A few pearls of wisdom for you

And if you've never watched Real Time with Bill Maher, I suggest you download it or something.



On the French:

"New rule: Conservatives have to stop rolling their eyes everytime they hear the word 'France.' Like just calling something 'French' is the ultimate argument winner. As if to say, 'what can you say about a country that was too stupid to get on board with our wonderfully conceived and brilliantly executed war in Iraq?' And yet, an American politician could not survive if he uttered the simple, true statement: France has a better health care system than we do, and we should steal it. Because here, simply dismissing an idea as 'French' passes for an argument. John Kerry? Couldn't vote for him, he looked French. Yeah, as opposed to the other guy, who just looked stupid.

Now last week France had an election, and people there approach an election differently -- THEY VOTE. 85% of them turned out. You couldn't get 85% of Americans to get off the couch if there was an election between tits and bigger tits and they were handing out free samples. Now maybe the high turnout has something to do with the fact that the French candidates are never asked about where they stand on evolution, prayer in school, abortion, stem cell research, or gay marriage. And if the candidate knows about a character in a book other than Jesus, it's not a drawback. The electorate doesn't vote for the guy they wanna have a croissant with, nor do they care about private lives.

In the current race, Segolene Royale has four kids but she never got married. And she's a Socialist. In America, if a Democrat even thinks you're calling him a liberal, he grabs an orange vest and a rifle and heads into the woods to kill something. Mme. Royale's opponent is married but they live separately and lead separate lives. And the people are okay with that for the same reason they're okay with nude beaches -- because they're not a nation of six year olds who scream and giggle if they see pee pee parts!

They have weird ideas about privacy. They think it should be private. In France, even the mistresses have mistresses. To not have a lady on the side says to the voters, 'I'm not good at multitasking.'

Now like any country, France has its faults, like all of that ridiculous accordion music. But their health care is the best in the industrialized world, as is their poverty rate. And they're completely independent of Mid-East oil. And they're the greenest country, and they're not fat. And they have public intellectuals in France. We have Dr. Phil. They invented sex during the day, lingerie, and the tongue. Can't we admit we could learn something from them?

So, from now on, all you high-ranking Bush administration officials, because the French are righter than you on some things, when France comes up in conversation you are not allowed to roll your eyes. The only time you get to do that is when your hooker from Ms. Julia's is blowing you."

On George Bush:

"And finally, new rule. Jimmy Carter must be shipped off to Guantanamo Bay. Last weekend, former US president and current Al Qaeda operative Jimmy Carter launched an unprovoked attack on democracy itself by telling an Arkansas newspaper that the Bush administration has been the worst in history, and people were shocked. Arkansas has newspapers?

But once again, we were sucked into a phony controversy about who said what and how it hurts George Bush's feelings. Cuz when you hurt George Bush, you hurt America's feelings, and when you hurt America's feelings, you hurt the troops. And when that happens, Tinker Bell's light goes out and she dies.

Now as for Carter's assertion, I was up all night on Wikipedia doing an exhaustive search on former presidents and, while other presidents have sucked, Bush is like a smorgasbord of suck. He combines the corruption of Warren G. Harding, the warmongering of James Polk, and the abusive power of Richard Nixon.

Nixon got in trouble for illegally wiretapping Democratic headquarters -- Bush is illegally wiretapping the entire country. Nixon opened up relations with the Chinese -- Bush let them poison your dog. Herbert Hoover, who was literally named after a machine that sucks, sat on his ass through four years of the depression. But he was an actual engineer, and if someone had told him about global warming, he would've understood it before the penguins caught on fire. Ulysses S. Grant let his cronies loot the Republic, but he won his Civil War. Harding sucked, but he once said, 'I am not fit for the office, and never should have been here.' So at least he knew he sucked.

He never walked off stage like Bush does, after one of his embarrassing, language-mangling press conferences, with that smirk on his face like, 'nailed it!' Or maybe that's just the look you get when you have a showdown with the Democrats and you win, like he just did with Iraq. You don't get to be the worst president ever without a little help from the other side.

You know I like Jimmy Carter, but when the Republican fake-outrage machine pretended to be so upset at his remarks, Carter did what Democrats do and he backed down. He said his words were careless and misquoted, and the sun was in his eyes and his hearing aid went out, and he was molested by a clergyman. Instead of looking them in the eye and saying, 'no! I meant what I said because it was true. And speaking as the first citizen of Habitat for Humanity, let me take out my Jimmy Carter tool box and build you a house where we can meet and you can BLOW ME'."