| February 20, 2004 | Send Bill Maher's New Rules to a Friend |
All right, New Rule number one: If a candidate is accused of having an affair he didn't have, he gets his next one free. John Kerry had to spend a week refuting yet another Matt Drudge sex fantasy. And for that, he deserves to have one completely unremarked-upon mini-affair with the kind of sad, frumpy campaign worker that passes for political groupies these days.
New Rule: Homosexuals must be ripped. As news reports cover gay couples lining up in San Francisco to get married, America has been forced to confront a real eye-opener: a gay person can be just as big a slob as a straight one. The video is shocking. There were gay couples with beer guts and nine-day-old stubble, wearing hockey jerseys. And I don't just mean the lesbians!
Hey, guys, I know you're new at this matrimony thing, but this is how it works. First, you get married, then you let yourself go.
New Rule: The Catholic Church needs to change its name to Toll House Cookies. A new study reveals the tally of Catholic priests who have been accused of molestation in the United States is approaching 5,000. Which means it's time to change the name and start over. That's what Philip Morris did when the name became synonymous with lung cancer. They became the good people at the Altria Company.
Kentucky Fried Chicken wanted you to forget the "fried" part and became KFC. So how about it, Roman Catholic Church? Or should I say, RCC?
New Rule: Sometimes, "sorry" just doesn't cut it. Pakistan says it's really, really sorry for selling nuclear secrets to anyone for cash and/or a thing for Allah. Well, that's nice, but when one of their customers turns Washington into a debris field, it'll be comforting to know Islamabad feels "Islama-terrible."
Now, I know putting loose nukes into play isn't a serious Muslim offense, like letting women wear pants, but here in the land of the Great Satan, it's the second-most horrifying thing we could imagine. [slide of Janet Jackson exposed at Super Bowl]
We'll get the timing on these pictures.
And finally, New Rule: No one has their shit together at 22. Now, outside of the basic fairness of placing George Bush in with all the other young men of his era who found a way to avoid Vietnam, I don't really care if our president showed up for all his National Guard jumping jacks in 1973. I don't care that there's evidence that John Kerry once very nearly met Jane Fonda.
We've all made mistakes when young and chasing a buzz. Bush blew off his calisthenics. Saddam gassed his own people. I bought the John and Yoko album where they just farted for an hour into a tape recorder!
The phrase, "youthful indiscretions" is redundant, because how many discreet young people do you know? No, the people you need to worry about are not the one who sowed their wild oats, but the ones who didn't. Michael Jackson had to wait until he was an adult to have a childhood, and I think we see how well that turned out.
Go back far enough in any great man's life and you will eventually get to the stuff he did or said before he was great or even a man. Don King started out life in Cleveland as a corrupt, murderous thug, but then - okay, bad example.
But the point remains, trying to define a person's current self by their past self is the worst kind of "gotcha." Our mistakes from the past are just that: mistakes. And they were necessary to make in order to become the wiser person we became.
You never got drunk and pissed yourself? Or sold drugs to school children? Or panicked when you couldn't get it up at a bachelor party and killed a hooker?
Hey, if only hindsight could come without having to mess up first. And believe me, I have the platform shoes to prove that one. But to exploit youthful mistakes for political gain is, well, let's just say, when you get older, you might look back and regret it.
All right. That's our show. Thank you to Jon Favreau, Debra Dickerson, D.L. Hughley, Senator George Allen, Representative Dennis Kucinich, and to you folks. Thank you very much! Have a good night!
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