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Bill Maher’s dilemma: Why can’t the U.S. be more like Canada, or something?

Jeff Poor Media Reporter
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If you’ve ever watched Bill Maher’s Friday HBO show, you know he holds a lot of resentment toward conservatives and their beliefs. But what’s his ideal vision for the United States?

On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” the outspoken entertainer offered a hint. He asked his guest Martin Short, a Canadian-American actor, if he noticed that Canada and the United States were drifting apart culturally.

“When you were a boy…things I think were different,” Maher said. “The United States and Canada were more alike. When you were skiing on the snowcap plains of Manitoba, but it seems like in that era the United States and Canada were more alike and the last 30 or 40 years, we’ve kind of grown apart. Canada is a country that has health care and not a lot of gun violence. And we’ve become just a more war-like mean, cramped conservative country. You think that’s true?”

Short explained that he viewed the countries as being incredibly close, but with different priorities.

“These two countries have an unbelievable closeness – I mean, we’re the aliens you don’t deport,” Short said. “I think it’s always been that way. We are a different country. We’re a parliamentary country. Thirty-six million people, and yet we’re the second largest country in the world. We’re big-boned as we like to call it. And you know, gays in the military passed in ’92 with no fanfare.”

Maher responded that he viewed Canadian society as being more evolved than American society.

“That’s what I mean, that’s how we’ve grown apart,” Maher responded. “The progressive things that we should have been doing in that time, Canada has done and we have lagged behind.”

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