The Allen Almanac

Some people have been talking about Bill Maher’s new rule for conservative think tanks:

A) You can’t call yourself a think tank if all your ideas are stupid. And B), if you’re someone from one of the think tanks that dreamed up the Iraq War, and who predicted that we’d be greeted as liberators, and that we wouldn’t need a lot of troops, and that Iraqi oil would pay for the war, that the WMD’s would be found, that the looting wasn’t problematic, and the mission was accomplished, that the insurgency was in its last throes, that things would get better after the people voted, after the government was formed, after we got Saddam, after we got his kids, after we got Zarqawi, and that the whole bloody mess wouldn’t turn into a civil war…you have to stop making predictions!

But I like his new rule for all of us about the Mark Foley scandal better:

New Rule: If you think the worst thing Congress doesn’t protect young people from is Mark Foley, then wake up and smell the burning planet. The - the ice caps are cracking, the coral reefs are bleaching, and our poisoned groundwater has turned spinach into a “side dish of mass destruction.” Read the labels on your food. It turns out the healthiest thing you can put in your body is Mark Foley’s penis.

But that’s America for you: a red herring culture, always scared by the wrong things. The fact is, there are a lot of creepy, middle-aged men out there lusting for your kids. They work for MTV, the pharmaceutical industry, McDonald’s, Marlboro, and K Street.

And recently, there’s been a rash of strangers making their way onto school campuses and targeting your children for death. They’re called military recruiters. More young Americans were crippled in Iraq last month than any month in the last two years. And the scandal is that Mark Foley wants to show them a good time before they go?

When will our closeted gay congressmen learn, our boys aren’t for pleasure, they’re for cannon fodder? Why aren’t Democrats and the media hammering away every day about who we’re supposed to be fighting for over there, and what the plan is? Yes, Mark Foley was wrong to ask teenagers how long their penis was. But at least someone on Capitol Hill was asking questions.

You know who else is grabbing your kids at too young an age? Merck, Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline. By convincing you that your kids are depressed, hyperactive or suffering from ADD. In the last decade, the number of children prescribed anti-psychotic drugs in America increased by over 400%. Which means either that our children are going insane-which we might look on as a problem-or more likely, we have, for profit, created a nation of little junkies.

So, stop with the righteous indignation about predators. This whole country is trying to get inside your kid’s pants, because that’s where he keeps his wallet.

I don’t care - I don’t care if Mark Foley had been asking boys to describe their penis because I have some sad news for you: your kid is so larded out on Cheetohs and YooHoo, he can’t even see his penis. So many of our kids are fat drug addicts nowadays, it’s almost as if Rush Limbaugh had puppies!

So we can pretend that the biggest threat to our children is some creep on the Internet, or we can admit it’s us. Because when your son can’t find France on a map, or touch his toes with his hands, or understand that the ads on TV are lying, including the one where the Marine turns into Lancelot-then the person fucking him…is you.