| August 6, 2004 | Send Bill Maher's New Rules to a Friend |
It is time for this week's New Rules, ladies and gentlemen.
All right, New Rule: You can't call your show "Wife Swap" unless the other guy really gets to bang your wife. I didn't sign up for an hour of watching mom do some other family's laundry.
Speaking of wives, New Rule: Whenever a woman is missing, arrest her husband. Especially if he looks like this. [photo of Lori Hacker's husband Mark] No, that's not a mug shot, it's his wedding photo. Who else would want her dead? She's a housewife in Salt Lake City. She didn't double-cross the Medellin cartel in a coke deal.
New Rule: Hurricane's names should be scary. It's bad enough we can't name hurricanes after women anymore because it's sexist, now they're all getting WASP-y names like "Alex." Which is the least effective approach because hurricanes hit the South. And can you imagine how fast the Carolinas would evacuate if they announced that Ludacris was headed their way?
New Rule: Put on a shirt. [image of Time Magazine cover] You're a news magazine, not Blue Boy. This guy has got such a package on him, I had to sign for it. I haven't had anything this gay in my house since Jm J. Bullock crashed my Christmas party.
New Rule: You can't write your own obituary. There's a hot new trend now: writing your own death notice before you die. It's a nice new way of saying, "I may be dead, but I can still monopolize the conversation." Hey, you're dead. Worms are eating you. Let someone else talk.
And finally, New Rule: You can make fun of Lynndie England all you want, but when it comes to prisons, we are all holding the leash. Now this week, America's anti-Sweetheart, Private Lynndie England, faced justice for her part in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Or as Rush Limbaugh calls it, "The Sleepover." Now, a lot of people think Abu Ghraib happened because, as Americans, we're comfortable asking our horny hillbillies to fight our wars. And we are. But we're also comfortable with pretending that anyone in America who winds up in prison for whatever reason somehow deserves not just loss of freedom but a brutalizing, terrifying trip to hell.
It's no coincidence that the guard described as the ringleader in Iraq, Charles Graner, worked before the war - where? - in a prison in America. He didn't learn to torture from the CIA or Special Ops. He picked it up right here and took his skills of abuse to Iraq. Outsourcing at its worst!
Now, we are all Lynndie England because we know what's happening in our prisons and we don't care. We tell ourselves - we tell ourselves the convenient lie that anyone who bears the label "criminal" or "terrorist" is irredeemable, sub-human, psycho scum, and so whatever happens to them behind bars is justified. When the truth is, millions of non-violent Americans have been traumatized for life in prisons simply because they either did drugs or made a bad judgment, usually when they were young, stupid and drunk. You'd think President Bush could relate.
There are over two million Americans behind bars, and that is not including the people who work at Wal-Mart. America, the nation that always has to be number one, is number one in percentage of its citizens in jail. Two million people. The equivalent of locking up all of Miami, which is not a bad idea until at least the election is over.
It costs $40 billion to house this many prisoners. Do you know how many countries that had nothing to do with 9/11 we could attack for that kind of money?
So, in conclusion, if your response to this is "not my problem," remember this: there are monsters and animals in our prisons, yes. But most didn't go in that way. But that's how they'll come out. Or to put it another way, if you think Martha Stewart has an attitude now...
Thank you very much, everybody. Terrific job. Terrific panel. That is our show. My thanks to Kay Granger, Nina Easton, Bob Barr, Cokie Roberts and Steve Harvey. See you next week, folks. Thank you.