On Real Time with Bill Maher on Friday, the host discussed Obama’s inauguration speech and the congressional hearing on Benghazi this week.

Maher said he agreed that the inauguration speech was partisan and that he’d “never heard an inauguration speech like that,” but asked, “Didn’t they kind of drive him to it?”

David Avella, president of GOPAC, said he believed there were actually points of agreement between Democrats and the GOP in the speech, including Obama’s statement that government cannot fix every social problem. But he also said Obama had done his own “name-calling” this month. When Maher asked him to specify, Avella said, “Well, he talked about right-wing Republicans,” to which Maher said, “That’s a name-call?”

ADVERTISEMENT

Republican Pollster Kristen Soltis argued that “The theme of this speech was ‘You didn’t build that,’ over again, but this time it’s not a gaffe, it’s the speech.”

Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean (D) said the theme was “equal rights for every person in this country” and that it “wasn’t partisan, it was American.” He claimed it was “about time the president stood up to all this crazy crap on the right wing.”

Avella then said that the speech didn’t touch on job creation, which he claimed the president has not been able to do.

“That’s not true, that’s a lie,” Maher said. Dean argued that from the bottom of the recession, America has gained five or six million new jobs.

Maher then discussed the Benghazi congressional hearing, where Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was asked about the killings of the ambassador to Libya along with three other diplomats, although Maher said Americans “don’t give a shit about” Benghazi.

ADVERTISEMENT

What happened was awful, he went on, but “if you are hellbent on tracing it back to President Blackenstein, you are going down a rabbit hole. But then of course what do they do? They go down that rabbit hole.”

Maher was especially struck by Republican Sen. Rand Paul’s line of questioning during the hearing. He asked, “Is the U.S. involved with any procuring of weapons, transfer of weapons, buying, selling, anyhow, transferring weapons to Turkey?”

Clinton at the time paused notably. “To Turkey?”

ADVERTISEMENT

Paul later went on Sean Hannity’s talk show on Fox and said he had no proof and had had no hearing on anything with regard to Turkey. “In other words, this is just a bunch of horse shit I heard on TV that I’m going to bring into the United States Senate,” Maher said.

Avella said that the left-wing also had conspiracy theories regarding 9/11, but Maher and Dean claimed that he was making a “false equivalence” because a much larger percentage of Republicans believe that Obama was born in Kenya than the percentage of liberals who ever believed 9/11 was an inside job.

ADVERTISEMENT

Watch the video below: