Posted 4/25/2012 05:51:00 PM by Douglas

P.J. O'Rourke just keeps getting better and better the older and drunker he gets. Enter this round of making fun of the adult man-child that sill wears shorts.

When I board an airplane these days, all the middle-aged men are dressed like me—when I was an 8-year-old. They’re in shorts and T-shirts. And it’s not just on airplanes. It’s in business offices, teachers’ lounges, and churches.

Yeah, there's really no reason for a grown man to dress like Dennis the Menace. His last line nails it:

And (we’re not getting younger) you can’t go to the grave wearing shorts and a T-shirt, either. The one place where a dress code reliably obtains is among morticians. You will be wearing a suit when you’re dead.

If your family and friends have never seen you in a suit before, there’s a chance that you’ll be mistaken for the funeral director. You really don’t want people leaning over your casket, asking, “How much is this costing us?”

Time to put on some big-boy pants!

Labels: P.J. O'Rourke

Posted 10/24/2010 12:45:00 PM by Douglas

P. J. O'Rourke doesn't like democrats. Turns out it's mostly mutual.

Do Democrats have a mad infatuation with the political system, an unhealthy obsession with an idealized body politic? Do they dream of capturing and ravishing representational democracy? Are they crazed stalkers of our constitutional republic?

No. It’s worse than that. Democrats aren’t just dateless dweebs clambering upon the Statue of Liberty carrying a wilted bouquet and trying to cop a feel. Theirs is a different kind of love story. Power, not politics, is what the Democrats love.

I'd like to agree with him if I thought the Republicans were any better. They're not. But I think he knows that.

Labels: P.J. O'Rourke

Posted 5/31/2010 01:17:00 PM by Douglas

P.J. O’Rourke, as usual is crazy. But he's hilarious in the suggestion to newspapers: the pre-obituary.

One bright idea isn’t going to solve the problems of the American newspaper industry, but it’s one bright idea more than the American newspaper industry has had in 40 years. What I propose is “Pre-Obituaries”—official notices that certain people aren’t dead yet accompanied by brief summaries of their lives indicating why we wish they were.

The main advantage of the Pre-Obit over the traditional obituary is the knowledge of reader and writer alike that the as-good-as-dead people are still around to have their feelings hurt.

Sounds good to me. I might buy a paper if it contained some of these suggestions:

Jimmy Carter is 85. We must hasten to throw the Camp David Accord in his face before he heads to his eternal camp-out with Anwar el-Sadat. Gore Vidal is 84. There’s no chance he’ll end up in the same place as Bill Buckley. We ought to take up Buckley’s gauntlet and slap Gore’s face here and now. Noam Chomsky is 81. Why should Satan have all the fun? We own pitchforks of fact aplenty with which to prod his living flesh. Norman Lear is 87 and will be married to Maude forever any minute now. (Although Lear may find himself forgiven. He never meant to make Archie Bunker a hero and a role model, but perhaps the road to heaven is paved with bad intentions.) Ed Asner is 80. Put him together with Ben Bradlee (88) and Alan J. Pakula, director of All the President’s Men (died in 1998, darn it), and you have the villains in the tragic tale of the American newspaper’s self-congratulatory ossification. Ross Perot also will be 80 soon. We owe him one Bill Clinton-sized philippic. Ralph Nader is 76. High time that someone, metaphorically, flipped him in a Corvair. And Paul Ehrlich is 78. In these days of the graying workforce, baby bust, and demographic decline, surely he needs a population bomb in his underpants.

But the opportunity missed when Sir Teddy passed last year is priceless:

And then there’s that missed opportunity of all opportunities, Ted Kennedy (1932-2009). One Pre-Obituary hardly would have done the job. Teddy left us with 50 years of unperformed dances upon his future grave. There was the death of his self-respect in 1962 when he was given his brother’s Senate seat the way a child is given a toy to keep him occupied on a long trip. There was the death of his conscience in 1969 when he killed Mary Jo Kopechne. There was the death of his political fortunes in 1980 when he couldn’t wrestle the presidential nomination from even Jimmy Carter. And there was the long, slow death of what little sense he had as he became the Grand Old Moron of the Senate.

Ha!

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Posted 5/12/2010 06:31:00 PM by Douglas

I don't care if it's from 1978, P.J. O'Rourke is still friggin' hilarious Thanks, long-time reader

I used to know this girl who weighed about eighty pounds and dressed in skirts that didn't even cover her underwear, when she wore any. I had this beat-up old Mercedes, and we were off someplace about fifty miles from nowhere on Christmas Eve in a horrible sleetstorm. The road was really a mess, all curves and big ditches, and I was blotto, and the car kept slipping off the pavement and sliding sideways. And just when I'd hit a big patch of glare ice and was frantically spinning the wheel trying to stay out of the oncoming traffic, she said, "I shaved my crotch today – wanna feel?"

That's really true. And then about half an hour later the head gasket blew up, and we had to spend I don't know how long in this dirtball motel although the girl walked all the way to the liquor store through about a mile of slush and got all kinds of wine and did weird stuff with the bottlenecks later. So it was sort of okay, except that the garage where I left the Mercedes burned down and I used the insurance money to buy a motorcycle.

But the most important part:

Nothing handles better than a rented car. You can go faster, turn corners sharper, and put the transmission into reverse while going forward at a higher rate of speed in a rented car than in any other kind. You can also park without looking, and can use the trunk as an ice chest. Another thing about a rented car is that it's an all-terrain vehicle. Mud, snow, water, woods – you can take a rented car anywhere. True, you can't always get it back – but that's not your problem, is it?

Drive it like it's rented! But if you don't?

It's hard to face the truth, but I suppose you yourself realize that if you'd had just a little more courage, just a little more strength of character, you could have been dead by now. No such luck.

Labels: P.J. O'Rourke

Posted 9/27/2009 01:43:00 PM by Douglas

P.J. O'Rourke reviews, hilariously as usual, a few crappy books about Woodstock and boomers continual practice of worshiping anything they can remember of it. I like this line about what "The 60s" actually were:

It was not, by the way, a decade: The sixties were a strange episode of about 80 months' duration that started when the Baby Boom had fully infested academia (roughly the 1966-67 school year) and came to a screeching halt in 1973 when conscription ended and herpes began.

Ah herpes. way to ruin the party for everyone.

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Posted 6/07/2009 04:31:00 PM by Douglas

P.J. O’Rourke, hilariously, on the death of the American automobile. Or more specifically, the love affair with the American automobile.

Four things greater than all things are,—Women and Horses and Power and War.

But what happened?

The car ceased to be object of desire and equipment for adventure and turned into office, rec room, communications hub, breakfast nook and recycling bin—a motorized cup holder.

Yep. $4 a gallon gas makes you feel bad about spinning the tires, but do you really want to anyway? The cart guys at Kroger look at you like you're an idiot. I especially like his take about how impossible new cars are to repair, and how damn naggy they are:

One might as well pry the back off an iPod as pop the hood on a contemporary motor vehicle. An aging shade-tree mechanic like myself stares aghast and sits back down in the shade. Or would if the car weren’t squawking at me like a rehearsal for divorce. You left the key in. You left the door open. You left the lights on. You left your dirty socks in the middle of the bedroom floor.

So we want boring, and Detroit is happy to ablige. The sadder part? Japan does it better, anyway:

And there’s the end of the American automobile industry. When it comes to dull, practical, ugly things that bore and annoy me, Japanese things cost less and the cup holders are more conveniently located.

I remember a Mercedes commercial from about 20 years ago: the whole point: "People don't get their pictures made with their toasters and washing machines." I wonder if people who drive Toyota Camry or Honda Civics get their pictures made with them? And why?

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Posted 4/29/2009 05:41:00 PM by Douglas

P.J. O'Rourke is consistently funny, even if he's not consistently right. Take his latest jab:

It's going to be hard to do a worse job running America than the Republicans did, but the Democrats can do it if anyone can.

The Left is the party of government activism - the party that says government can make you richer, smarter, slimmer, taller, and take a dozen strokes off your golf game.

The Right is the party that says government doesn't work. And then they get elected and prove it.

Were it only true. Were it only the case that the Republicans wanted less government. That's a nice sound-bite, but it's total horse shit. Then there's this:

America needed a Republican president. Because America has a Democratic congress. Republican president, Democratic congress - this means gridlock. I love gridlock.

The worst thing in politics is ''bipartisan consensus.'' Bipartisan consensus - that's like when my doctor and my lawyer agree with my wife that I need help.

Ha! Wait, what? A Republican White House and Congress under Bush changed virtually nothing about how the federal government redistributes people's money (their one true job). So honestly, what difference does it make? Can you make me laugh now?

When charming leftists stick their nose into things they don't understand they become ratchet-jawed purveyors of monkey-doodle and baked wind. They are piddlers upon merit, beggars at the door of accomplishment, thieves of livelihood, envy coddling tax lice applauding themselves for giving away other people's money.

Ok, I like that part. There's nothing compassionate about giving away someone else's money. But let's finish on a high note, P.J. How 'bout foreign policy?

So far, the best Obama has been able to do by way of an Iraq policy is to make what I think of as the ''high school sex promise:'' I'll pull out in time, honest, Honey.''

I love it. Does this mean Iraq is pregnant?

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Posted 11/10/2008 05:35:00 PM by Douglas

So the conservatives blew it. Let me be the first to day, "duh." But where was this article in 2002, P.J.?

Let us bend over and kiss our ass goodbye. Our 28-year conservative opportunity to fix the moral and practical boundaries of government is gone--gone with the bear market and the Bear Stearns and the bear that's headed off to do you-know-what in the woods on our philosophy.

An entire generation has been born, grown up, and had families of its own since Ronald Reagan was elected. And where is the world we promised these children of the Conservative Age? Where is this land of freedom and responsibility, knowledge, opportunity, accomplishment, honor, truth, trust, and one boring hour each week spent in itchy clothes at church, synagogue, or mosque? It lies in ruins at our feet, as well it might, since we ourselves kicked the shining city upon a hill into dust and rubble.

Well, it was your to lose, and it's lost. Bush's pathetic pandering to the middle cost the farm. But it's not too late to get it back, is it?

The free market is a bathroom scale. You may hate what you see when you step on the scale. "Jeeze, 230 pounds!" But you can't pass a law making yourself weigh 185. Liberals think you can. And voters--all the voters, right up to the tippy-top corner office of Goldman Sachs--think so too.

It's so over.

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Posted 9/30/2008 05:46:00 PM by Douglas

P.J. O'rourke deals with a little bit of the butt cancer:

God knows this stuff. He's God. He's all-knowing. What am I telling him, really? "Gosh, you sure are a good God. Good -- you own it. Plus you're infinitely wise, infinitely merciful, but ... look, everybody makes mistakes. A little cancer of the behind, it's not a big mistake. Not something that's going on your personal record. There's no reason it can't be, well ... reversed, is there?"

Even facing death, he's still pretty damn funny. But I'll echo this accord:

Thus, the next time I glimpse death ... well, I'm not going over and introducing myself. I'm not giving the grim reaper fist daps. But I'll remind myself to try, at least, to thank God for death. And then I'll thank God, with all my heart, for whiskey.

God bless whiskey, indeed.

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Posted 8/29/2008 05:17:00 PM by Douglas

God. Because you can't flunk out of Sunday School:

Let me resort to the usual practice of the ignoramus and give up on philosophical inquiry and just proclaim an opinion: Science requires more faith than God.

“But science can be proved,” a scientist would say. “The whole point of science is experimental proof.” Yet we non-scientists have to take that experimental proof on faith because we don’t know what the scientists are talking about. This makes science a matter of faith in men while religion, of course, is a matter of faith in God, and if you’ve got to choose …

Personally, I don’t think you do. Science and religion both assert the same thing: that the universe operates according to rules and that those rules can be discerned. Albeit this does make it easier to believe in God than, for instance, organic chemistry. Just the fact of rules implies a rule maker while just the fact of mixing nitro with glycerin and causing an explosion does not imply a Ph.D.

Ha! P.J.'s good for a laugh from time to time.

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Posted 6/08/2008 12:58:00 PM by Douglas

P.J. O'Rourke goes to the museum:

The museum is full of noisy children and their caregivers, blended families, and whatever else we're calling kith and kin these days. A long, mouse-maze, airport security-style line must be endured to get tickets. The sculpture of a Masai spearman facing off against a crouching lioness has been shunted to a lonely corner, lest someone somehow take offense. Nowadays offense is taken--snatched and grabbed--as if offense were something valuable to own. And given our umbrage-filled presidential campaign, maybe it is. The brontosaurus has been pushed to the back (that is to say the front) of the main hall and isn't called a brontosaurus anymore. (Doubtless offense was taken by Chicago's Bronto-American community.) Nor is the skeleton of this vast vegan any longer engaged in post-mortem mortal combat with the bones of a tyrannosaurus rex. Modern kids are too loving and caring about dinosaurs to be exposed to such scenes of domestic violence.

It gets better, but pretty much what you'd expect from the "all cultures are equivalent, just different" crowd. Now excuse me while I got eat some baby hearts.

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Posted 5/28/2005 05:03:00 PM by Douglas

P.J. O'Rourke can be funny, when he has to, and I think he may be on to something here with his idea of progressive taxation.

What is the least damaging way to tax the media and entertainment industry? The first response that comes to mind is "Who cares?"

And as that great Republican think tank, the Bible, puts it, "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world and lose" . . . the next election. An indirect tax is best, being proportional in its effects and producing "flat tax" outcomes. I propose a tax on raw materials.

You know what would make this even funnier? If you could be sure that he was joking.

Actually the resource upon which the media and entertainment industry depends is not fame but its toxic run-off, celebrity. America has vast proven reserves. I bought the May 23 issue of a magazine devoted to vulgar public notice. Its contents suggest that Sartre was ever so slightly misquoted on the nature of perdition: Hell is People. What have I ever done to deserve being exposed to Paris Hilton's Chihuahua, Tinkerbell, wearing four designer outfits? This was in a photo spread titled "Dogs Are Children Too!" Also featured was Tori Spelling's pug dressed as Little Orphan Annie and a quote from Oprah Winfrey about her cocker spaniel, Sophie: "I have a daughter."

Why the hell does Paris Hilton still have a job, and what the hell, exactly, is her job? Every time she does an appearance, she owes the standard $10,000 annoying tax. [$15,000 if her dog is dressed up.]

I suggest, therefore, a Celebrity Tax with a low-end base rate of, mmm, 100 percent. Furthermore, let's make the tax progressive to get some Democrats on board. (Probably not including Hillary, Ted, and Barney Frank. They'll be working nights and weekends to pay up.) Given the modest talent of current celebrities and the immodest example they set for impressionable youth, we'll call it a "Value Subtracted Tax," or, better, a "Family Value Subtracted Tax." And it will be calculated on the celebrity's net worth.

Family Value Subtracted Tax. Perfect. If only we could get Bill O'Reilly, Al Franken, Sean Hannity and Michael Moore to become subject to this tax, I think we could actually be on to something.

People (and by "people" I mean contestants on American Idol) are willing to invest all that they have in the faint hope they'll receive a fleeting and worthless moment as the center of attention for an audience of bored idiots. (If you doubt me, compel yourself to watch an episode, regrettably available on DVD and video, of Jackass.) Tax the media and entertainment industry at a million percent and it will continue to produce a surplus of celebrities with Stakhanovite labor heroism.

Boy, he's nailed the American Idol contestants right on the nose, didn't he? And I can't be mad at anyone that uses the Stakhanovite term in an article, but only because I know what it means.

Labels: P.J. O'Rourke

Posted 7/18/2002 10:13:00 PM by Douglas

I can't let this post from P.J. O'Rourke get by unnoticed:
The Liberty Manifesto
What a great concept, eh?
There are certainly things that the government can do better than the private sector, but. . .what a second. . .what is that again?
Seriously, there are things an effective government can do better, but the problem is the government has there hands in everything, so there's not many directions you can look and not find some ways to improve the system. But you're not going to solve those problems with more legislation.

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