{"id":80916,"date":"2022-02-16T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-02-16T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=80916"},"modified":"2022-02-15T20:03:55","modified_gmt":"2022-02-16T02:03:55","slug":"p-j-orourke-rip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=80916","title":{"rendered":"P. J. O’Rourke, RIP"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

P. J. O’Rourke died yesterday at the age of 74<\/a>. He was one of the best conservative pundits of the last 50 years and certainly the funniest. He also had a keen eye. In his 1990 classic Parliament of Whores<\/a>, he provided a spot-on synopsis of the people you meet at a protest rally. Tell me if these descriptions from 30+ years ago still don’t ring true:<\/p>\n

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World Council of Churches sensible-shoe types who have self-righteousness the way some people have bad breath<\/p>\n

Angry black poverty pests making a life and a living off the misfortunes of others<\/p>\n

Even angrier feminists doing their best to feminize poverty before the blacks use it all up<\/p>\n

Earnest neophyte Marxists, eyes glazed from dialectical epiphanies and hands grubby from littering the Mall with ill-Xeroxed tracts<\/p>\n

College bohos dressed in black to show how gloomy the world is when you’re a nineteen-year-old rich kid<\/p>\n

Young would-be hippies dressed exactly like old hippies used to dress (remarkable how behind the times the avant-garde has gotten)<\/p>\n

And some of those old hippies themselves, faded jeans straining beneath increasing paunches, hair still tied into a ponytail in the back but gone forever from the top<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

His powers of observation set him apart from other writers, especially those who tried their hand at satire. He understood his targets better than the targets understood themselves.<\/p>\n

As O’Rourke grew older, he softened the sharp edges and some of his thinking got a bit pear-shaped. He drew the ire of conservatives everywhere when he endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016. I was not a fan of Donald Trump either, but O’Rourke’s powers of observation betrayed him that time<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Dorothy and Toto\u2019s house fell on Hillary. I endorse her.<\/p>\n

Munchkins endorse her.<\/p>\n

Donald Trump is a flying monkey.<\/p>\n

Except what the flying monkeys have to say, \u201coreoreoreo,\u201d makes more sense than Trump\u2019s policy statements.<\/p>\n

Not that Hillary makes much sense either.<\/p>\n

Hillary is wrong about everything. She is to politics and statecraft what Pope Urban VIII and the Inquisition were to Galileo. She thinks the sun revolves around herself.<\/p>\n

But Trump Earth\u2122 is flat. We\u2019ll sail over the edge. Here be monsters.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

O’Rourke was wrong about that. Hillary is more of a monster in real life than anything O’Rourke could imagine over the edge. We’ll leave that aside. Where O’Rourke made his mark, and where his legacy will reside, is in being a proto-Mencken for our age. And let’s say it — his bon mots<\/em> were pretty bon<\/em>:<\/p>\n

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There are probably more fact-finding tours of Nicaragua right now than there are facts\u2014 the country has shortages of practically everything.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Or this:<\/p>\n

\n

The second item in the liberal creed, after self-righteousness, is unaccountability. Liberals have invented whole college majors\u2014 psychology, sociology, women’s studies\u2014 to prove that nothing is anybody’s fault. No one is fond of taking responsibility for his actions, but consider how much you’d have to hate free will to come up with a political platform that advocates killing unborn babies but not convicted murderers. A callous pragmatist might favor abortion and capital punishment. A devout Christian would sanction neither. But it takes years of therapy to arrive at the liberal view.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Or this:<\/p>\n

\n

Even the bad things are better than they used to be. Bad music, for instance, has gotten much briefer. Wagner’s Ring Cycle takes four days to perform while “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm” by the Crash Test Dummies lasts little more than three minutes.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But above all, this:<\/p>\n

\n

The American political system is like a gigantic Mexican Christmas fiesta. Each political party is a huge pi\u00f1ata \u2014 a papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 donkey, for example. The donkey is filled with full employment, low interest rates, affordable housing, comprehensive medical benefits, a balanced budget and other goodies. The American voter is blindfolded and given a stick. The voter then swings the stick wildly in every direction, trying to hit a political candidate on the head and knock some sense into the silly bastard.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

We all need our sticks and few wielded a more elegant brickbat than the Irish kid from Toledo. RIP,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

P. J. O’Rourke died yesterday at the age of 74. He was one of the best conservative pundits of the last 50 years and certainly the funniest. He also had a keen eye. In his 1990 classic Parliament of Whores, he provided a spot-on synopsis of the people you meet at a protest rally. Tell […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":358,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,58,19,434,368],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80916","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-universe-and-everything","category-humor","category-memoriam","category-mr-d","category-trump-derangement"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80916","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/358"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=80916"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80916\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":80920,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80916\/revisions\/80920"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=80916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=80916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=80916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}