by Bill Maher
New Rule: Anyone who whines about America losing its freedoms must watch any Jackass movie. This is a country where you can still Super Glue a midget to a fat guy and set off fireworks inside your ass. If that’s cramping your style, Tea Baggers, then move to Holland.
DOS ICKIES
New Rule: Stop calling bagpipes a musical instrument. They’re actually a Scottish Breathalyzer test. You blow into one end, and if the sound that comes out the other end doesn’t make you want to kill yourself—you’re not drunk enough.
DOUBLE DRIVEL
New Rule: Now that it’s been declared unconstitutional, we must change the name of the National Day of Prayer to the National When You Wish upon a Star Day. Seriously, what’s the difference? You know, other than that stars are real.
DREAMS FROM MY FODDER
New Rule: When a human cannonball dies, it’s not a tragedy. It’s a finale.
DRILL, MAYBE, DRILL
New Rule: Stop calling Sarah Palin a “babe.” Megan Fox is a babe. Sarah Palin is a pleasant-looking forty-six-year-old woman in mom jeans. Is this really all it takes to give America a hard-on? This . . .
. . . is the first lady of France. I repeat, this is the first lady of France. And we’re excited about some Pentecostal nitwit in an L.L.Bean parka?
DUDE AWAKENING
New Rule: Stop putting “Bro” in front of everything. Bromance, bro-down, brodak moment. Way to make shoe shopping with my friend Steve sound gay. Oh, and one way to tell your “bromance” has grown into a full-on gay relationship: When you’re giving each other “brojobs.”
DRUGSTORE COW
New Rule: Stop pretending your drugs are morally superior to my drugs because you get yours at a store. This week, they released the autopsy report on Anna Nicole Smith, and the cause of death was what I always thought it was: mad cow. No, it turns out she had nine different prescription drugs in her—which, in the medical field, is known as the “full Limbaugh.” They opened her up, and a Walgreens jumped out. Antidepressants, anti-anxiety pills, sleeping pills, sedatives, Valium, methadone—this woman was killed by her doctor, who is a glorified bartender. I’m not going to say his name, but only because (a) I don’t want to get sued, and (b) my back is killing me.
This month marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of a famous government report. I was sixteen in 1972, and I remember how excited we were when Nixon’s much ballyhooed National Commission on Drug Abuse came out and said pot should be legalized. It was a moment of great hope for common sense—and then, just like Bush did with the Iraq Study Group, Nixon took the report and threw it in the garbage, and from there the ’70s went right into disco and colored underpants.
This week in American Scientist, a magazine George Bush wouldn’t read if he got food poisoning in Mexico and it was the only thing he could reach from the toilet, described a study done in England that measured the lethality of various drugs, and found tobacco and alcohol far worse than pot, LSD, or Ecstasy—which pretty much mirrors my own experiments in this same area. The Beatles took LSD and wrote Sgt. Pepper—Anna Nicole Smith took legal drugs and couldn’t remember the number for nine-one-one.
I wish I had more time to go into the fact that the drug war has always been about keeping black men from voting by finding out what they’re addicted to and making it illegal—it’s a miracle our government hasn’t outlawed fat white women yet—but I leave with one request: Would someone please just make a bumper sticker that says, “I’m a stoner, and I vote.”
—March 30, 2007
E
CTRL+ALT+ELITE
New Rule: Now that liberals have taken back the word “liberal,” they also have to take back the word “elite.” By now you’ve heard the constant right-wing attacks on the “elite media,” and the “liberal elite.” Who may or may not be part of the “Washington elite.” A subset of the “East Coast elite.” Which is overly influenced by the “Hollywood elite.” So basically, unless you’re a shit-kicker from Kansas, you’re with the terrorists. If you played a drinking game where you did a shot every time Rush Limbaugh attacked someone for being “elite,” you’d be almost as wasted as Rush Limbaugh.
I don’t get it: In other fields—outside of government—elite is a good thing, like an elite fighting force. Tiger Woods is an elite golfer. If I need brain surgery, I’d like an elite doctor. But in politics, elite is bad—the elite aren’t down-to-earth and accessible like you and me and President Shit-for-Brains.
Which is fine, except that whenever there’s a Bush administration scandal, it always traces back to some incompetent political hack appointment, and you think to yourself, “Where are they getting these screwups from?” Well, now we know: from Pat Robertson. I’m not kidding. Take Monica Goodling, who before she resigned last week because she’s smack in the middle of the U.S. attorneys scandal, was the third-ranking official in the Justice Department of the United States. She’s thirty-three, and though she never even worked as a prosecutor, was tasked with overseeing the job performance of all ninety-three U.S. attorneys. How do you get to the top that fast? Harvard? Princeton? No, Goodling did her undergraduate work at Messiah College—you know, home of the “Fighting Christies”—and then went on to attend Pat Robertson’s law school.
Yes, Pat Robertson, the man who said the presence of gay people at Disney World would cause “earthquakes, tornadoes, and possibly a meteor,” has a law school. And what kid wouldn’t want to attend? It’s three years, and you have to read only one book. U.S. News & World Report, which does the definitive ranking of colleges, lists Regent as a tier-four school, which is the lowest score it gives. It’s not a hard school to get into. You have to renounce Satan and draw a pirate on a matchbook. This is for the people who couldn’t get into the University of Phoenix.
Now, would you care to guess how many graduates of this televangelist diploma mill work in the Bush administration? One hundred fifty. And you wonder why things are so messed up? We’re talking about a top Justice Department official who went to a college founded by a TV host. Would you send your daughter to Maury Povich U? And if you did, would you expect her to get a job at the White House? In two hundred years, we’ve gone from “we the people” to “up with people.” From the best and brightest to dumb and dumber. And where better to find people dumb enough to believe in George Bush than Pat Robertson’s law school? The problem here in America isn’t that the country is being run by elites. It’s that it’s being run by a bunch of hayseeds. And by the way, the lawyer Monica Goodling hired to keep her ass out of jail went to a real law school.
—April 13, 2007
EAU DE HUMANITY
New Rule: Celebrity colognes must actually smell like the celebrity. Tim McGraw’s new cologne is, quote, “a lush combination of lavender, amber, patchouli, and sandalwood.” While the actual Tim McGraw is a spicy combination of beef jerky, Pabst Blue Ribbon, and WD-40. And make way for the newest celebrity cologne: McCain . . .
. . . with its alluring combination of flop sweat, creamed corn, and Preparation H.
ENOUGH ALMIGHTY
New Rule: Since in a recent poll only fifteen percent of Americans said they believe in evolution, America must change its name to the United States of Jesus Christ. And our motto from “E Pluribus Unum” to “I’m with Stupid.” The good news for the nation? If we get any stupider about science, we’ll forget how to cook crystal meth.
EXXXON
New Rule: If I’m paying four bucks a gallon for gas, that TV in the pump has to show porn. This way, I’m not the only one at the pump taking it in the ass.
BIO-DEBATABLE
New Rule: From now on, Earth Day really must be a year-round thing. And in honor of this Earth Day, starting Monday, supermarket clerks must stop putting the big bottle of detergent with a handle on it in a plastic bag. I don’t mean to tell you how to do your job, but you see that handle you just lifted the detergent with? I can use that same handle to carry the detergent to my car. And stop putting my liquor in a smaller paper s
ack before you put it in the big paper sack with my other stuff. What, are you afraid my groceries will think less of me if they see I’ve been drinking? Trust me, the broccoli doesn’t care, and the condoms already know.
Here’s a quote from Albert Einstein: “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would have only four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.” Well, guess what? The bees are disappearing. In massive numbers. All around the world. And if you think I’m being alarmist and that “Oh, they’ll figure out some way to pollinate the plants . . .” No, they’ve tried. For a lot of what we eat, only bees work. And they’re not working. They’re gone. It’s called colony collapse disorder, when the hive’s inhabitants suddenly disappear, and all that’s left are a few queens and some immature workers—like when a party winds down at Elton John’s house.
But I think we’re the ones suffering from colony collapse disorder. Because although nobody really knows for sure what’s killing the bees, it’s not Al Qaeda, and it’s not God doing some of his Old Testament shtick, and it’s not Winnie-the-Pooh. It’s us. It could be from pesticides, or genetically modified food, or global warming, or the high-fructose corn syrup we started to feed them. Recently, it was discovered that bees won’t fly near cell phones—the electromagnetic signals they emit might screw up the bees’ navigation system, knocking them out of the sky. So thanks, bigmouth in line at Starbucks, you just killed us. It’s nature’s way of saying, “Can you hear me now?”
Recently I asked: If it solved global warming, would you give up the TV remote and go back to carting your ass over to the television set every time you wanted to change the channel? If it comes down to the cell phone vs. the bee, will we choose to literally blather ourselves to death?
Will we continue to tell ourselves that we don’t have to solve environmental problems—we can just adapt: build seawalls instead of stopping the ice caps from melting. Don’t save the creatures of the earth and oceans, just learn to eat the slime and jellyfish that nothing can kill, like Chinese restaurants are already doing.
Maybe you don’t need to talk on your cell phone all the time. Maybe you don’t need a bag when you buy a keychain. Americans throw out one hundred billion plastic bags a year, and they all take a thousand years to decompose. Your children’s children’s children will never know you, but they’ll know you once bought batteries at the 99 cent store, because the bag will still be caught in a tree. Except there won’t be any trees. Please educate someone about the birds and the bees, because without bees, humans become the canary in the coal mine, and we make bad canaries, because we’re already such sheep.
—April 20, 2007
F
FRENCH DISSING
New Rule: Conservatives have to stop rolling their eyes every time they hear the word “France.” Like just calling something French is the ultimate argument winner. As if to say, “What can you say about a country that was too stupid to get on board with our wonderfully conceived and brilliantly executed war in Iraq?” And yet an American politician could not survive if he uttered the simple, true statement “France has a better health-care system than we do, and we should steal it.” Because here, simply dismissing an idea as French passes for an argument. John Kerry? Couldn’t vote for him—he looked French. Yeah, as opposed to the other guy, who just looked stupid.
Last week, France had an election, and people over there approach an election differently. They vote. Eighty-five percent turned out. You couldn’t get eighty-five percent of Americans to get off the couch if there was an election between tits and bigger tits and they were giving out free samples.
Maybe the high turnout has something to do with the fact that the French candidates are never asked where they stand on evolution, prayer in school, abortion, stem cell research, or gay marriage. And if the candidate knows about a character in a book other than Jesus, it’s not a drawback. The electorate doesn’t vote for the guy they want to have a croissant with. Nor do they care about private lives: In the current race, Madame Royal has four kids, but she never got married. And she’s a socialist. In America, if a Democrat even thinks you’re calling him “liberal,” he grabs an orange vest and a rifle and heads into the woods to kill something.
Royal’s opponent is married, but they live apart and lead separate lives. And the people are okay with that, for the same reason they’re okay with nude beaches: because they’re not a nation of six-year-olds who scream and giggle if they see pee-pee parts. They have weird ideas about privacy. They think it should be private. In France, even mistresses have mistresses. To not have a lady on the side says to the voters, “I’m no good at multitasking.”
Like any country, France has its faults, like all that ridiculous accordion music—but their health care is the best in the industrialized world, as is their poverty rate. And they’re completely independent of Mid-East oil. And they’re the greenest country. And they’re not fat. They have public intellectuals in France. We have Dr. Phil. They invented sex during the day, lingerie, and the tongue. Can’t we admit we could learn something from them?
—May 4, 2007
FACE OFF
New Rule: Stop showing me pictures of celebrities I used to think were hot without makeup. If Christina Aguilera wanted us to see what she looks like first thing in the morning, she’d pass out faceup.
FAILURE TO LUNCH
New Rule: If you work in an office, you have to take a turn cleaning the office microwave. I opened ours the other day and a bat flew out. The inside looks like a Jackson Pollock painting. The three settings are now “cook,” “defrost,” and “hepatitis.” If you’re not going to clean the damn thing, at least take out whatever is growing in there so we can harvest the stem cells.
FAITH HEEL
New Rule: In the future, you don’t need to show us the picture of guys like Terry Jones. Once you tell us he’s an Evangelical pastor, he’s from Florida, and he wants to burn the Koran to send a message to them A-rabs . . . we’re pretty sure he looks like this.
FASHION OF THE CHRIST
New Rule: If you’re known for beating the mother of your child, you probably shouldn’t wear a wife-beater.
FASHION STATEMENT
New Rule: The president of Iran needs a makeover. You’re a nuclear power now; isn’t it time you dressed like it? You’ve got 160 centrifuges—and one suit. Forget enriching uranium, you need to enrich your wardrobe. You’re going to wipe Israel off the face of the earth looking like that? I don’t think so. You’re on Schindler’s Worst-Dressed List.
FEMINOSEY
New Rule: Stop trying to “fix” men. Scientists have developed a hormone-laced nasal spray that makes men more emotional and sensitive. It’s called Gaysonex. And the only side effects are dry mouth, a mild headache, and a slight tingling around your vagina. Ladies, what if we developed a drug that made you more horny and easy? I mean, besides vodka and Red Bull.
FENDER NEUTRAL
New Rule: Schools need bumper stickers for the kids who are never going to be honor students. Why punish the low achievers? How about bumper stickers that say . . .
FINGER BANG
New Rule: Stop criticizing the company that distributes Braille porn. Why shouldn’t the sightless enjoy porn? What, are they gonna go more blind?
FIRTH CONTROL
New Rule: Colin Firth has to admit that he’s not a human being but a robot designed by women as the perfect man. He’s handsome, charming, witty, he’s got that accent and a gay best friend . . . the only way he could be any better is if he ejaculated Häagen-Dazs.
FIRTH PRIZE
New Rule: If they’re going to make a historical epic, full of British actors, in period costumes, about Queen Elizabeth helping her father get over his speech impediment, why bother having the Oscars at all? You win. Unless someone in America is making a movie where Meryl Streep teaches Anne Frank to box, we give up.
FIZZ ED
New Rule: Guys,
you don’t need both Ed Hardy fashions and Ed Hardy booze. Either one alone is enough to make Snooki do you in the men’s room.
FIZZLE STICK
New Rule: Sorry, North Korea, it’s not an “intercontinental ballistic missile” unless it can get all the way to another continent. If all you ever hit is the ocean, what you’ve got is a torpedo.
FLICK OR TREAT
New Rule: Your list of scary movies to watch on Halloween has to include scary movies. The Birds isn’t scary. It’s ridiculous. The Blair Witch Project? That’s two hours of watching people get lost in the woods, followed by motion sickness. You want to see a real scary movie? Try Jesus Camp.