Reminiscent of Al Franken on the Late Show last October, on Friday's Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO, actor Ben Affleck charged that President Bush “probably also leaked” Valerie Plame's name and so “if he did, you can be hung for that! That's treason!” In full rant, an apoplectic Affleck asserted: “You could be killed. That's not a joking around Tom DeLay 'I'll do a year, I bribed the state officials with corporate money.' That's like they shoot you in the battlefield for doing that.”
Affleck appeared on Maher's panel with Senator Joe Biden and Bill Sammon of the Washington Examiner. A couple of minutes later, after Sammon suggested Tom DeLay's resignation means the loss of a “poster boy for the left” so they can't use him anymore to raise funds, Affleck besmirched DeLay as a “criminal” while simultaneously demonstrating his political naivete. Though the Texas redistricting orchestrated by DeLay made his district less Republican, Affleck contended: "Tom DeLay personally gerrymandered that district so severely that it looks like a map of Italy....There won't be a Democrat elected in that seat for a thousand years. You can't say he's the poster boy for the left. He happens to be an incredibly powerful Republican who is a criminal and now you blame Democrats for pointing it out!"
Video clip of Affleck talking about hanging and shooting Bush for treason (35 seconds). Real (1.1 MB) or Windows Media (1.25 MB), plus MP3 audio (200 KB).
A September 30, 2005 Washington Post story noted: “As part of a Texas redistricting that DeLay engineered and that led to Republicans gaining five seats in that state, DeLay's district lost some GOP voters.”
(On Franken, an October 22 NewsBusters item, with video, recounted: "And so basically, what it looks like is going to happen is that Libby and Karl Rove are going to be executed" because "outing a CIA agent is treason," left-wing author and radio talk show host Al Franken asserted, to audience laughter, on CBS's Late Show with David Letterman. Franken qualified his hard-edged satire: "Yeah. And I don't know how I feel about it because I'm basically against the death penalty, but they are going to be executed it looks like." Franken later suggested that President Bush is at risk of receiving the same punishment, since Karl Rove likely told him what he did, but he added a caveat: "I think, by the way, that we should never ever, ever, ever execute a sitting President.")
Brief transcripts of the two portions of the April 7 Real Time with Bill Maher quoted above:
Ben Affleck: “He probably also leaked the name. There's just no proof of that.”
Sammon: “Even the prosecutor, even Fitzgerald is saying Bush didn't leak the name. So let's be clear, Bush didn't leak Valerie Plame's name -- not that we know of.”
Affleck: “Because if he did, you can be hung for that! That's treason!”
Bill Maher: “That is treason.”
Affleck: “You could be killed. That's not a joking around Tom DeLay 'I'll do a year, I bribed the state officials with corporate money.' That's like they shoot you in the battlefield for doing that. Don't you think we should find out who leaked that name?”
And moments later:
Maher proposed that Tom DeLay is “the poster boy for the kind of getting paid off, sludge fund, influence-peddling [said “petting”], crony capitalism that has turned America into something less than a first-rate power.”
Sammon: “...You're right that he is the poster boy for the left. He's the guy the left loves to hate and his departure means you can't use his name to raise funds anymore. His departure means his seat will probably go to a Republican this time. His departure mean-”
Maher: “A Democrat, you mean?”
Sammon: “No, if he'd of stayed in the race he probably would have lost. By getting out, he actually makes it more likely for that to go to a Republican. ”
Affleck: “Tom DeLay personally gerrymandered that district so severely that it looks like a map of Italy, you know what I mean?. There won't be a Democrat elected in that seat for a thousand years. You can't say he's the poster boy for the left. He happens to be an incredibly powerful Republican who is a criminal and now you blame Democrats for pointing it out!” (Loud applause)
