In Weekly Standard, P.J. O’Rourke attempts to joke his way through the squandering of conservative opportunity. O’Rourke begins with the usual introductory paean to Ronald Reagan, asking what happened to the world he promised to the children of the Conservative Age, bemoaning lost dreams of freedom and responsibility, knowledge, opportunity and other such virtues he deems to be exclusively of the Conservative heritage. May I quote Mr. O’Rourke himself from his book Parliament of Whores: "Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work, and they get elected and prove it."
No mean feat, this mea culpa in the Weekly Standard -- though precious little genuine culpability is put into evidence. A gracious plenty of autoerotic self-flagellation is presented therein, for the Republicans were ever the Party of Kink, driven by the worst of all motivations, Masochistic Guilt combined with the delicious thrill of potential exposure. All the while O’Rourke delivers himself of dozens of clichés. Conspicuous by its absence is any mention of the moral failings inherent in situations such as the ginned-up WMD evidence, authorized torture, Guantanamo, the secret prisons, the no-bid contracts. Instead we are given a fan dance with perfunctory mention given to Moral Dimensions to Foreign Policy. I am put in mind of a lactose-intolerant lady who ate the forbidden fruits of cheesecake and now utters farts in the church sanctuary: profoundly ashamed and red-faced, yet somehow relieved of the growing pressure within her.
This is no mea culpa, nor even an accurate enumeration of Republican sins and shortcomings. O’Rourke says we can’t count that high, but there is no shortage of integers. O’Rourke is the skeevy lawyer who puts himself in the witness box. His essay, and the old lady’s farts, are not well-received by the parishioners at the Republican House of Worship, though they probably won’t revoke O’Rourke’s church membership. Humor is a scarce commodity among the Republicans: they can’t afford to fire him.
P.J. O’Rourke of Toledo Ohio, lately spending his time between homes in New Hampshire and Washington D.C. wishes to invoke the Ivory Tower of Hyde Park, comparing and contrasting Obama-ville to the South Side of Chicago. This is only the first of many embarrassing oversights: the entire essay is a dazzling solo performance worthy of the Cirque du Soleil, featuring Mr. O’Rourke leaping from one foot to the other, placing the other foot in his mouth, all the while propelling himself forward by kicking himself in the ass. Mr. O’Rourke should confine his witticisms to what he has seen: perhaps comparing the effete suburbs of Washington to the gritty realities of the District of Columbia, for the South Side of Chicago is beyond his ken. On the South Side of Chicago lie the white enclaves of Pullman, Stickney and Bridgeport, the ancestral home of Hizzoner da Mare: the Daley clan is all from Bridgeport. Of Pullman more will be said in time.
Mr. O’Rourke would have us believe Obama springs from the liberal bastions of Hyde Park. This is not true, but we must allow Mr. O’Rourke’s his petty caviling: he is a mere satirist, expectorating little gobbets of half-truths onto his monitor: the truth is not in him and honest research beyond him. O’Rourke conveniently overlooks Obama’s time in New York City. The truth bears telling, for it points to just how significant a lie O’Rourke has told.
After obtaining his B.A. degree at Columbia, Obama spent a year as a financial research assistant working for Business International Corporation (BIC), now a part of the intelligence wing of the Economist Group, they of the Economist magazine, still quaintly calling itself a newspaper. BIC was famous for its Round Tables, where American businesses would learn how to operate overseas. Within the Economist Group, BIC also compiled profiles and forecasts of various countries along with many other such reports. Obama also worked with the New York Public Interest Research Group, (NYPIRG). At NYPIRG, Obama learned the ropes of a college-based political organization. Obama worked with a campaign to improve the New York City subway system, particularly the poor condition of the station serving Community Colleges of New York at 137th Street. Obama learned his political tradecraft at BIC and NYPIRC in New York City, not in Hyde Park. Obama’s degree was in political science with an emphasis in international relations: NYC was his finishing school.
Mr. Obama next shrewdly chose the South Side of Chicago, as Mr. O’Rourke chose National Lampoon: the raw material for his best work was close at hand and like minds were on the stage. As the Harvard Lampoon had given birth to the National Lampoon, it drew in the likes of the then-drug-addled Mr. O’Rourke, along with the Whole Sick Crew including John Hughes and the late lamented Michael O’Donoghue, whose shoes Mr. O’Rourke is unworthy to polish, though I’m sure Mr. O’Donoghue would thoroughly enjoy being the spectacle of being exhumed so O’Rourke could do just that. Like attracts like, and Obama came to the heart of black political power, the Bronzeville of old, with his own agenda in mind. Obama had outgrown the college-sized NYPIRG, now he wanted something larger and found it in the Developing Communities Project (DCP).
In those days the South Side was in serious economic trouble if Hyde Park was not. DCP served eight Catholic parishes in Riverdale, Roseland and West Pullman. Obama worked his ass off, established a college prep program, job training for the laid-off workers and organized a tenant’s rights organization for one of Chicago’s most ill-run public housing projects, Altgeld Gardens. In three years, he’d taken DCP from a little parish outreach program to an organization with 13 employees and a budget of 400,000 USD. He continued community organizing with the Gamaliel Foundation, which had been founded to help black Americans buy houses on Chicago’s West Side, not the South Side. O’Rourke has it pitifully, damnably wrong: Obama’s focus was never Hyde Park: it was to the west, where things could be fixed, the land of Saul Alinsky and Back of the Yards.
What can we say to P. J. O’Rourke? You are only making excuses, dutifully repeating all you hear, shining it all up with a few bon mots like a gilt-wrapped dog egg for others to unwrap and dissect. A good history of the City of Chicago would serve you well Mr. O’Rourke, ere you make another mention of Hyde Park and its relation to the South Side. Nor are you the only writer to coin a good metaphor about Liberals: Saul Alinsky said quotes from Mao, Castro or Che Guevara are as germane to our highly technological, computerized society as a stagecoach on a jet runway at Kennedy airport.
Off to Harvard Law, where Obama truly excelled. Obama would return to Chicago each summer to intern at two of Chicago’s premiere law firms, Sidley and Austin, then Hopkins and Sutter. Thereafter, the University of Chicago recruited him to their faculty with many a fine perquisite. Still, Obama kept his hand in the community organizing game and his wife, who he’d met at Sidley and Austin did the same. Obama made handy with the movers and shakers of Illinois’ black constituency, deftly elbowing his way into the Illinois State Senate at the expense of the hapless Alice Palmer. Emil Jones would become his friend and mentor. All that community organizing on the South Side would pay off in spades, if I can be forgiven a pawky and somewhat racist witticism.
Mr. O’Rourke would warn us, like the third Spirit of Dickens’ Christmas Carol, of the South Side of Chicago metastasized all across the length and breadth of this land. Insert spooky music here. Wake up and smell the coffee, Mr. O’Rourke, pray tell us how your boyhood home of Toledo Ohio is doing these days. Is the Glass City striding boldly into the future with eighteen percent of its population existing below the poverty line? And what of that eight percent housing vacancy rate, has it improved in recent years? Even in hoity-toity Old Orchard, one of Toledo’s more upscale neighborhoods, the foreclosure signs are sprouting up from the once-manicured lawns. Pull your head out, Mr. O’Rourke: the disaster we Liberals foretold is already upon us all. You are a few years late to the disaster prediction party. Like those charlatans predicting the past, you would put on your wizard’s cap to tell us of what already is, pretending somehow you and your Conservative buddies over at Cato Institute weren’t part and parcel of the whole grim setup to this parlor trick. Perhaps you haven’t been home to the Buckeye State of late, flitting back and forth as you do, along the Right Coast of our fair land. A few best-selling books might have inured you to the effete viewpoint you so loudly despise. Do throw a few ducats from your carriage as you pass by, into the coffers of the Choice Food Pantry of Lucas County. Toledo needs your help.
Whatever may be said of Mr. O’Rourke’s philosophy, he is more accurately characterized as an effete Libertarian than a Conservative. He utters several heresies, chief among them telling the Republicans to lay off the Pro-Life Debate. This dooms his argument to hell, both literally and metaphorically, for the Libertarians have led the Republicans farther astray than any Bible Thumper. How he could presume to use the collective "we" and "our" to describe Conservatism is perhaps more of the droll parody which catapulted him to fame at National Lampoon. It is at best inadvertently funny, at worst a mockery of true Burke-ian Conservatism. The Republicans began as the anti-slavery party and abortion is the slavery debate of our times. Do not expect the Republicans to abandon the pro-life position, no matter how small their constituency becomes. Perhaps Mr. O’Rourke, ensconced comfortably in the psalmist’s Seat of the Scornful, might believe Republicans ought to pander to get back in power. Pander they have, and again pander yet well might, but on the issue of abortion they will not pander.
Do not worry your empty head about the threat of Collectivism in our times. Mr. O’Rourke. While you Conservatives remain out of power, the shortages will be divided among the peasants. In its own dull and insensate way, the American public has done what it always does when times get bad: it elects Democrats to clean up. I call it the Janitor Effect. After the wild cocaine-fuel’d extravagances of Reagan and Bush, we Democrats were summoned to tote out metric tons of champagne bottles, pick up the slimy condoms and clean the vomited-up sushi out of the shag carpets of those awful years.
I seem to recall Mr. O’Rourke writing something quite funny (it may have been Tony Hendra) back in his play Lemmings: "Power to the right people". Now O’Rourke abbreviates it to "Power to the right". It must be such an effort lugging around that gigantic ego, but like Hercules of old, who tricked Atlas into stealing the Golden Apple of the Hesperides. O’Rourke then hopes to trick us again, demanding we Democrats again set things to rights as we always do, shouldering the burden of the sky itself, all the while offering advice and warning to us as if it were now our obligation to undo the stupidity of the last eight years. No. We again inherit the messes you create, Conservatives, as we always did. Do not pretend you didn’t act like Conservatives while Bush was in power: you sound like those Trotsky-ites (from whose chancrous and syphilitic loins the Neocons were begotten) saying Stalin wasn’t a real Communist. You will stand aside and keep your Libertarian pie hole shut while the professional janitors scrub your encrusted filth from the furniture of the White House. We are the Right People for that job, and if we do not meet your elevated standards, well, we are just the janitors. Power to the Right People, indeed! Where do we plug in the wet-vac?
You Conservatives elected a moron, who appointed ideologues to power. No more Conservative president was ever elected than Bush43. As Colin Powell told you while he was yet Secretary of State: "you break it: you bought it". Don’t ask for a refund now, especially you Libertarians. The Free Market wasn’t quite free, was it? All that hooey about the Left not knowing what’s going on in this financial crisis, we knew all right. You weren’t listening. And don’t you try to demonize Wall Street as if it were some Pale Alligator of the Sewer System. Bush and Wall Street had a lovely little incestuous relationship going, feeding no-bid contracts into publicly traded firms.
Yes, it is good to see Mr. O’Rourke’s litany of Republican sins enumerated, but they are woefully incomplete. The Catholics make quite a big deal of Sin, but they make some useful distinctions. They sort out Material Sin from Formal Sin. The Catholic Encyclopedia tells us:
This distinction [between material and formal sin] is based upon the difference between the objective elements (object itself, circumstances) and the subjective (advertence to the sinfulness of the act). An action which, as a matter of fact, is contrary to the Divine law but is not known to be such by the agent constitutes a material sin; whereas formal sin is committed when the agent freely transgresses the law as shown him by his conscience, whether such law really exists or is only thought to exist by him who acts. Thus, a person who takes the property of another while believing it to be his own commits a material sin; but the sin would be formal if he took the property in the belief that it belonged to another, whether his belief were correct or not.
Mr. O’Rourke would have us believe Republican shortcomings over the last few years were merely material sins, mere deeds of exigency, done without the full weight of conscience and morality or the Doctrines of True Conservatism brought to bear on the problem, and not the Formal Sins they have committed. A hungry Everyman with no concept of Catholicism might stumble into a church, open the pyx, nibble up the Communion host and refresh himself with a glug of wine, then wash up in the font of holy water, wiping his hands on the chasuble, not knowing he was desecrating holy things. But the sins of the last eight years were committed with full knowledge of the prohibitions and consequences in mind. The great sin of the last eight years was the vile secrecy and pervasive culture of lies which emanated from the White House, culminating in the torture of innocent persons and the establishment of gulags all around the world. That sin Mr. O’Rourke does not address. Did not George W Bush tell us he was invading Iraq because they tortured prisoners?
Mr. O’Rourke famously wrote an essay called "On God" in which he said:
"Fear of God" is most often manifested today in the public’s alarm that religious zealots will try to destroy the world. Providentially, God has made the zealots as incapable of using reason, logic, and the other tools of science as I am. Religious zealots can’t blow up the world the way scientists can. The zealots must secure the faith of the scientists. But the scientists don’t know what the zealots are talking about. Is faith compatible with science? Not completely—and that’s a blessing.
The Conservative Bible-Thumping Zealots spelled out their Free Market / Deregulation objectives in 40 point Times Roman. They voted for Mr. Bush not once but twice, and the world’s economy is now destroyed. We Democrats are left to pick up the pieces. The zealots, it seems, have not only secured the faith of the scientists. They have also secured Mr. O’Rourke’s faith as well.