The New New Rules: A Funny Look at How Everybody but Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass (31 page)

HAND SOLO

 

 

New Rule:
If you’re going to be the pathetic, laughing-stock center of a tawdry, lie-riddled sex scandal, at least get laid. Congratulations, Congressman Shinytits69: In a world of politicians doing everything from having babies with the maid, leaving their wives on their deathbeds, and hiking the Appalachian Trail, you’re guilty of the most humiliating indiscretion of all: You didn’t get any. Talk about Democrats being ineffectual! Edwards and Clinton banged butterfaces, and that’s embarrassing enough—but you came up with just . . . your hand. Your name shouldn’t even be Weiner, you don’t deserve it—Weiners are for closers—your name should be Anthony Hand.

At his press conference, Congressman Weiner was talking about his online flirtations, and at one point he ejaculated, “They are all adults, at least to the best of my knowledge.” Oh, Anthony, it’s the Internet. There’s no such thing as the best of your knowledge. You know that naked coed you’ve got on the line, the one with tits that just won’t quit? This is her:

 

How is talking to this guy online better than old-school whacking off? Say what you want about a box of Kleenex and the July
Playboy,
but when you finish, it doesn’t call Andrew Breitbart.

I guess I just don’t get the appeal of sexting, and phone sex, and all that cyber-jacking the kids are into these days when they’re not listening to their hippity-hop records. Call me old-fashioned, but when I have sex I like to have the other person in the room. I find that it helps create a feeling of intimacy.

People say, “Bill, don’t knock phone sex till you’ve tried it.” I’ve tried it. True, it was with a customer-service rep from the gas company, but still. I gave it a shot. And you know what? It’s not sex. It’s not even a little bit like sex. It’s just talking. Even during actual sex, talking is fairly superfluous. Saying “Do me, do me” when I am at that very moment doing you is neither helpful nor essential to the overall experience. And that’s all cybersex is: an annoying person saying “Do me, do me” while you’re a thousand miles away, trying to maintain an erection while the cat walks across the keyboard.

Thanks to you, Congressman Weiner, there is now a new low in what passes for a sex scandal—JFK got Marilyn Monroe. John Edwards got a love child. You got mail. Say what you will about Bill Clinton, but at least when he whipped out his dick on a woman, she didn’t have to wait for it to stop buffering.

 

 

—June 10, 2011

 

NO NEW TEXAS

 

 

New Rule:
If you think the Republican presidential candidates can’t possibly get any lamer, then you haven’t met the new Republican flavor of the month: Rick Perry. If you’re not familiar with Rick, he took over as governor of Texas from George W. Bush, who’s now referred to as “the smart one.” He carries a gun even when he’s jogging, he wears cowboy boots with a suit, and the boots say, “Come and take it,” which sounds kind of gay. And he threw such a tantrum when Obama won, he actually talked about Texas seceding from the union. Because that’s what America needs: a president of the United States who’s not really sold on the whole “United States” concept.

Rick Perry rented out a seventy-thousand-seat football stadium in Houston for something called The Response—which sounds like a home pregnancy test but actually is, to quote the governor, “a Christian prayer service to provide spiritual solutions to the many challenges we face as a nation.” Or, as stadium employees are calling it, Batshit Day. I guess the idea is to get together in a big group and pray all at once; that way, the signal is stronger and God doesn’t lose you when he’s going through a canyon.

But here on Planet Reality, may I point out that there are no such things as “spiritual solutions” to national problems. If that’s where we are as a country, if our official government policy is “Yee-haw, Jesus, take the wheel”—then we’re dead already. On his Jesuspalooza website, Perry writes, “There is hope for America. It lies in heaven, and we will find it on our knees,” and “Some problems are beyond our power to solve.” What? I thought we were the can-do people. And if Perry thinks only God can solve our problems, then why is he even
in
government? Why doesn’t he just stay at home and light a bunch of candles, like Sissy Spacek’s mom in
Carrie
?

Here’s an opposing view: Not only are our problems
not
“beyond our power to solve,” they’re actually fairly easy to solve. You have a giant budget deficit, like Perry has in Texas? Raise taxes. Federal tax revenues haven’t been this low since 1950—and
that,
plus two wars and a recession, is the reason we have a huge deficit. It’s not because God’s angry over the gay kissing on
Glee.
It doesn’t require prayer to solve it; it requires a calculator.

Politicians like to say, “We need new ideas.” Bullshit—“new ideas” is just a secular version of “spiritual solutions”—something that’s going to magically fix everything. What “new idea” is going to solve our health-care crisis? A magic pill that makes obese children crap out gold bricks? We don’t need “new ideas,” we need the balls to implement the ideas we already know work: cut corporate welfare, slash the defense budget, tax the rich, support the strong unions that created a middle class in the first place, build infrastructure, and take the profit out of health care.

By the way, Rick Perry isn’t just talking when he says “spiritual solutions.” Back in April, faced with a devastating drought, Rick did what any solutions-oriented twenty-first-century civil servant would do. He proclaimed a Day of Prayer for Rain. Because we’re ancient Mayans now. Of course, the drought only got worse. In the words of Sister Mary Ignatius, God answers all your prayers. And sometimes the answer is no.

 

 

—June 17, 2011