Talking heads on both the right and the left have attempted, in the wake of former Apple CEO Steve Jobs’s death, to claim their political views were also those held by Jobs. Both Rush Limbaugh and Jesse Jackson argued Jobs fell in line with each of their respective ideologies.
However, HBO’s “Real Time” Bill Maher argued Jobs was probably closer to Jackson than Limbaugh. On his Friday night program, Maher advised conservatives not to try to claim the former Apple CEO as one of their own.
“I want to say one other thing about Steve Jobs – agree or don’t,” Maher said. “But, I know that he’s one of the few people who liberals and conservatives both like, you know, in the partisan country that we live in. And I just know that the right-wingers are going to try to claim him because he was a giant success. Please don’t do it, right-wingers. He was not one of you. He was not a corporate type. He was an Obama voting, pot-smoking Buddhist. He wasn’t one of you. So don’t try to claim Steve Jobs.”
Maher reminded his audience and viewers Jobs was cut loose by the Apple board of directors, only to come back and run the company again in the late-1990s.
“He got fired by corporate America,” Maher said. “Remember – he got his ass thrown out because he was a little too innovative. He didn’t play the game the way they do.”
Maher’s panelist P.J. O’Rourke, a conservative, gave his reasons for not wanting to claim Jobs. Nonetheless, Maher doubled-down on his “hippie” claim.
“But he was a hippie and I know you have problems with hippies,” Maher said to O’Rourke when explaining why Jobs would identify with the left, which according to the “Real Time” host is what the so-called “Occupy Wall Street” movement is comprised of.
Watch: