

Def, not knowing when to shut it, continued: "In any barbershop I am so not alone, I'm so not alone."

Which made Maher state the obvious: "That doesn't mean you're right."

West kept jumping in in the annoying way he does by deflating any incendiary comments with his patented, "what brother Mos Def is really trying to say.." over and over.

Def claimed that “George Washington and all them dudes was terrorists as far as the Queen was concerned,” charged that “the Catholic church's stance about child molestation is a form of terrorism in and of itself” and when asked by Maher if bin Laden was behind destroying the World Trade Center, declared “absolutely not.” Def asserted that “highly-educated people in all areas of science have spoken on the fishiness around the whole 9/11 theory.”

Def then defended terrorism as a response to America's foreign policies: “Let's deal with the fact that there are valid reasons even to a lot of terrorists' arguments, quote unquote, terrorists' arguments about why are they frustrated with colonial presence, imperial presence. The way that this government has pursued its foreign interests has been meddlesome, murderously meddlesome.”

A note to Bill's producers, get your act together putting mics on people- Mos Def kept making shuhshudh noises as his mic kept moving, and please fire the booker and get someone from last season to line up some smarter, interesting guests.