The New New Rules: A Funny Look at How Everybody but Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass (29 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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WHAT ABOUT BLOB?
 
 
New Rule:
You can’t be president if you can’t fit in the Oval Office. Governor Chris Christie says he’s not running for president, but if he did, he’d definitely beat Obama. Which is like an eight-year-old saying, “I could kick your ass in tiddlywinks, I just don’t
feel
like it.” News flash, Governor Fat Bastard: Obama’s approval rating in New Jersey is four points higher than
yours,
so I don’t know what you’re smoking. I mean, besides bacon.
WHITE-COLLAR CRIME
 
New Rule:
Cocaine is not an aerosol. In Spain, a woman was arrested for trying to smuggle liquid cocaine disguised as spray starch. One sign your spray is actually cocaine: when your starched shirts have trouble staying hard.
WHY ME, GOURD
 
 
New Rule:
Banks must stop putting up Halloween decorations and open up another teller window. You’re a bank, not a college dorm room. Your service charges are scary enough. And while we’re at it . . .
 
. . . stop trying to make my supermarket look like an old-fashioned farm stand. We get it. It’s fall, and so the floor is now made of wood and the fruit is stacked in hay, but the other day my cart got stuck in a steaming pile of horseshit.
WING IT
 
 
New Rule:
Arabs, when one of our planes goes down in your country, that doesn’t mean you all have to rush over and stand on it. Maybe there’s some cultural explanation, like Khadhafi didn’t let you have jungle gyms and you’re trying to get your childhood back. But I’m going to let you in on something: You’re not striking a blow against the Great Satan. You’re getting lead poisoning from General Dynamics.
WINTER’S BONEHEAD
 
New Rule:
When you make stupid into an art form, it’s not stupid anymore. We just found out that the “Sarah Palin” who writes Sarah Palin’s Facebook page is a fake, but the real Sarah Palin has her own Facebook page under a fake name. And sometimes the real/fake Sarah Palin praises the work of the fake/real Sarah Palin. It’s like
Inception
for hillbillies. There’s also a rumor that she doesn’t really need glasses, she just wears them to look smart. And when she has them on, Todd doesn’t know she’s Superman.
BRUCE ALRIGHTY
 
New Rule:
Now that a Cheney, a McCain, and a Bush have come out to support gay marriage, it’s your turn, Obama. Who are you waiting for, the state of Alabama? The Reverend Fred Phelps? Even sixty-three percent of
Catholics
are okay with gay marriage. But then again, they’re used to being fed the body of a man by another man who’s wearing a dress.
This month, America reached a milestone in its attitude toward gays: more than half the country—fifty-three percent—now supports gay marriage. Now, that still means that forty-seven percent of Americans are assholes. After all, if a poll found that forty-seven percent of Americans thought blacks shouldn’t be able to marry a Kardashian sister, the Twit-tersphere would light up like Charlie Sheen just fell down a well. But still, this is remarkable progress, considering that it wasn’t that long ago that just saying the words “gay marriage” made most Americans throw up in their cornflakes.
So I’d like to congratulate the leadership of the Democratic Party, who really stood up for what was right. I’d like to, but I can’t, because other than Gavin Newsom, Dennis Kucinich, and that governor in New Jersey who went all
Brokeback Mountain
with his bodyguard, no Democrat would touch the issue with a ten-inch pole. It wasn’t the Democrats who changed America on the issue—it was television, which in the last five years has gotten gayer than the British Navy. If there’s one thing I know about Americans, it’s that if they see something on TV, it makes it okay. And when they saw real gay couples standing on courthouse steps wearing the same ugly rented tuxedos that straight men wear to get married—suddenly, they realized that the gays were just like them: tacky and overweight.
Recently, Victoria Jackson, the oldest surviving member of
Saturday Night Live,
said the show
Glee
is “shoving the gay thing down our throats.” Besides being the first funny thing she’s said in twenty-five years, it’s true. They
are
shoving the gay thing down America’s throat, and it turns out America got used to it surprisingly quickly. And that shouldn’t shock anybody, because shoving things down America’s throat is what the Republicans do all the time.
Unlike the Democrats, when Republicans believe in things that the public doesn’t—their response is, “Fuck it, we’ll
make
them believe.” Like attacking Iraq to avenge 9/11. Like convincing a country that badly wanted health-care reform that they actually didn’t want it. Like turning global warming into a hoax. That’s what conservatives do—relentlessly push until the unthinkable becomes the consensus. The idea of blaming teachers for our financial crisis, which would have seemed completely lunatic a year ago, becomes the conventional wisdom.
Republicans don’t run from unpopular stances, and they stand by their convictions. Stupid, ignorant, world-destroying convictions based on dis-proven economic fantasies and ancient books full of primitive morality and magic people—but convictions nonetheless.
 
 
—April 1, 2011
 
WORD IMPERFECT
 
 
New Rule:
I don’t care if white-trash America ever accepts that Barack Obama is president, but it’s high time that my spellcheck did.
WORLD SERIES OF PORKER
 
New Rule:
Competitive eating isn’t a sport. It’s one of the seven deadly sins. ESPN recently televised the U.S. Open of Competitive Eating, because watching those athletes at the poker table was just too damn exciting. What’s next, competitive farting? Oh, wait, they’re already doing that—it’s called
The Howard Stern Show.
WRAP SMEAR
 
New Rule:
Someone has to explain to me the difference between eating the new McDonald’s Big Mac Snack Wrap—which is basically a handful of burger chunks, lettuce, cheese, and sauce all glopped together on a tortilla—and eating out of the garbage.
WRECKS APPEAL
 
New Rule:
If men can admit they watch NASCAR for the crashes, women can admit they watch fashion shows . . .
 
. . . to see skinny chicks fall on their asses.
CHARLIE DON’T SERF
 
New Rule:
As long as we’ve got three wars going, America needs to add one more—a class war. It’s time working Americans told Wall Street the same thing that the good people of Detroit told Charlie Sheen: “This is bullshit, and I want my money back.”
Two interesting things are happening in America right now. Charlie Sheen—a millionaire armed with only a few catchphrases and two porn actresses who smell like ammonia—launched a self-pity tour because he can’t have a TV show, while the Republicans—the party of millionaires—is shutting down the government because they can’t have a tax-free world. As Paul Ryan says, “It’s not a budget. It’s a cause.”
Like slavery. Like supporting one of the luckiest guys in the world in his quest to get all that’s coming to him. Folks, if you go to a show and the guy onstage says, “Sorry, dude, I already got your money,” you’re not in on the joke. You
are
the joke.
You’re not his friend, or one of his chosen people, and you’re not going to
be
him someday in paradise if you drink his tiger blood. That’s Jesus you’re thinking of. This is the guy from the sitcom about making dirty jokes to a fat kid. You can know that a rock makes a shitty pet, but if you buy a pet rock, you’re still an idiot. Ask your dentist—a shit-eating grin doesn’t change the fact that you’ve been eating shit. That’s the difference between being Charlie Sheen’s girlfriend and Charlie Sheen’s fan. If you’re his girlfriend and you get fucked, he pays
you.
And if you think a guy living large and rubbing your nose in it that you’re
not
is funny, here’s one you’ll really love: You have to pay your taxes, and General Electric doesn’t. That’s right, GE, America’s largest corporation, paid no taxes on $14 billion in profit. Why aren’t people mad at them?
If I had to pick a phrase that encapsulates the American economy in the last decade, it surely would be: “I’ve already got your money, dude.”
There’s a law now forbidding credit-card companies from screwing you with fine print and sudden unjustified rate hikes—to which the credit-card companies said, “I already got your money, dude.” Or maybe you lost your job in a recession caused by already rich people who bundled horseshit loans, and then took “too big to fail” pity money from Uncle Sam: “Already got your money, dude.”
Americans need to have a Detroit moment, when they realize they’re pooling their money and wasting it on the richest guy in the room. The richest one percent hoard an obscene amount of the wealth while the average American has to save up to eat at Red Lobster on his birthday. Wake up—because somehow, they’re banging the porn stars, and you’re getting the crabs.
 
 
—April 8, 2011
 

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