The New New Rules: A Funny Look at How Everybody but Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass (31 page)

Read The New New Rules: A Funny Look at How Everybody but Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass Online

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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But if the one with the Cockney lizard gets in trouble, just let it die.
HAND SOLO
 
 
New Rule:
If you’re going to be the pathetic, laughing-stock center of a tawdry, lie-riddled sex scandal, at least get laid. Congratulations, Congressman Shinytits69: In a world of politicians doing everything from having babies with the maid, leaving their wives on their deathbeds, and hiking the Appalachian Trail, you’re guilty of the most humiliating indiscretion of all: You didn’t get any. Talk about Democrats being ineffectual! Edwards and Clinton banged butterfaces, and that’s embarrassing enough—but you came up with just . . . your hand. Your name shouldn’t even be Weiner, you don’t deserve it—Weiners are for closers—your name should be Anthony Hand.
At his press conference, Congressman Weiner was talking about his online flirtations, and at one point he ejaculated, “They are all adults, at least to the best of my knowledge.” Oh, Anthony, it’s the Internet. There’s no such thing as the best of your knowledge. You know that naked coed you’ve got on the line, the one with tits that just won’t quit? This is her:
 
How is talking to this guy online better than old-school whacking off? Say what you want about a box of Kleenex and the July
Playboy,
but when you finish, it doesn’t call Andrew Breitbart.
I guess I just don’t get the appeal of sexting, and phone sex, and all that cyber-jacking the kids are into these days when they’re not listening to their hippity-hop records. Call me old-fashioned, but when I have sex I like to have the other person in the room. I find that it helps create a feeling of intimacy.
People say, “Bill, don’t knock phone sex till you’ve tried it.” I’ve tried it. True, it was with a customer-service rep from the gas company, but still. I gave it a shot. And you know what? It’s not sex. It’s not even a little bit like sex. It’s just talking. Even during actual sex, talking is fairly superfluous. Saying “Do me, do me” when I am at that very moment doing you is neither helpful nor essential to the overall experience. And that’s all cybersex is: an annoying person saying “Do me, do me” while you’re a thousand miles away, trying to maintain an erection while the cat walks across the keyboard.
Thanks to you, Congressman Weiner, there is now a new low in what passes for a sex scandal—JFK got Marilyn Monroe. John Edwards got a love child. You got mail. Say what you will about Bill Clinton, but at least when he whipped out his dick on a woman, she didn’t have to wait for it to stop buffering.
 
 
—June 10, 2011
 
ZINE-OPHOBIA
 
New Rule:
Stop trying to make your magazine interactive.
Time
magazine keeps telling me that if I want to read more about a story, go to their website. Here’s a better idea: Put the rest of the story
in the magazine.
You know, like you used to do before the Internet? I know you have a website that you’re really proud of, but I’m on the toilet.
ZIP COLD
 
New Rule:
As long as they’re thinking of dropping Saturday service, the Post Office can go ahead and just close altogether. Since about 1998, no one in America has gotten anything in the mail but catalogs, bills, Christmas cards, and anthrax. And I hate Christmas cards. At least when you get anthrax you don’t think, “Oh, shit, now next year I have to send them anthrax.”
NO NEW TEXAS
 
 
New Rule:
If you think the Republican presidential candidates can’t possibly get any lamer, then you haven’t met the new Republican flavor of the month: Rick Perry. If you’re not familiar with Rick, he took over as governor of Texas from George W. Bush, who’s now referred to as “the smart one.” He carries a gun even when he’s jogging, he wears cowboy boots with a suit, and the boots say, “Come and take it,” which sounds kind of gay. And he threw such a tantrum when Obama won, he actually talked about Texas seceding from the union. Because that’s what America needs: a president of the United States who’s not really sold on the whole “United States” concept.
Rick Perry rented out a seventy-thousand-seat football stadium in Houston for something called The Response—which sounds like a home pregnancy test but actually is, to quote the governor, “a Christian prayer service to provide spiritual solutions to the many challenges we face as a nation.” Or, as stadium employees are calling it, Batshit Day. I guess the idea is to get together in a big group and pray all at once; that way, the signal is stronger and God doesn’t lose you when he’s going through a canyon.
But here on Planet Reality, may I point out that there are no such things as “spiritual solutions” to national problems. If that’s where we are as a country, if our official government policy is “Yee-haw, Jesus, take the wheel”—then we’re dead already. On his Jesuspalooza website, Perry writes, “There is hope for America. It lies in heaven, and we will find it on our knees,” and “Some problems are beyond our power to solve.” What? I thought we were the can-do people. And if Perry thinks only God can solve our problems, then why is he even
in
government? Why doesn’t he just stay at home and light a bunch of candles, like Sissy Spacek’s mom in
Carrie
?
Here’s an opposing view: Not only are our problems
not
“beyond our power to solve,” they’re actually fairly easy to solve. You have a giant budget deficit, like Perry has in Texas? Raise taxes. Federal tax revenues haven’t been this low since 1950—and
that,
plus two wars and a recession, is the reason we have a huge deficit. It’s not because God’s angry over the gay kissing on
Glee.
It doesn’t require prayer to solve it; it requires a calculator.
Politicians like to say, “We need new ideas.” Bullshit—“new ideas” is just a secular version of “spiritual solutions”—something that’s going to magically fix everything. What “new idea” is going to solve our health-care crisis? A magic pill that makes obese children crap out gold bricks? We don’t need “new ideas,” we need the balls to implement the ideas we already know work: cut corporate welfare, slash the defense budget, tax the rich, support the strong unions that created a middle class in the first place, build infrastructure, and take the profit out of health care.
By the way, Rick Perry isn’t just talking when he says “spiritual solutions.” Back in April, faced with a devastating drought, Rick did what any solutions-oriented twenty-first-century civil servant would do. He proclaimed a Day of Prayer for Rain. Because we’re ancient Mayans now. Of course, the drought only got worse. In the words of Sister Mary Ignatius, God answers all your prayers. And sometimes the answer is no.
 
 
—June 17, 2011
 
PHOTO CREDITS
 
Page 12: AFP/Getty Images
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Page 28: Bottom: Alexis C. Glenn/UPI/Landov
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Page 43: Top: Bloomberg via Getty Images
Page 43: Middle: Press Association via AP Images
Page 43: Bottom: Press Association via AP Images
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Page 50: Bottom: DLILLC/Corbis
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Page 67: Top: Ocean/Corbis
Page 67: Bottom: RNT Productions/Corbis
Page 69: Trae Patton/NBCU Photo Bank via AP Images
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Page 79: Gilbert Tourte/Reuters/Landov
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Page 181: Top: AP Photo/Jennifer Graylock
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Page 182: AP Photo/Minnesota Public Radio/Bob Collins
Page 183: AP Photo/Shiho Fukada
Page 186: Chicago/PA Photos/Landov
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Page 195: Getty Images
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Page 264: AP Photo/Rich Schultz
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Page 272: Kelly Redinger/Design Pics/Corbis
Page 274: Jason Reed/Reuters/Landov
Page 279: AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite/File
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