The Squandering of the Conservative Opportunity

Of all the conservative thinkers, I've always prized PJ O'Rourke above all. For starters, he worked for National Lampoon, where he deftly and repeatedly inserted nuggets of conservative thinking tinged with vice into his humor and because he's stuck to those irascibly loveable guns ever since:


"Conservatives generally tend to be funnier in their private lives because of the hypocrisy factor. I am of course a big fan of hypocrisy, because hypocrites at least know the difference between right and wrong--at any rate, know enough to lie about what they're doing. Liberals are not nearly as hypocritical as conservatives, because they don't know the difference between right and wrong. In public policy liberals are always much more hilarious. Liberals are always proposing perfectly insane ideas, laws that will make everybody happy, laws that will make everything right, make us live forever, and all be rich. Conservatives are never that stupid."

In a Weekly Standard piece titled We Blew It, O'Rourke begins "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."

PJ O'Rourke is still the master so sit down, shut up and read him before its too late.