On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher said that he would like to tell the anonymous New York Times op-ed writer “thank you for your service.”

After speculating that Chief of Staff John Kelly wrote the op-ed, Maher stated, “[M]y outlier opinion on this, is this person, I would like to say to them, thank you for your service. I –seriously, let me explain why, the United States has made the same mistake overseas so many times. We take out Saddam Hussein or somebody we don’t like and not think about what comes next. Yeah, Saddam Hussein was terrible, what came next? ISIS. What comes next if these people who are preventing him from doing really crazy things go?”

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