The New New Rules: A Funny Look at How Everybody but Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass (25 page)

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Authors: Bill Maher

Tags: #Humor, #Form, #Political, #General, #Topic, #Political Science, #Essays

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

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