The Buffalo Bills Coach Has Nothing on Bill Maher When It Comes to 9/11 Terrorist Praise

What the hell was Buffalo Bills coach Sean McDermott thinking? He’s apologizing this week after a report about a 2019 “motivational speech” that used the 9/11 terrorists as an example of great teamwork. Coach McDermott drilled players about how the attacks were executed and discussed how the hijackers were on the same page. After multiple players confirmed the “motivational speech” to Go Long, news of McDermott’s disturbing talk went viral, prompting the public apology. “I regretted mentioning 9/11 in my message that day and I immediately apologized to the team,” he said. “Not only was 9/11 a horrific event in our country's history, but a day that I lost a good family friend.”

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It’s pretty unfathomable that anyone would praise the 9/11 terrorists or hold them up as a shining example of, well, anything, but that’s when Bill Maher politely asks us to hold his beer. Back in September 2001 — SEPTEMBER 2001! — Maher delivered a tirade that was just as bad as McDermott’s. But the comic pundit did it less than a week after the attacks and over the national airwaves instead of inside a private locker room.

When Politically Incorrect was still on network television at ABC (ominous piano plays), Maher took issue with people who called the 9/11 terrorists cowardly. “We have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away,” Maher lectured his panel. “That's cowardly.”

Maher, being Maher, doubled down: “Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it’s not cowardly.”

All of this was less than a week after the terrorist attacks. Unsurprisingly, the show’s sponsors weren’t nuts about Maher lauding the attackers’ bravery. Sears and FedEx pulled their ads after angry viewers complained. It didn’t take long for Maher to start covering his tracks.

Soldiers weren’t cowards for launching those missiles, he clarified. "In no way was I intending to say, nor have I ever thought, that the men and women who defend our nation in uniform are anything but courageous and valiant,” he said. Instead, Maher’s accusations were intended for "the government, the elected officials, the people who want to put up a giant missile shield, when plainly that's not where the threat is from." 

Finally, pulling a page from the Half-Assed Atonement 101 textbook, Maher offered this: “I offer my apologies to anyone who took it wrong.” That’s right — it wasn’t Maher’s words that were the problem, it was the people who didn’t know how to take it. 

Incredibly, ABC stood by Maher — for a minute anyway. In a statement, the network said, “While we remain sensitive to the current climate following last week’s tragedy … there needs to remain a forum for the expression of our nation's diverse opinions."

That didn’t last long. Some ABC affiliates, like the one in Washington, D.C., yanked Maher’s show immediately and never aired it again. The network canceled Politically Incorrect a few months later and replaced it with Jimmy Kimmel. “(ABC has) been pretending since September 17th that I don’t exist,” Maher complained. “Add the network to the very long list of “anyone who took it wrong.”