Among the Intellectualoids/Liberals: A Tribute
O'Rourke, P. J.
INTELLECTUALOIDS Liberals: A Tribute by P.J. O'Rourke My next book is a collection of articles about—if I may be excused for venturing upon a large theme—the battle against evil. Not that I meant...
...The search for victims of injustice to pester explains why liberals won't leave minorities alone...
...Liberals are vague about this, but it's probably white male taxpayers or the Iran-contra conspiracy...
...It's a kind of natural aristocracy, and the wonderful thing about this aristocracy is that you don't have to be brave, smart, strong, or even lucky to join it...
...Jeanne Kirkpatrick "Documents in splendid fashion a period of unprecedented intellectual arrogance and folly...
...They have a more innocent—not to say toddler-like--idea of freedom...
...But every iniquity documented in my book is traceable to bad thinking or bad government...
...Other malignities—drugs in America, famine in Africa, and everything in the Middle East—are more complex...
...When I say liberals I certainly don't mean open-handed or tolerant persons or even Big Government Democrats...
...711 "This is must reading...
...The liberal makes grim attempts to hold on to his youth—fussing with his hair, his wardrobe, his speech, and even his ideology in an attempt to retain the perfect solipsism of adolescence...
...I was just writing magazine pieces, trying to make a living, and evil is good copy...
...Liberals hate wealth because they hate all success...
...Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats...
...6 6 iL beral" is, of course, one of those fine English, words, like lady, gay, and welfare, that has been spoiled by special pleading...
...It was good to get that off my chest...
...What's the use of belonging to a self-selecting elite if there's a real elite around...
...The more victimized the better—the best victims being too ignorant and addled tochallenge their benefactors...
...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...
...Liberals are fond of victims and seek them wherever they go...
...Any rich man does more for society than all the jerks pasting VISUALJZF...
...What did surprise me, on rereading those articles, is how much of the evil was authored or abetted by liberals...
...And the Marine Corps does more to promote world peace than all the Ben & Jerry's ice cream ever made...
...Liberals don't like any form of individual achievement...
...Vann Woodward ANTI AMERICANISM Critiques at Home and Abroad, 1965-1990 PAUL HOLLANDER At better bookstores or call 1-800-451-7556 • OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS The American Spectator April 1992 49...
...By virtue of this superiority, the caring have a moral right to lead the nation...
...Men are freed from drudgery, women from exploitation...
...By loudly denouncing, all bad things—war and hunger and date rapeliberals testify to their own terrific goodness...
...The minority is always right," said that pesky liberal Ibsen...
...They hate success when it's achieved by other people, of course, but sometimes they even hate the success they achieve themselves...
...That liberals aren't enamored of real freedom may have something to do with responsibility—that cumbersome backpack which all free men have to lug on life's aerobic nature hike...
...People who are in fact just kindhearted are told that because they care they must be liberals, too...
...More important, they promote themselves to membership in a self-selecting elite of those who care deeply about such things...
...WORLD PEACE bumper stickers on their cars...
...You just have to be liberal.1 Kidnapping the moral high ground also serves to inflate liberal ranks...
...His is an infantile worldview...
...Iraq's invasion of Kuwait is a case of bad men doing wrong things for wicked reasons...
...Anyway, it's a book about evil: evil ends, evil means, evil effects and causes...
...And liberals have been vigorous cheerleaders for both...
...A devout Christian would sanction neither...
...With money comes power over the world...
...I mean, if Europeans didn't discover North America, how'd we all get here...
...In a compilation of modern journalism there's nothing surprising about that...
...Liberal self-obsession is manifested in large doses of quack psychoanalysis, crank spiritualism, insalubrious health fads, and helpless self-help seminars...
...Liberals want the, freedom to put anything into their mouths, to say bad words, and to expose their private parts in art museums...
...I don't let it bother me for one simple reason...
...He has a ridiculous and egotistical relationship with God, by turns denying He exists andhiding in His skirts...
...their sandal straps, bumping their heads on wind chimes—how much trouble could they cause, even in a full-blown cultural-diversity frenzy...
...Read it and understand better how modern man is divided against himself...
...Modern liberals are no poets, however, and are hardly satisfied with legislating in the unacknowledged manner...
...And in my new book there is at least one evil, involving the kill-happy Irish, that is being fought whether it exists or not...
...This essay is adapted with permission from his forthcoming book, Give War a Chance: Eyewitness Accounts of Mankind's Struggle Against Tyranny, Injustice and Alcohol-Free Beer, to be published in April by Atlantic Monthly Press...
...Even Castro and Kim 11 Sung know this to be nonsense...
...When doing battle against those evils, people sometimes have trouble deciding whom to shoot...
...A callous pragmatist might favor abortion and capital punishment...
...No one has ever had a fantasy about being tied to a bed and sexually ravished by someone dressed as a liberal...
...There...
...Also, wealth is, for most people, the only honest and likely path to liberty...
...Since we're not in control of ourselves, we are all vulnerable to victimization by whatever is in control...
...Liberals hate wealth, they say, on grounds of economic injustice—as though prosperity were a pizza, and if I have too many slices, you're left with nothing but a Domino's box to feed your family...
...It will have enduring value in the history of ideas...
...Businesses can be started, homes built, communities formed, religions practiced, educations pursued...
...Getting their toes caught in P J. O'Rourke is the author of Parliament of Whores...
...Now that I've had my say, however, you may be wondering—don't I sometimes get called a Nazi...
...Not that I meant to do anything so grand...
...People who care a lot are naturally superior to those of us who don't care any more than we have to...
...But it takes years of therapy to arrive at the liberal point of view...
...Irving Louis Horowitz "Careful, clear, and incisive...
...Here the liberal truly comes into his own...
...I have often been called a Nazi, and, although it is unfair, I don't let it bother me...
...Yes, name-calling, in which conservatives such as myself are so loath to indulge, is a favorite tactic of the liberals...
...And, when it comes to minorities, there is none greater—or, as it were, lesser—than that ultimate of all minorities, the self...
...At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child—miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic, and useless...
...That's $100,000 worth of education, charity, or 1It was that talented idiot Percy Bysshe Shelley who first posited this soggy oligarchy when he said, "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world...
...Now, liberals are people I had been accustomed to thinking of as daffy, not villainous...
...And if there has to be some, they prefer the kind that cannot be easily quantified—"the achievement of Winnie Mandela," for example...
...This is why animal rights is such an excellent liberal issue...
...I mean people who are excited that one percent of the profits from Ben & Jerry's ice cream goes to promote World Peace...
...This is the full-sized or standard pure-bred evil and is easily recognized even by moral neophytes...
...Liberals have invented whole college majors—psychology, sociology, women's studies—to prove that nothing is anybody's fault...
...The second item in the liberal creed, after self-righteousness, is unaccountability...
...But liberals aren't very interested in such real and material freedoms...
...The worst leech of a mergers-andacquisitions lawyer making $500,000 a year will, even if he cheats on his taxes, put $100,000 into the public coffers...
...I take on various types of evil...
...Not even a Democratic presidential candidate is as ignorant and addled as a dead laboratory rat...
...Either way—as God's special friend or as the highest form of sentient life on the planet—the liberal grows in self-importance...
...Some are simple...
...The liberal is continually angry, as only a self-important man can be, with his civilization, his culture, his country, and his folks back home...
...Marines...
...48 The American Spectator April 1992 U.S...
...The principal feature of contemporary American liberalism is sanctimoniousness...
...Edward 0. Wilson "For a full appreciation of home-grown varieties of anti-Americanism...nothing can equal Paul Hollander's account...
...Today's liberals love politics as much as they love disappearing rain forests, homelessness, and hate crimes, because politics is one more way to achieve power without merit or risk...
...There is nothing more mealy-mouthed, bullying, irresponsible, and victimized than a well-coddled self, especially if it belongs to a liberal...
Vol. 25 • April 1992 • No. 4
