Bill Maher Calls for ‘Referendum on Decency’ as Trump, Clinton Campaign Turns Bitter (Video)

“Let’s leave the eye-gouging to the pageant moms,” HBO host says

Bill Maher called out presidential contenders Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton for abandoning a long-standing tradition, noting that they “are the first two candidates in memory not to call and congratulate each other after they won their respective races.”

“Civility is nearly dead in this country,” the host of HBO’s “Real Time” lamented on Friday, pledging to make the courtesy call in November a campaign issue.

For Maher, the break with tradition was the latest indication of just how corrosive political culture has become in the U.S. “Filibustering has become not a rare, principled protest but the everyday, automatic cock-blocking that defines government now,” he said.

Maher noted that Senate Republicans love the Constitution but have chosen to “ignore their duty” to fill a Supreme Court vacancy, while also calling out Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg when she “talked trash about Trump this year like she was in a rap battle.”

“This election is a referendum on decency,” Maher concluded, showing video images of brawling politicians on the floor of parliament in Ukraine, Turkey, South Korea and Nepal.

“We laugh at it, but that is where we are headed,” he said. “This is supposed to be a democracy, not a bum fight. Let’s leave the eye-gouging to the pageant moms.”

Watch the video above.

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