November 2, 2007 Send Bill Maher's New Rules to a Friend
New Rule: When you're supposed to be "taking off the gloves and really letting your opponent have it," don't get caught checking out her ass. [a series of photos of Obama checking out Hillary Clinton at the debate are shown]
New Rule: You can't claim to have seen a UFO and have the pointy Mr.Spock ears. [photo of Dennis Kucinich shown]
New Rule: Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas must be combined into one single super-holiday--called "Thankshallowistmas." That way, you only have to get together with your bat-shit family once. In a costume for candy, presents and a big turkey dinner. Then it's everybody into the den until you're drunken uncle calls your cousin a whore.
New Rule: You don't have to recall things that would make people sick anyway. General Mills has recalled five million Jeno's frozen pizzas because they might be contaminated with E. coli. Couldn't they just as easily say they're recalling five million strains of E. coli because they might be contaminated with Jeno's pizza? I mean, what's the difference? One gives you stomach cramps and diarrhea, and the other is E. coli!
New Rule: Waiters in Asian restaurants have to stop giving me attitude when I ask for a fork. It's not a hate crime, you know. Now, if you would please, I would like to get that food you just put in front of me into my stomach before it dawns on me what the f*ck it is.
And, finally, New Rule: If America's richest one-percent are now so rich that even a five-star hotel isn't good enough, it's time to bring back the guillotine.
Yes, what's being dubbed America's first "six-star" hotel has just opened in Miami Beach. How ritzy is it? Well, let's put it this way. J-Lo can afford to stay here, but her husband can't. At this hotel, when they ask if you'd like help with your bag, they're talking about your scrotum.
But, this is America, and we can afford it, along with $2-trillion wars and tax cuts. But, there's one thing we can't afford, and that's health care for sick kids.
So, the question I'm asking is, how did it all ever get so uneven? Warren Buffett asks that question. He's the third-richest man in the world, and a decent man. He points out how ridiculous it is that he - the third-richest man in the world - is taxed at 17.7%, while his secretary, who makes sixty grand a year, is taxed at 30%. Which brings up a very fundamental economic question: why is Warren Buffett paying his secretary only sixty grand a year? He's the third-richest man in the world!
But, you know, the days when a shop girl in the big city could support herself working a full 40-hour week, or a family of four could live off a single blue-collar breadwinner, are as bygone a fantasy as malt shops or heterosexual wizards. If you're living hand-to-mouth, and still buying into the con that the big threats to America are socialized medicine, Mexican immigrants and tax increases, then you're not being kept down by the rich. You're being kept down by you.
In America, it's not the haves and have-nots. It's the haves and the been-hads. If you, the citizen, deliberately vote for someone who won't give you health care over someone you will, you need to have your head examined. Except you can't afford to have your head examined.
Please remember that if you hear the new radio ad from Rudy Giuliani, who says his chances of surviving prostate cancer in America were 82%, whereas, in England, under "socialized medicine," his chances would have been 44%. Numbers that, like the cancer, were pulled directly out of Rudy's ass.
Now, I know socialized medicine sounds like Stalin himself is going to come over to your house and perform a forced sterilization. But, really all it is, is universal health care. Which means everybody - not just the rich - gets to see a doctor when their erection lasts longer than 72 hours.
And I just hope that one day, ten or fifteen years from now, one of Rush Limbaugh's "Ditto Heads" is going to wake up in his cell in debtors' prison - because that's where President Giuliani throws you when you can't pay your Visa bill - and he'll turn on the Fox Financial Channel, and as he watches some CEO gloat over his $200 million in stock options, he's going to suddenly realize that he's been had. And on that day, that man will begin the great middle class uprising of the 21st century.
Oh, no, he'll probably just switch over to "Pimp My Truck.
