by Bill Maher
To me, this story isn’t about sports or sex or how necessary caller ID is—it’s about how pathetic and clueless white American males have become. Because the kind of guy who thinks there are women out there who just, cold, want to see your cock is the same kind of guy who thinks Sarah Palin is swell and tax cuts pay for themselves. I will explain that connection further, but first let’s just dwell for one more moment on how stupid it is to forget that in 2010 when you text someone a picture of your genitals, you’re not just sending it to that person but to every person on the planet who has access to the Internet. Somewhere right now there’s a tribesman in Samoa thinking, “Brett Favre is texting a picture of his dick to a woman? That shit never works.”
And he’s right—no woman in the history of mankind has ever wanted to see a picture of a penis. Go back to the earliest cave paintings. The very first one is of a cock, and after that they’re all antelopes and sunrises. But for some reason, men persist. Why? Because men have always been in charge, especially white men. Brett Favre is like a lot of white males: He’s owned the world for so long, he’s going a little crazy now that he doesn’t. Also, like many white men across the country, he lost his job to a Mexican.
If Brett Favre’s penis could talk, what would it say? Well, other than, “No photos, please,” I think it would say, “I’m not a witch. I’m you.” Because for hundreds of years, white penises were America. White penises founded America, they made the rules, and they called the shots in the workplace, in the home, and at the ballot box. But now the unthinkable is happening. White penises are becoming the minority: 2010 was the first year in which more minority babies were born in the U.S. than white babies. This is what conservatives are really upset about—that the president is black, and the secretary of state is a woman, and every shortstop is Latino, and every daytime talk-show host is lesbian, and suddenly this country is way off track and needs some serious “restoring.” If penises could cry—and I believe they can—then white penises are crying all over America.
And that’s where women like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann and Christine O’Donnell come in—the lovely MILFs of the new right. And their little secret is that their popularity comes exclusively from white men. Look at the polling: Minorities hate them, women hate them—only white men like them. I’m no psychiatrist, but I do own a couch, and my theory is that these women represent something those men miss dearly: the traditional idiot housewife. If an election between Obama and Sarah Palin were held today, and only white men could vote, Sarah Palin would be president.
Did you know that in 1788, when there were four million people in America, only thirty-nine thousand of them—the rich white men—got to vote? That doesn’t sound good to you? Well, what if I threw in a picture of my cock? Which brings me back to Brett Favre, and I think it’s worth noting that in one of the alleged photos of him, he’s pleasuring himself on a bed while wearing Crocs. And if you think about it, is there any better metaphor for the sad state of America today than an over-the-hill white guy lazily masturbating in plastic shoes?
—October 15, 2010
SODA JERKS
New Rule: As far as I’m concerned, Diet Cherry Chocolate Dr Pepper still doesn’t have enough shit going on. I need Caffeine-free Diet Cherry Chocolate Dr Pepper. No, I need Cool Ranch Extreme Caffeine-free Diet Cherry Chocolate Dr Pepper. Baked. And I want a sticker on it, telling kids that drugs are bad.
SQUAWK BLOCKER
New Rule: A dog is the only animal that can get you laid. No offense, parrot guy, but it’s just not gonna happen. When women see you, they’re not thinking, “I bet that guy is interesting,” they’re thinking, “That bird better not shit on my dress.”
SQUIRTIN’ CALL
New Rule: Science has given us the plastic ketchup bottle, the squeezable plastic ketchup bottle, and the upside-down squeezable plastic ketchup bottle. Now it must create the ketchup bottle that doesn’t make a sound like a fart. You’re a condiment, not a whoopee cushion. If I want rude noises from vegetables, I’ll go to a Tea Party rally.
STATUTORY JAPE
New Rule: Stop putting religious statues on the front lawn. Whoever said there are no virgins left in L.A. has never been to a Mexican neighborhood—there’s one in every front yard. At least my lawn jockey is tasteful. Besides, if I want to see the Virgin Mary, I’ll . . .
. . . order the grilled cheese.
STATUTORY TAPE
New Rule: From now on, duct tape must be called what it really is—murder tape. A search of the suspected Craigslist Killer’s home yielded a firearm, restraints, and duct tape, or, as we call that here in Hollywood, Phil Spector’s earthquake kit.
STICKER SCHLOCK
New Rule: Take those fake-bullet-hole decals off your car. Honky, please—this look doesn’t say, “I’m a moving target.” It says, “I shop at Target.”
STUBBLE TROUBLE
New Rule: If your razor has five blades, it’s not a razor. It’s a weed whacker. With the new Gillette Fusion razor, the first blade lifts the stubble. The second severs the hair follicle. The third slices your skin. The fourth scrapes bone marrow. And the fifth was used by O. J. Simpson to kill his wife, and he wants it back.
STUDENT BOOTY
New Rule: Stop saying that teenage boys who have sex with their hot blond teachers are “permanently damaged.” I have a better description of these kids: lucky bastards. I was once beat up after school, and believe me, I would gladly trade that pummeling for a session of oral sex with my French teacher—no matter how much his mustache tickled.
SUNDAY BLUNCH
New Rule: The Chinese community must explain why Chinese restaurants are never open for breakfast. There’s a billion of you. You can’t all be sleeping in. I’ll make you a deal: You tell me why you’re not open for breakfast and I’ll tell you how to get back on the freeway.
SUNNY AND SHARE
New Rule: Our friends on the East Coast have to forgive us when we laugh at them. Out here, a “rough winter” is when it rains during the Oscars. We don’t even need a weather segment on our local news. But we keep it as a jobs program for aging out-of-work actors and Latina girls with big tits.
SWEDE REVENGE
New Rule: Sweden must take a ten-year break from creepy detective novels. Just to replenish your stock of dead women. Your country is smaller than Ohio. You can’t all be sex murderers, sex-murder victims, politicians covering up sex murders, or alcoholic detectives haunted by childhood memories of sex murders. If you’re all dead or drunk, who’s gonna make the shitty furniture that breaks when you sit on it?
SWIGGER, PLEASE
New Rule: You don’t have to put the cap back on the bottled water after every sip. It’s water, not a genie.
MILLION MEH MARCH
New Rule: If you’re going to have a rally where hundreds of thousands of people show up, you may as well go ahead and make it about something. With all due respect to my friends Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, it seems to me that if you truly wanted to come down on the side of restoring sanity and reason, you’d side with the sane and the reasonable—and not try to pretend the insanity is equally distributed in both parties. Keith Olber-mann is right when he says he’s not the equivalent of Glenn Beck. One reports facts; the other one is very close to playing with his poop. And the big mistake of modern media has been this notion of balance for balance’s sake, that the left is just as violent and cruel as the right, that unions are just as powerful as corporations, that reverse racism is just as damaging as racism. There’s a difference between a mad man and a madman.
Now, getting more than two hundred thousand people to come to a liberal rally is a great achievement that gave me hope, and what I really loved about it was that it was twice the size of the Glenn Beck crowd on the Mall in August—although it weighed the same. But the message of the rally as I heard it was that if the media would just stop giving voice to the crazies on both sides, then maybe we could restore sanity. It was all nonpartisan, and urged cooper
ation with the moderates on the other side. Forgetting that Obama tried that, and found out there are no moderates on the other side.
When Jon announced his rally, he said that the national conversation is “dominated” by people on the right who believe Obama’s a socialist, and by people on the left who believe 9/11 was an inside job. But I can’t name any Democratic leaders who think 9/11 was an inside job. But Republican leaders who think Obama’s a socialist? All of them. McCain, Boehner, Cantor, Palin . . . all of them. It’s now official Republican dogma, like “Tax cuts pay for themselves” and “Gay men just haven’t met the right woman.”
As another example of both sides using overheated rhetoric, Jon cited the right equating Obama with Hitler, and the left calling Bush a war criminal. Except thinking Obama is like Hitler is utterly unfounded—but thinking Bush is a war criminal? That’s the opinion of Major General Anthony Taguba, who headed the Army’s investigation into Abu Ghraib.
Republicans keep staking out a position that is farther and farther right, and then demand Democrats meet them in the middle. Which now is not the middle anymore. That’s the reason health-care reform is so watered down—it’s Bob Dole’s old plan from 1994. Same thing with cap and trade—it was the first President Bush’s plan to deal with carbon emissions. Now the Republican plan for climate change is to claim it’s a hoax.
But it’s not—I know because I’ve lived in L.A. since ’83, and there’s been a change in the city: I can see it now. All of us who live out here have had that experience: “Oh, look, there’s a mountain there.” Governments, led by liberal Democrats, passed laws that changed the air I breathe. For the better. I’m for them, and not the party that is plotting to abolish the EPA. I don’t need to pretend both sides have a point here, and I don’t care what left or right commentators say about it, I care only what climate scientists say about it.
Two opposing sides don’t necessarily have two compelling arguments. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke on that mall in the capital, and he didn’t say, “Remember, folks, those southern sheriffs with the fire hoses and the German shepherds, they have a point, too.” No, he said, “I have a dream. They have a nightmare. This isn’t Team Edward and Team Jacob.”
Liberals, like the ones on that field, must stand up and be counted, and not pretend we’re as mean or greedy or shortsighted or just plain batshit as them. And if that’s too polarizing for you, and you still want to reach across the aisle and hold hands and sing with someone on the right, try church.
—November 5, 2010
T
TAMPACS
New Rule: Stop trying to scare me with your Mayan-calendar doomsday theories. I’m supposed to be terrified by counting the days on the Mayan calendar? Why? Is my Mayan girlfriend late for her Mayan period? If the Mayans could see the future, how come they couldn’t get away from Cortés?Besides, we have much scarier things to worry about in 2012:
TANGO AND BASH
New Rule: If you send more than one news van to cover Dancing with the Stars, then you have to change your name from Eyewitness News to Guess What, You Guys?
TAT PATROL
New Rule: Now that everyone has a tattoo, it will now be considered rebellious to not have a tattoo. Seriously. I think the Jonas Brothers have tattoos now. I’m sure Mitt Romney is all inked up. Betty White has one across her back that says “Fuck the Police”—that I know for a fact.
TEA Rx
New Rule: If conservatives can call it Obamacare, every time a family is forced to file for bankruptcy due to a medical misfortune, or a sick child is dropped by his insurance company, or a patient dies because she can’t afford surgery, we get to call it: “Tea Bagger Care.”
TEXT MESSAGE
New Rule: Stop worrying that crackpots are inserting their dogma into Texas schoolbooks. Sure, replacing Thomas Jefferson with Phyllis Schlafly is troubling, but it’s Texas. The only use Texans have for textbooks is to sit on them so they can get a better view of the football game. The last person to even notice Texas had schoolbooks was Lee Harvey Oswald.
THEATER NOT
New Rule: My friends who are actors must stop inviting me to their plays. The answer is no. I’m not busy, I just don’t want to see your play. In fact, it’s literally the very last thing in the world I want to do. If it becomes a movie, maybe I’ll see it then. Not at the theater. But if it gets to Netflix, sure. You know me, anything to support the arts.
THIN BLUE WHINE
New Rule: Police cars have too many lights. The car on Dragnet had one light. On Adam-12, two lights. These days, police cars have blinking lights, rotating lights, strobe lights . . . Car 54, Where Are You? Studio 54, Where Are You? I don’t know if I’m being arrested or invited to a rave.
THIN HIZZY
New Rule: If your home is built by Ikea, you’re safer in the box it came in. Ikea is going into the home-building business, which on the upside means you’ll be able to buy a five-bedroom house for $110. But when a hurricane hits, do you really want to be in a house made of corkboard and paper clips? Remember: Ikea is Swedish for “Where does this bolt go?”
TICKER SHOCK
New Rule: Stop calling what’s happening to the financial markets “an adjustment.” An adjustment is something you do in your sweatpants when your penis falls out of your underwear. This is “a clusterfuck.”
TOKE MACHINE
New Rule: Until pot is legalized, you can’t sell it in vending machines. There are three new medical marijuana machines in L.A., which goes against the natural order of getting high first and then buying shit from the vending machine. Call me old-fashioned, but if I’m going to break the law, I demand the full package, and that includes visiting a vaguely creepy dude named Skeet and wondering how long I have to “hang out” with him and his hollow-eyed husk of a girlfriend before I can take my weed and go.
GOODBYE, MR. CHIPS
New Rule: Someone in America must give me hope that this country can sacrifice anything to get anything done. I refer specifically to SunChips. You know SunChips—the corn-based snack you wolf down at the convenience store when you’re high? Well, this year, they came out with something really cool: a biodegradable bag that won’t contribute to the Texas-size swirls of plastic we now have in both the Atlantic and Pacific—and I couldn’t wait to reward them with my business. Except now I can’t. They stopped making this bag because there was a problem with it—it was loud. Like a porn star, it made a little too much noise when you stuck your hand in it. It crinkled in a disturbing fashion, like Keith Richards’s face.
It’s the sound of jackbooted eco-thugs taking away your inalienable right to be able to hear Ice Road Truckers perfectly while stuffing your face!
But unlike plastic, this bag would decompose into dirt instead of lying around for the next five hundred years to choke seagulls to death and destroy the ecosystem. Oh, sure, we could have made the ultimate sacrifice and, I don’t know, poured the chips into a bowl . . .
Side note: In Canada, SunChips is keeping the non-earth-raping bag, because they’re not a nation of crack babies, and they get it that sometimes you have to give up small things in order to make the world a better place. Except in America. Where “Have it your way” is the rule for everything, including volume on snacks. You think we’re going to reform Social Security?
There’s a lot of talk since the Republicans won the midterms that the adults are back in charge, having adult conversations about budget matters—for example, they say they want to keep the parts of the health-care bill that people like, and repeal the parts that people don’t like. Of course, it is the parts that people don’t like that pay for the parts they do like. Yes, isn’t it great to have the adults back in charge?
This is America. We don’t have adult discussions. We have Twitter. If you have a problem with the baby talk that serves as our national dialogue, move to Finland—because ultimately it is our fault, not the politicians’. They just do what we tell them to do. If you showed Mitt Romney a poll that said he
could win more votes if he became a woman named Mitteesha, he would get a weave and lop off his cock faster than you can say, “Is that thing sterilized?”
—November 12, 2010
TOMMY KNOCKER
New Rule: Since Tom DeLay has done only two things since leaving politics—Dancing with the Stars and now prison—somebody must tell him: There are easier ways to have sex with men.