Matthew Perry Calls Fox’s Bret Baier A “Scared Asshole” On Bill Maher Panel

Poor Bret Baier can’t even get ’90s sitcom celebrities to properly remember his name when they call him a “scared asshole” on national TV, which they are still on for some reason. Thus was his misfortune last night on Real Time, as Bill Maher‘s panel evaluated Bill O’Reilly‘s pre-Super Bowl interview with President Obama and Matthew Perry chimed in to compare that interview to the one “Bill” Baier did with the president a while ago, which he found only marginally more acceptable.

Real Time isn’t exactly a place for euphemisms, but last night’s panel was particularly abrasive, even for the venue (save Princeton professor Cornel West, whose “mom is watching” and thus limited his vocabulary to only certain flourishes of implied vulgarity). Maher opened the discussion arguing that patriotism was less about guns and more about “not belittling your president,” and wondered incredulously what the response would have been to a similar interview of President George W. Bush conducted by Keith Olbermann. Author Hooman Majd went a step further and considered many of O’Reilly’s comments “bigoted,” suggesting that, were he in the president’s shoes, he would have kicked O’Reilly out of the house when he asked whether he knew about football. West noted that he felt the President managed to keep his cool because it’s really dissent among progressives that makes him angry– “people like us”– and that O’Reilly’s routine was expected. Still, Maher countered, O’Reilly “leaned over like it was a bar” and, in his eyes, was generally rude.

At this point, Matthew Perry (who had heretofore been obscured by the camera angle) enters the scene, and argues that this isn’t O’Reilly’s problem exclusively, but a Fox News problem. He recalls “Bill Baier”– “a Fox guy, but a more timid guy, who interrupted [President Obama],” but he goes easy on Baier because “that guy was clearly sort of trying to make his day” and came off more as a “scared asshole” than “egomaniacal” O’Reilly. While it is somewhat unfair to critique the comments within the context of this being an actor giving his take on politics, it would also be disingenuous to ignore the fact that comments would already have been notable enough without them coming from Chandler Bing, but from Perry take on a particular comedic merit.

The clip, courtesy of HBO, below:

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.