by Bill Maher
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
TURBAN OUTFITTERS
New Rule: If you still think Obama is a Muslim, you just might be a redneck. A Christian church in South Carolina has a sign out front that says, “Obama, Osama. Humm. Are they brothers?” No, in fact, they’re not even related, which is more than I can say for the married couples in your church.
TURBAN RENEWAL
New Rule: Sikhs in America have to assimilate just a little more. Oh, I’m not talking about the do-rag, which is no sillier than a cowboy hat. But this week police had to break up a brawl at a Sikh temple in New York City involving swords and cricket bats. Whoa, fellas—this is America. We use guns here. Next time some shit starts at the temple, pull a Glock out of your turban and say, “Is there a motherfucking problem here?”
TWEENIE ROAST
New Rule: Science has to stop trying to determine why teens have sex. A new study links degrading lyrics to teen sex. Hey, Lab Coat, let me save you some time. You want to know why teens have sex? Because their teacher offered.
TWEET RELIEF
New Rule: My BlackBerry must find a better way to indicate that it’s low on battery power than with a constant blinking light. Not to be rude, BlackBerry, but if you weren’t using up all of that battery power letting me know that I’m low on battery power, I wouldn’t be so low on battery power. Christ, you’re a BlackBerry. If you’re trying to tell me something—send me a text.
IRRITABLE BOWL SYNDROME
New Rule: Americans must realize what makes NFL football so great: socialism. That’s right, the NFL takes money from the rich teams and gives it to the poorer ones . . . just like President Obama wants to do with his secret army of ACORN volunteers. Green Bay, Wisconsin, has a population of one hundred thousand. Yet this sleepy little town on the banks of the Fuck-if-I-know River has just as much of a chance of making it to the Super Bowl as the New York Jets—who next year need to just shut the hell up and play.
Now, me personally, I haven’t watched a Super Bowl since 2004, when Janet Jackson’s nipple popped out during halftime, and that split-second glimpse of an unrestrained black titty burned my eyes and offended me as a Christian. But I get it—who doesn’t love the spectacle of juiced-up millionaires giving one another brain damage on a giant flat-screen TV with a picture so real it feels like Ben Roethlisberger is in your living room, grabbing your sister?
It’s no surprise that some one hundred million Americans will watch the Super Bowl—that’s forty million more than go to church on Christmas—suck on that, Jesus! It’s also eighty-five million more than watched the last game of the World Series, and in that is an economic lesson for America. Because football is built on an economic model of fairness and opportunity, and baseball is built on a model where the rich almost always win and the poor usually have no chance. The World Series is like The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. You have to be a rich bitch just to play. The Super Bowl is like Tila Tequila. Anyone can get in.
Or to put it another way, football is more like the Democratic philosophy. Democrats don’t want to eli
minate capitalism or competition, but they’d like it if some kids didn’t have to go to a crummy school in a rotten neighborhood while others get to go to a great school and their dad gets them into Harvard. Because when that happens, “achieving the American dream” is easy for some and just a fantasy for others.
That’s why the NFL literally shares the wealth—TV is their biggest source of revenue, and they put all of it in a big commie pot and split it thirty-two ways. Because they don’t want anyone to fall too far behind. That’s why the team that wins the Super Bowl picks last in the next draft. Or what the Republicans would call “punishing success.”
Baseball, on the other hand, is exactly like the Republicans, and I don’t just mean it’s incredibly boring. I mean their economic theory is every man for himself. The small-market Pittsburgh Steelers go to the Super Bowl more than anybody—but the Pittsburgh Pirates? Levi Johnston has sperm that will not grow up and live long enough to see the Pirates in a World Series. Their payroll is $40 million; the Yankees’ is $206 million. The Pirates have about as much chance at getting in the playoffs as a poor black teenager from Newark has of becoming the CEO of Halliburton.
So you kind of have to laugh—the same angry white males who hate Obama because he’s “redistributing wealth” just love football, a sport that succeeds economically because it does just that. To them, the NFL is as American as hot dogs, Chevrolet, apple pie, and a second, giant helping of apple pie.
—January 29, 2011
U
UDDER NONSENSE
New Rule: The guys who wrote Why Do Men Have Nipples? must write another book called If You Care, Then You’re Gay.
ULTRASOUND ADVICE
New Rule: If you can force a woman to look at a sonogram—to see what will happen if she has an abortion—you also have to let her see a crying baby, a bratty five-year-old, and a surly teenager to see what will happen if she doesn’t. And you have to tell her it costs $204,000 to raise it until it turns eighteen, in 2028, where it will be a slave to the Chinese, in a radioactive world with no animals, fish, or plants.
CAKE BOSS
New Rule: If you think Michelle Obama is after your freedom because she merely suggests that our kids should exercise more and eat a little broccoli along with their lard, you don’t deserve a place in the free market of ideas. You belong at the Cheesecake Factory. She’s not Stalin because she notices your kids sweat Mountain Dew.
And yet this is bigger than America’s ass—hard to believe, but indulge me. This is about the Tea Baggers’ fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between freedom and the freedom to never be told anything—like avoid food served in a bucket. It’s just a tradition that first ladies get to pick some mundane—and up until now, noncontroversial—cause to promote. Lady Bird Johnson: beautifying America. Barbara Bush had literacy. Betty Ford’s was no hard liquor before ten a.m. Our previous first lady, Laura Bush, worked tirelessly against illiteracy, so between her efforts and her husband’s, it was a tie. Hillary Clinton did pioneering work in looking the other way. I’m just saying, if your husband can convince you that the bra in the bed probably fell in at the mattress factory, you can overlook Hosni Mubarak.
When I look at a moon pie, I just see sugar and trans fat, not my constitutional freedoms. But Sarah Palin recently brought sugar cookies to a school as a protest against the government telling the school what to eat. Which of course it wasn’t doing. Sean Hannity warned that we’d soon be paying fines for eating salt. Which isn’t a problem for Hannity, who eats mostly boogers. When did the right wing become Joe Pesci over every little thing: “You sayin’ I use too much salt? What am I, salty? Fuck you, I use too much salt—here, take some salt right down your throat!”
Forty years ago, when Lady Bird Johnson suggested we plant wildflowers to beautify the highways, the reaction was “Sounds like a neat idea!” not “Don’t tell me what I can plant, bitch!”
I’m not saying the right objects to Mrs. Obama’s efforts because the Tea Baggers are stupid, or because they’re hysterical, or because they hate black people. Though all of that is true. But what does it say about America that even a first lady suggestion has to be controversial—especially when she purposefully picked something no one could disagree with: Maybe we should send our kids outside to play. You know who else liked to send people places? Hitler. Rush Limbaugh makes a crack about this every week. Because who better to get your health advice from than a drug-addicted fat man. Rush, I have proof that no one in the government is forcing you to eat right and exercise: you.
—February 4, 2011
V
THE VILLAGE PAPAL
New Rule: Popes are supposed to love everybody. Pope Benedict has rejected France’s new ambassador to the Vatican because he’s gay and married to a man. The Pope said it just wouldn’t be right to have a homosexual walking around his pretend country run by men in dresses. So stay away, you nasty gay Frenchman . . .
. . . or the Vatican guards in their adorable striped pantaloons will have their way with you!
VINYL VERDICT
New Rule: There’s no such thing as essential Kenny Loggins.
VOLCANIC ASS
New Rule: You can’t lecture people about economics if you own a volcano. Casino king Steve Wynn told Fox News: “Government has never increased the standard of living of one single human being in civilization’s history. For some reason, that simple truth has evaded everybody.” And then he put his elbow through a Picasso. Here’s one way the government helped Las Vegas, just a little: We built the Hoover Dam. That’s what makes all the little lights go on. So either start closing your casinos at sunset or buy the world’s biggest flashlight. And shove it up your ass.
THREE FLOG NIGHT
New Rule: If your wife says, “Hurry up, we’re going to be late for our Valentine’s dinner,” and you reply, “Just a minute, honey, I’m almost finished masturbating”—you might have a porn problem. I bring this up because there is a crisis in America: a full ninety-one percent of men can no longer get an erection without hearing the sound of a Mac booting up.
I made that statistic up, because statistics on porn are hard to come by, mainly because when you do a Google search for them you wind up looking at porn, and suddenly it’s three hours later and the dog is starving. But it is true that in far too many marriages these days, the husband comes home from work and goes straight to the den to look at porn, while the poor wife is alone upstairs . . . Between him masturbating at his keyboard and her crying herself to sleep, who can keep that much Kleenex in the house?
I know what you’re thinking: Bill Maher, anti-porn? No, I’m not anti-porn, I’m just saying, masturbation has its place—and that place should be plan B, when you can’t get the real thing. For me, that was college. It filled the hole in me when I had no hole to fill. But now psychologists are telling us that for a sizable percentage of the men in America, masturbating to porn is plan A; doing it with your wife or girlfriend is more like a fallback option for when the power goes out.
What’s worse, when someone spends twelve hours a day looking at porn, you build up a tolerance and you need more to get the same high. So you move on to fetish sites, and then weird Japanese porn, where a schoolgirl’s being molested on a bullet train by Godzilla, and before you know it you’re into the stuff that Germans like. Horrifying, slimy, violent ideas punctuated by the sounds of womanly sobbing. Like an interview with John Boehner.
And to be honest about our porn addiction—it’s not that Americans are oversexed, it’s that we are catastrophically lazy. We’d rather sit on the sofa and show our wing-wang to strangers on Chatroulette than go schlep out to Houlihan’s and try to pick up a secretary who’s had one too many mai tais. We’ve become a nation of cooch potatoes.
I’m getting action and I don’t even have to brush my teeth! Real, actual sex? Not tonight, honey—I’m horny! It’s amazing—for men, it took only a couple of decades between discovering that women can have orgasms and deciding that givi
ng them one is just too much trouble.
—February 11, 2011
YAHOO NEWS
New Rule: Since the number-one cause of death in the Civil War was diarrhea—true—Civil War reenactors must do all their inspiring battlefield re-creations with a steaming load of crap in their pants. And if you think that sounds uncomfortable and unpleasant, try slavery.
I mention this because today marks the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of the inauguration of Jefferson Davis as president of the Confederacy, and that’s when all the shooting and pooping started. And tomorrow in Montgomery, Alabama—in just one of many slavery shindigs around the South this year—the Sons of the Confederacy are sponsoring a march to “celebrate the Confederacy,” part of a whole year of nostalgia, including battle reenactments, parades, and grand balls—which is what you have to have to convince people that there’s nothing fucked up about celebrating slavery. Oh, I know, they’re not celebrating slavery, they’re celebrating a way of life: “Oh, I wish I was in the land of cotton”—because someone else was picking it!
