The New New Rules: A Funny Look at How Everybody but Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass (26 page)

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Authors: Bill Maher

Tags: #Humor, #Form, #Political, #General, #Topic, #Political Science, #Essays

BOOK: The New New Rules: A Funny Look at How Everybody but Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass
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TAMPACS
 
New Rule:
Stop trying to scare me with your Mayan-calendar doomsday theories. I’m supposed to be terrified by counting the days on the Mayan calendar? Why? Is my Mayan girlfriend late for her Mayan period? If the Mayans could see the future, how come they couldn’t get away from Cortés?Besides, we have much scarier things to worry about in 2012:
 
TANGO AND BASH
 
 
New Rule:
If you send more than one news van to cover
Dancing with the Stars,
then you have to change your name from
Eyewitness News
to  
Guess What, You Guys?
TAT PATROL
 
New Rule:
Now that everyone has a tattoo, it will now be considered rebellious to not have a tattoo. Seriously. I think the Jonas Brothers have tattoos now. I’m sure Mitt Romney is all inked up. Betty White has one across her back that says “Fuck the Police”—that I know for a fact.
TEA Rx
 
New Rule:
If conservatives can call it Obamacare, every time a family is forced to file for bankruptcy due to a medical misfortune, or a sick child is dropped by his insurance company, or a patient dies because she can’t afford surgery, we get to call it: “Tea Bagger Care.”
TEXT MESSAGE
 
New Rule:
Stop worrying that crackpots are inserting their dogma into Texas schoolbooks. Sure, replacing Thomas Jefferson with Phyllis Schlafly is troubling, but it’s
Texas.
The only use Texans have for textbooks is to sit on them so they can get a better view of the football game. The last person to even notice Texas had schoolbooks was Lee Harvey Oswald.
THEATER NOT
 
New Rule:
My friends who are actors must stop inviting me to their plays. The answer is no. I’m not busy, I just don’t want to see your play. In fact, it’s literally the very last thing in the world I want to do. If it becomes a movie, maybe I’ll see it then. Not at the theater. But if it gets to Netflix, sure. You know me, anything to support the arts.
THIN BLUE WHINE
 
New Rule:
Police cars have too many lights. The car on
Dragnet
had one light. On
Adam-12,
two lights. These days, police cars have blinking lights, rotating lights, strobe lights . . . Car 54, Where Are You? Studio 54, Where Are You? I don’t know if I’m being arrested or invited to a rave.
THIN HIZZY
 
New Rule:
If your home is built by Ikea, you’re safer in the box it came in. Ikea is going into the home-building business, which on the upside means you’ll be able to buy a five-bedroom house for $110. But when a hurricane hits, do you really want to be in a house made of corkboard and paper clips? Remember: Ikea is Swedish for “Where does this bolt go?”
TICKER SHOCK
 
New Rule:
Stop calling what’s happening to the financial markets “an adjustment.” An adjustment is something you do in your sweatpants when your penis falls out of your underwear. This is “a clusterfuck.”
TOKE MACHINE
 
New Rule:
Until pot is legalized, you can’t sell it in vending machines. There are three new medical marijuana machines in L.A., which goes against the natural order of getting high first and
then
buying shit from the vending machine. Call me old-fashioned, but if I’m going to break the law, I demand the full package, and that includes visiting a vaguely creepy dude named Skeet and wondering how long I have to “hang out” with him and his hollow-eyed husk of a girlfriend before I can take my weed and go.
GOODBYE, MR. CHIPS
 
New Rule:
Someone in America must give me hope that this country can sacrifice anything to get anything done. I refer specifically to SunChips. You know SunChips—the corn-based snack you wolf down at the convenience store when you’re high? Well, this year, they came out with something really cool: a biodegradable bag that won’t contribute to the Texas-size swirls of plastic we now have in both the Atlantic and Pacific—and I couldn’t wait to reward them with my business. Except now I can’t. They stopped making this bag because there was a problem with it—it was loud. Like a porn star, it made a little too much noise when you stuck your hand in it. It crinkled in a disturbing fashion, like Keith Richards’s face.
It’s the sound of jackbooted eco-thugs taking away your inalienable right to be able to hear
Ice Road Truckers
perfectly while stuffing your face!
But unlike plastic,
this
bag would decompose into dirt instead of lying around for the next five hundred years to choke seagulls to death and destroy the ecosystem. Oh, sure, we could have made the ultimate sacrifice and, I don’t know, poured the chips into a bowl . . .
Side note: In Canada, SunChips is keeping the non-earth-raping bag, because they’re not a nation of crack babies, and they get it that sometimes you have to give up small things in order to make the world a better place. Except in America. Where “Have it your way” is the rule for everything, including volume on snacks. You think we’re going to reform Social Security?
There’s a lot of talk since the Republicans won the midterms that the  
adults
are back in charge, having
adult
conversations about budget matters—for example, they say they want to keep the parts of the health-care bill that people like, and repeal the parts that people don’t like. Of course, it is the parts that people
don’t
like that pay for the parts they
do
like. Yes, isn’t it great to have the adults back in charge?
This is America. We don’t have adult discussions. We have Twitter. If you have a problem with the baby talk that serves as our national dialogue, move to Finland—because ultimately it is our fault, not the politicians’. They just do what we tell them to do. If you showed Mitt Romney a poll that said he could win more votes if he became a woman named Mitteesha, he would get a weave and lop off his cock faster than you can say, “Is that thing sterilized?”
 
 
—November 12, 2010
 
TOMMY KNOCKER
 
New Rule:
Since Tom DeLay has done only two things since leaving politics—
Dancing with the Stars
and now prison—somebody must tell him: There are easier ways to have sex with men.
TOOT BEER
 
New Rule:
Stop trying to slip stimulants into my stimulants. Traces of cocaine have been found in Red Bull. Drinking Red Bull with cocaine is like watching golf on Xanax.
TOT AND BOTHERED
 
New Rule:
Children’s birthday parties must provide a little something for the grown-ups. And by something, I mean Jack Daniel’s on ice with a twist. You can put it in a SpongeBob cup, I don’t care. But I’m standing here in the blazing sun watching an out-of-work actor in a Spider-Man costume make balloon animals, and I need something to wash down the Vicodin I just stole from your medicine cabinet.
TOY STORY
 
New Rule:
If we want to find a place to cut government waste, we must start with the DEA rubber duck. Yes, on the DEA’s website you can buy a rubber ducky with a DEA badge and a cop’s hat. Which I recommend doing, because they’re a great place to hide your weed.
THE TREE AMIGOS
 
New Rule:
Oil companies must stop with the advertisements implying they’re friends of the environment. “At Exxon Mobil, we care about a thriving wildlife.” Please—the only thing an oil executive has in common with a seagull is they’d both steal french fries from a baby.
TRUMP ROAST
 
New Rule:
Whenever you think the Tea Party can’t get any dumber, they get dumber. Now they’re in love with Donald Trump. Because nothing says “We’re serious about fiscal responsibility” quite like a billionaire whose corporations have filed for bankruptcy three times.
TRUTHER CONSEQUENCES
 
New Rule:
Conspiracy theorists who are claiming that we didn’t really kill Bin Laden must be reminded that they didn’t think he did the crime in the first place. Come on, nutjobs, keep your bullshit straight: The towers were brought down in a controlled demolition by George W. Bush to distract attention from Hawaii, where CIA operatives were planting phony birth records so that a Kenyan named Barack Obama could someday rise to power and pretend to take out the guy we pretended took out the towers. And I know that’s true because I just got it in an e-mail from Trump.
PEACE NIX
 
New Rule:
The problem isn’t that there’s too little civility in government, it’s that there’s too much. President Obama’s State of the Union speech is next week, and as you’ve probably heard, members of Congress have agreed, in response to the tragedy in Arizona, to break with the tradition of Republicans on one side of the room, Democrats on the other. Instead, they’ll all sit together. Conservative next to liberal, gay next to straight, nerd next to jock . . . Oh, wait, that was an episode of
Glee.
In any event, the two parties are coming together, and they’ve agreed Joe Lieberman has to sit by himself.
America is such a mystery to me: A lunatic uses a Glock to shoot nineteen people, and our answer is: “Don’t try to control guns or nuts, just be more polite.” I’m just a hockey mom, but it seems to me when a madman kills people, the problem isn’t the First Amendment. It’s the Second.
In his big speech, President Obama said, ”We should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children’s expectations.” The first of which, I’m guessing, would be to live in a country where they don’t get shot when they leave the house. That’s what’s important; who gives a damn if politicians mask their disdain for one another with forced niceties? They do already: “My good friend from the great state of Alabama.” As if they’re really good friends, or anyone outside Alabama thinks it’s a great state.
Oh, it’s a lovefest these days: Conservatives couldn’t stop praising Obama’s speech—of course, because it let them off the hook. The party of assault weapons didn’t get blamed for the assault. Just like the party of oil didn’t get blamed for the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Like the party of deregulation skated on tanking the economy.
Again and again, Obama is given the opportunity to lay some richly deserved blame at the feet of the Republicans, and again and again he just can’t do it, because he wants them to like him so badly—Conservatives, stop worrying, he can’t be a Kenyan; he’s a golden retriever. He’s done everything he possibly could to appease you, short of using bleach.
And when Obama says “find common ground”—oh, here comes the bullshit now. Because whenever a Democrat seeks common ground, he always seems to find it right where the Republican was already standing. Ten years ago we had a ban on extended ammo clips so that people like this walking Thorazine ad couldn’t kill supermarket crowds hassle-free. The Republicans killed the ban, and now the compromise is we can never get it back. I think the old word for that was “surrender.”
Republicans—please note—are not taken in by the myth of common ground—they never move an inch on anything. Gun restrictions are always bad, taxes are always too high, and there’s nothing on earth that can’t be improved by adding either Jesus or bacon. Sarah Palin knows fewer words than Koko the gorilla, but it’s not a coincidence that two of them are “Don’t retreat,” and the other is “Reload.”
 
 
—January 21, 2011
 

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