by Bill Maher
I tell you, southerners—and I love them—have more disconnects than AT&T. And it started with Jefferson Davis—in his inauguration speech, he didn’t once mention slavery. He just talked about “agriculture” and “resources,” and then winked so much his wife thought he was sexting her by Morse code.
Now, I know you southerners have had a tough go at it. You lost the Civil War to the North. Reese Witherspoon to Hollywood. And the Dixie Chicks to Satan. And I’m not trying to offend my southern friends, mostly because you’re on meth and packing heat, but underneath that trucker hat there’s a plantation-size mental split going on. Because even the southerners who do the reenacting and lionize their slaveholding ancestors would tell you that they now think slavery was wrong. Then how could killing people to defend it have been right?
If my ancestors had fought for the right to abduct teenagers and force them into prostitution, I probably wouldn’t reenact that on weekends with the cast of Gossip Girl. And why is it that the people who want to reenact the war are the losers? That’s like doing sexual role-play and starting with, “Hey, remember that time I couldn’t get it up? Let’s relive that.”
So I’m not saying that your great-great-grandpa Lucius Meriwether Cornpone didn’t fight bravely at the Battle of Whogivesashit, but he was fighting on the wrong side. Just as I’m sure there were brave soldiers in Hitler’s army, but I wouldn’t start a restaurant called the Waffen Hut.
And all this talk about the “southern way of life” . . . please, I’ve been to the South. It’s the same way of life we have over here. You watch TV, you go to the mall, you eat a soft pretzel, and you go home. You just do it slower, that’s all. Gone With the Wind was just a movie. A movie made in Culver City. By Jews.
—February 18, 2011
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WAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE
New Rule: Television networks have to stop making shows that try and put a happy ending on America’s enormous wealth disparity and instead make a show called Shine My Shoes, Fuckface! This is America, where the top four hundred people have more money than the bottom 150 million combined.
ABC gave us Secret Millionaire, which is like Undercover Boss but less intellectually taxing. In each episode, one of our richest one percent drops in on the wage slaves for a week and finds out that living on one hundred eighty-five bucks a week in America really blows, so they then anecdotally solve the wealth-gap problem by showering everyone with cash. It’s like Pretty Woman if you were the whore.
It’s amazing. TV used to give Americans the reverse fantasy: What if you, normal person, suddenly became a millionaire? Now it’s “Oh, who are we kidding? You consider yourself lucky to hold on to your job deep-frying chicken parts, but how’d you like to be briefly introduced to a millionaire? Would you like that? You can even touch his garments!” And people watch this shit and find it inspirational. It’s why they fawn over Donald Trump when he flirts with running for president every four years, even though he spends the rest of his time letting eighteen people kiss his ass before he fires all but one of them.
America’s rich aren’t giving you money. They’re taking your money. Between the years 1980 and 2005, eighty percent of all new income generated in this country went to the richest one percent. Let me put that in terms even you fat-ass Tea Baggers can understand. Say one hundred Americans get together and order a one-hundred-slice pizza. The pizza arrives, they open the box, and the first guy takes eighty slices. And if someone suggests, “Why don’t you just take seventy-nine slices?” that’s socialism!
I know, it’s just a TV show. But it does reinforce the stupid idea people have that rich people would love us, and share with us, if only they got to walk a mile in our cheap plastic shoes—but they’re the reason the shoe factory moved to China. We have this fantasy that our interests and the interests of the super-rich are the same. Like somehow the rich will eventually get so full that they’ll explode, and the candy will rain down on the rest of us. Like they’re some kind of piñata of benevolence. But here’s the thing about a piñata. It doesn’t open on its own. You have to beat it with a stick.
Forget Secret Millionaire; I have a better idea for a show. Every week, one of the men responsible for the global financial meltdown is dropped into a poor neighborhood, and . . . And that’s it. No cameras, we just leave him there. I call it I’m Alan Greenspan. Get Me out of Here.
—March 11, 2011
WART JESTER
New Rule: There doesn’t have to be an app for everything. Researchers are developing a cell-phone app they say will diagnose STDs on the spot. So while you’re downloading the Clash, you can get tested for the clap. Of course, the hard part isn’t making your lovers understand the importance of safe sex—it’s getting them to pee on your iPhone.
WEDDING SLASHERS
New Rule: If women stop making every movie about getting married, men will stop making every movie about killing you.
WEDGE ISSUE
New Rule: If you get to serve me a quarter-head of lettuce with dressing on it, which proves you could have made a salad but chose not to, then I get to pay you with an ATM receipt, which proves I have the money but you’re not getting any.
WEED THE PEOPLE
New Rule: Telling me the pot is stronger doesn’t scare me. The White House says that marijuana is stronger today than it’s ever been, and that’s why we need the crackdown, so we can return to the days when you needed to take ten hits to get high. This is what the drug war has come to. It’s a war on “good shit.” They’re telling parents, “This is not the marijuana you remember.” And I agree. But don’t we want the best for our children? To leave them with a world that’s better than the one we inherited? And that includes pot. So when you tell me today’s pot has a higher THC content than ever before, I don’t worry; I credit the American entrepreneur who made it. Against all odds, it’s morning in America again.
BARRY, WHITE
New Rule: If the Republicans’ idea of governing is just being against everything the president is for, then they have to change their name to the “I Know You Are, but What Am I?” party and nominate for 2012 a man who is the exact opposite of Obama. A fat, white, small-eared idiot who angers quickly, overreacts to everything, and can bowl 300, and who carries only one form of ID, his original birth certificate. A man so the antithesis of our current president that even his name is Barack Obama spelled backward. Say hello to the Republican Party’s 2012 presidential candidate, Karab Amabo.
Now, before I give you the details about Karab Amabo, please understand, I’m not making this premise up. This week the Republican Party did a one-eighty on Libya so hard it drove John Boehner’s tears back into his face. Totally ruining the leather. But let me tell you about Karab Amabo.
Amabo would be our first homeschooled president, and the first in his family to ever not graduate high school. After flunking out of bartending school, he spent years disorganizing communities, and wrote two books: a memoir, Dreams from My Food Court, and a policy book, Thinking Is for Dummies.
And what are his policies? Karab Amabo believes we should increase our dependency on foreign oil, and shrink the size of government until it performs only the most basic functions: killing Arabs, paying farmers to grow corn, and probing people at the airport. Karab Amabo believes abortion should be illegal, especially in the case of rape or incest, and he is so pro-life his slogan is “Life begins at erection.”
Karab Amabo pledges to repeal the job-killing health-care bill, and to implement Amabocare, a comprehensive program that gives uninsured people with preexisting conditions the opportunity to walk it off.
Temperamentally, Karab Amabo believes America has had enough of “no drama Obama” and his measured, Vulcan logic. At the first sign of crisis, Amabo will pray, scream, shit his pants, and fly Air Force One into a mountain.
And what of Amabo’s family? Karab Amabo’s wife is a sour, ashen midget whose flaccid arms are so weak she can barely do her job, operating the deep fryer at Jack in
the Box. The Amabos and their two sons go to church every four hours, and they have a meth lab where the White House garden used to be.
—March 25, 2011
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
X
X-MEN
New Rule: If the water in your river makes the male fish grow vaginas, stay thirsty, my friend. Ninety percent of Washington, D.C.’s drinking water comes from the Potomac, a river so polluted with hormones it makes fish change sex. If I wanted to drink something that makes me grow a vagina, I’d order a wine cooler.
