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

by Bill Maher

  —February 20, 2009

  J

  JAPANESE ZERO

  New Rule: Newspapers must get rid of the Sudoku puzzle. Yes, it’s big in Japan, but so is Tom Waits. Maybe in Japan they think it’s fun to make a bunch of numbers add up, but in America we call that math, and that’s a job for India.

  JERK ETHIC

  New Rule: Powerball jackpot winners must stop saying they’re not sure if they’re going to quit their jobs. Of course you’re going to quit your job. And I have news for you: Your coworkers want you to quit your job. Nobody wants to be on the pork-processing line next to the unbearable ass in the Gucci smock.

  JERSEY SNORE

  New Rule: People on reality shows have to quit saying, “You either love me or you hate me.” There’s actually a third option: not giving a shit about you.

  JHERI-CURLING

  New Rule: No black athletes in the Winter Olympics. There’s a reason we schedule these things in the cold and snow—so the tropical people won’t show up and kick our ass. Look, you’ve got football, basketball, the presidency. Is it too much to leave us the ice dancing?

  BOY BLUNDER

  New Rule: Republicans must stop pitting the American people against the government. Last week, we heard a speech from Republican leader Bobby Jindal—and he began it with the story that every immigrant tells about going to an American grocery store for the first time and being overwhelmed with the “endless variety on the shelves.” And this was just a 7-Eleven—wait till he sees a Safeway. The thing is, that “endless variety” exists only because Americans pay taxes to a government, which maintains roads, irrigates fields, oversees the electrical grid, and everything else that enables the modern American supermarket to carry forty-seven varieties of frozen breakfast pastry.

  Of course, it’s easy to tear government down—Ronald Reagan used to say the nine most terrifying words in the English language were “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” But that was before “I’m Sarah Palin, now show me the launch codes.”

  The stimulus package was attacked as typical “tax and spend”—like repairing bridges is left-wing stuff. “There the liberals go again, always wanting to get across the river.” Folks, the people are the government—the first responders who put out fires—that’s your government. The ranger who shoos pedophiles out of the park restroom, the postman who delivers your porn.

  How stupid is it when people say, “That’s all we need: the federal government telling Detroit how to make cars or Wells Fargo how to run a bank. You want them to look like the post office?”

  You mean the place that takes a note that’s in my hand in L.A. on Monday and gives it to my sister in New Jersey on Wednesday, for 44 cents? Let me be the first to say, I would be thrilled if America’s health-care system was anywhere near as functional as the post office.

  Truth is, recent years have made me much more wary of government stepping aside and letting unregulated private enterprise run things it plainly is too greedy to trust with. Like Wall Street. Like rebuilding Iraq.

  Like the way Republicans always frame the health-care debate by saying, “Health-care decisions should be made by doctors and patients, not government bureaucrats,” leaving out the fact that health-care decisions aren’t made by doctors, patients, or bureaucrats; they’re made by insurance companies. Which are a lot like hospital gowns—chances are your ass isn’t covered.

  —March 6, 2009

  JOHN HANCOCK BLOCK

  New Rule: You can’t bum-rush the president for autographs after he just lectured you for an hour about how you have to grow up. Have some dignity, for Christ’s sake. He’s your coworker, not Hannah Montana. If you’re this crazy about him now, what are you going to do if he turns the country around, ask him to sign your tit?

  JOY RODGERS

  New Rule: Stop pretending this is an exercise machine. The newest “fitness” craze in Japan is the Joba, a horseback-simulation machine. Doesn’t anyone in that country just fuck anymore?

  JUDGE DELETE-O

  New Rule: Stop asking the Supreme Court to rule on stuff they don’t understand. First, it was e-mail, now it’s violent video games. What are they going to take up next, whether you can follow someone on Twitter who’s defriended you on Facebook? Sexting? These justices are so old, Justice Kennedy’s idea of cybersex is tapping out “Who’s your daddy?” in Morse code.

  JUGGER NOT

  New Rule: Meteorologists must come up with a new size for hail besides “golf ball,” “baseball,” and “grapefruit.” I wanna hear the weatherman say, “This week in Norman, Oklahoma, they got hail the size of Katy Perry’s tits.”

  DEPLOY, VEY!

  New Rule: Forget bringing the troops home from Iraq. We need to get the troops home from World War II. Can anybody tell me why, in 2009, we still have more than sixty thousand troops in Germany and thirty thousand in Japan? At some point, these people are going to have to learn to rape themselves. Our soldiers have been in Germany so long they now wear shorts with black socks. You know that crazy soldier hiding in the cave on Iwo Jima who doesn’t know the war is over? That’s us.

  Bush and Cheney used to love to keep Americans all sphinctered-up on the notion that terrorists might follow us home. But actually, we’re the people who go to your home and then never leave. Here’s the facts: The Republic of America has more than five hundred thousand military personnel deployed on more than seven hundred bases, with troops in one hundred fifty countries—we’re like McDonald’s with tanks—including thirty-seven European countries—because you never know when Portugal might invade Euro Disney. And this doesn’t even count our secret torture prisons, which are all over the place, but you never really see them until someone brings you there—kinda like IHOP.

  Of course, Americans would never stand for this in reverse—we can barely stand letting Mexicans in to do the landscaping. Can you imagine if there were twenty thousand armed Guatemalans on a base in San Ber-nardino right now? Lou Dobbs would become a suicide bomber.

  And why? How did this country get stuck with an empire? I’m not saying we’re Rome. Rome had good infrastructure. But we are an empire, and the reason is because once America lands in a country, there is no exit strategy. We’re like cellulite, herpes, and Irish relatives: We are not going anywhere. We love you long time!

  —March 27, 2009

  K

  KEGGER, PLEASE

  New Rule: No more studies warning us about how college students are binge drinking. What other kind of drinking do you think twenty-year-olds are doing, wine tasting? Of course they’re binge drinking. Hell, with this job market waiting for them, just be happy they’re not breaking into your house and stealing your prescription drugs.

  KEYSTROKE

  New Rule: If you are tweeting more than ten times a day, you need to take up a more productive hobby. Like masturbating. Look at it this way, it’s slightly better exercise, and you’ll be giving pleasure to the exact same number of people.

  KFU

  New Rule: Kentucky Fried Chicken can call their roadkill whatever they want. I’m still not eating out of a bucket. This week, for the fourth time, KFC is introducing “grilled” chicken. I’m sorry, but you’re missing the whole reason my mouth’s not watering: The problem isn’t the word “fried.” It’s the word “Kentucky.”

  KID RATION

  New Rule: Crap peddlers must stick to selling crap. Burger King has made their Kids Meals healthier—and not just by removing the toy from China. The new, healthier Kids Meal includes broiled chicken, organic applesauce, and low-fat milk. You also get a moist towelette for quick cleanup after your kid freaks out and dumps the whole thing in your car.

  KIDDIE LITTER

  New Rule: If you get to bring your baby into the public swimming pool, I get to follow you home and piss in his bathwater.

  STAR DREK

  New Rule: Human beings are such slobs, from now on pigs must declare us the other white meat. Do you know that right now there’s so m
uch discarded trash in outer space that three times last month the international space station was almost hit by some useless hunk of floating metal, not unlike the international space station itself? Really, you’ve got to give the human race credit. Only humans could visit an infinite void and leave it cluttered. Not only have we screwed up our own planet, somehow we’ve also managed to use up all the space in . . . space.

  History shows over and over again that if the citizens of earth put their minds to it, they can destroy anything. It doesn’t matter how remote or pristine, together, yes, we can fuck it up. The age of space exploration is only fifty years old, and we have already managed to turn the final frontier into the New Jersey Meadowlands. You know what’s up there? Old satellites, spent rocket boosters, Neil Armstrong’s golf club, that canister with Gene Roddenberry’s ashes, empty Tang jars, discarded astronaut diapers—more than one hundred thousand items, my favorite being a NASA space glove, which in 1965 was lost by astronaut Ed White. I can’t tell you why he had his glove off, except to say that in space, it can get very lonely.

  The reason this is so worrisome is something called the Kessler syndrome, wherein the more debris there is flying around, the more collisions occur, which exponentially expands the amount of debris, making it impossible to keep satellites up there . . . pretty soon we lose the cell phone networks, and then we face a world where teenagers are forced to send one another pictures of their genitals by mail.

  Of course, the other seemingly limitless expanse we’ve endangered lately is the ocean. Which we’re killing. Why? Because the Bible says God gave us dominion over the earth—which is taken to mean that God was saying, “This is your rental car—taketh it, and beateth the shit out of it. For who careth, it is a rental.”

  Did you know that there is now floating in the Pacific Ocean a 3.5-million-ton island of shit made up of all the indestructible crap we toss away, the stuff that will never break down, like Styrofoam and old Clorox bottles. And it’s twice the size of Texas—that’s right, the Pacific Ocean now contains more white trash than Texas.

  —April 3, 2009

  KILL THE EMPIRE

  New Rule: Americans have to stop saying we don’t have an exit strategy in Libya. Please. Look at Japan, Germany, Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan. We’re still in all those places. But we’re not in Vietnam or Somalia. So clearly we do have an exit strategy. It’s called “losing.”

  KILLY OCEAN

  New Rule: Stop asking why the killer whale killed the lady. Why do you think? He was denied tenure? Killer whales kill. Hence the name “killer whale.” And, guys, before you get any ideas, stay away from the blowfish.

  KIM JONG ILL

  New Rule: Let’s end the debate over whether North Korea has weapons that constitute a “direct threat.” If you don’t think Korea has access to dangerous toxic chemicals, you’ve obviously never been to a strip-mall nail salon.

  KITTY PORN

  New Rule: If you want to send me a link, you must take the extra five seconds to tell me what it is. How do I know if I’m going to see some adorable kittens at play or a piece of truly disgusting fetish porn that will be burned into my brain for the rest of my life? I need that info, because, really, at this point, I’ve seen plenty of kittens.

  KOBE BEEF

  New Rule: The Japanese must invent one thing that’s not at least vaguely pornographic.

  KVETCH OF THE DAY

  New Rule: Israel has to stop being mad at Obama because he won’t plan a visit. We’re your ally. Not your grandchildren. Calm down and give it a rest, or you’ll get Biden again.

  SENIOR MOMENT

  New Rule: Stop making college students sit through commencement speeches. You’ve just gone years in debt for a worthless diploma, now here’s your reward: twenty minutes of motivational bullshit from Coach Bobby Knight. I firmly believe if college students wanted to hear more drivel they’re never going to use again, they could go to class. So I would tell this graduating class exactly what they have to look forward to: working at Starbucks. I’m joking, of course. Starbucks isn’t hiring. Here’s the speech I would give.

  Graduates, faculty, alumni, and guests, I am truly honored to speak at your university, mostly because it’s a great place to score cheap weed. I’ve been asked by your dean to keep it brief, and by your feminist studies club to keep it humorless. So class of 2009, as you go out in the world, here is my message for you: Give up. You’re about to enter the worst job market since Adam and Eve hired the very first employee, a Mexican to tend their garden. On top of that, you went through the American educational system. You wrote “Hi, Mom!” on your cap, and you spelled “Hi” wrong.

  And if all that wasn’t enough, you are the first generation to inherit an environment that’s probably already toast, but, hey, maybe you can make a few bucks smearing sunscreen on old people. Just remember, there’s more to life than work. Maybe now’s the time to appreciate the little things. A flower. A sunset. A shopping cart full of cans.

  So I say to you as you embark on your new adult life, take a moment to look back and honor your parents. Because they’re the ones who paid for your education; they’re the ones who stood by you the whole time. And they’re the ones you’ll be moving back in with in the fall.

  So look at them—look at your parents right now. Or, more likely, your dad and his new wife, who’s your age, and your mom and her new boyfriend, whom she met on Myspace. And after the ceremony, I want you to take them aside and say something very important to them: “This is your fault!” Who do you think it was who tanked the economy and spent all the money and melted the planet and let the schools rot? Yes, it was us, but at least I hope we taught you that in life, there really is no such thing as failure, because if there were, we wouldn’t be seeing Dick Cheney on TV every day. In closing, remember above all that no matter where life takes you, you will always have something deep inside you of great value: plasma.

  —May 15, 2009

  L

  LEFT, RIGHT, AND VENTER

  New Rule: He’s your president, not your boyfriend. Last week I criticized President Obama for not fighting corporate influence enough, and it made some liberals very angry. My phone rang off the hook, my e-mail filled up, and Nancy Pelosi got so mad, her face moved. Look, I like Obama, too, I’m just saying, let’s not make it a religion. And as far as you folks on the right who think we’re somehow now in league . . . We’re not in league. I was criticizing Obama for not being hard enough on the corporate douche bags you live to defend. I don’t want to be on your team; pick another kid. So I stand by my words, but there is another side to the story, and that is that every time Obama tries to take on a progressive cause, there’s a major political party standing in his way. The Democrats.

  People talk a lot about a third political party in America. We don’t need a third party, we need a first party.

  This is because we don’t have a left and a right party in this country anymore. We have a center-right party, and a crazy party. Over the last thirty-odd years, Democrats have moved to the right, and the right has moved into a mental hospital. So what we have is one perfectly good party for hedge-fund managers, credit-card companies, banks, defense contractors, big agriculture, and the pharmaceutical lobby—that’s the Democrats. And they sit across the aisle from a small group of religious lunatics, flat earthers, and Civil War reenactors who mostly communicate by AM radio and call themselves the Republicans, and who actually worry that Obama is a socialist. Socialist? He’s not even a liberal.

  I know he’s not, because he’s on TV. And while I see Democrats on television, I don’t see actual liberals. And if occasionally you do get to hear Ralph Nader or Noam Chomsky or Dennis Kucinich, they’re treated like buffoons. Okay, these are not three of the world’s most charismatic men, but then nobody’s ever going to confuse Newt Gingrich for Zac Efron, and I have to look at his fat face on TV more often than that “free credit report” song.

  Shouldn’t there be one party that unambiguously suppor
ts cutting the military budget? A party that is straight up in favor of gun control, gay marriage, higher taxes on the rich, universal health care, legalizing pot, and steep, direct taxing of polluters?

  These aren’t radical ideas. A majority of Americans are either already for them, or would be if they were properly argued and defended. And what we need is an actual progressive party to represent the millions of Americans who aren’t being served by the Democrats. Because bottom line: Democrats are the new Republicans. It’s like when some Chinese company buys the name of a great old American brand and slaps it on some cheap crap. You buy it out of reflex, and it’s only later that you think, “Wow, I didn’t even know Woolworth’s made dildos.”