D.L. Hughley: Bullying can teach you about yourself

(CBS News) Stand-up comedian and actor D.L. Hughley was bullied as a child, but says good things can come from it.

"I don't believe it's a good thing, I think it's a thing that exists and you have to adjust to," Hughley said Tuesday on "CBS This Morning." "... The poem 'Invictus,' 'My head is bloody, but...unbowed,' that is about having a turmoil and standing through it. What the problem is, is that we don't learn that we can stand up for ourselves."

"Every person, whoever you are, is going to have a fight, physical, emotional," Hughley said. "You are going to have to get through something or someone, whether you want to or not. ... You have to lose to win, you have to understand who you are and what capacity you have, and nobody teaches you...that like an adversary."

Hughley even extends that thought to politics, saying former President Bill Clinton could probably give good advice to President Barack Obama. "(Clinton) was defeated, he was a very young governor, was defeated, came back and won again," Hughley said. "Let me tell you something, it takes stones to get fired from your job and still come back to work the next day. Like, he was impeached and acted like nothing ever happened. And I think that he had to a greater or lesser degree been bullied and seen what kind of capacity he had.

Hughley continued, "I think that President Obama, a good man, hasn't - when Joe Wilson called him a liar - I think that a person who had been bullied would have understood what that moment called for. ... I think that if the President of the United States had said, 'I am the duly elected as the President of the United States of America, you don't have to respect me, but you have to respect this office. Remove him from this premises.' It's a different presidency. I believe bullies look for weakness and they try to exploit them, and his presidency became different then. They believed they had a point of attack."

For more with Hughley, his new book "I Want You to Shut the **** Up: How the Audacity of Dopes is Ruining America" - including talk about his father, his work ethic and why he says comedy saved his life - watch the video in the player above.