Why the GOP Does Not, Like, Totally Suck
O'Rourke, P J.
Why the GOP Does Not, Like, Totally Suck Mr. and Mrs. American Spectator Reader, let P.J. O'Rourke talk sense to your kids. by P.J. O'Rourke D o you have a mopey young person in your family?...
...Speaking of which, now that Rose is dead, Ted Kennedy is technically an orphan...
...The destruction I adore...
...Get the child's attention (extra latte helps...
...But these guys in the lime green pants hammering at bean bags with Ping three woods don't really care about global issues, much less social justice...
...I cannot see a school crossing guard without wishing for a grisly hit-and-run...
...Not like the Democrats, always claiming to be the spiritual scions of Mahatma Gandhi...
...The GOP majority in Congress is going to spend most of its time tinkering with the New Blonde Wife Act of 1995...
...And when I'm sent back through an airport metal detector, I scream that I have a steel plate in my head...
...Subsidized Dramatist, can't your characters die of something besides AIDS...
...Woefully imperiled are all the accomplishments of the Clinton administration, such as...
...Well, of course, politicians can't actually give that money to poor people...
...Teachers liked them...
...What did they do to deserve them...
...Remember how Rover would run up and jam his nose into your .. . You need a government program...
...Parents liked them...
...Because people are trying to do horrible things to you all the time, like the big food companies that put poison in your food so that you'll never buy food from any competing big food companies...
...Therapy can help...
...22 The American Spectator May 1995 T his is why it's so important for big government to get bigger...
...Republican congressmen are going to want to make some positive contributions to our political system, and you may not feel too positive about that...
...GM knows you can't go to a Ford showroom if you're a paraplegic and brain dead...
...And heartless welfare reformers will soon be erecting grim, drafty orphanages all over the country...
...But you only care about things like high-tension power lines when they're causing childhood cancers in your neighborhood...
...Clip this article and hand it to your child...
...I rail against God because I was told to stop eating paste in Sunday school class...
...I know, I'm one of them...
...And the rest of its energy will be devoted to giving Dutch rubs and (those insensitive Republicans) Indian rope burns to the enormous system of government that has been created over the past sixty years by the good people in authority who do care...
...You may have a larva or pupa stage Democrat in your home...
...Democrats just for starters...
...A Clip this article and hand it to your child...
...They have to make rules and regulations or you'd screw up everything...
...nice, rich family, will be when it turns 30...
...So politicians have to take even more tence on children learning to read that has the National Education Association so upset, I'm not sure...
...But there's no such thing as politicians who can mind their own business...
...Which brings me to the subject of government...
...Call Earth...
...20 The American Spectator May 1995 enlisted P. J. O'Rourke to have a word with the youngsters...
...CI The American Spectator May 1995 23...
...I hear thoughtful, progressive, sensitive hissy noises in the audience...
...Is this "slacker" lying on your couch all day listening to Hootie and the Blowfish CDs...
...Plus, you know where you stand with Republicans...
...And because we're better people than you are we have the right—no, the duty—to tell you what to do...
...And, if you need money in the meantime, the government can print some for you because one of those good-paying government jobs is running the mint...
...Get diseases from foreign women who despise you in their hearts...
...Of course I'm Republican...
...Man, I went out and bought a three-foot barrel hoop and got one whole butt cheek pierced...
...Telling you what to do being the entire idea of big government, with its agencies, experts, courts, laws, regulatory codes, and powers of taxation to fund health care reform so that if I have a traffic accident while trying to run over school crossing guards you pay my doctor bills...
...Big government means there are always plenty of judges and juries available...
...Tell them that's where all the golf ball trees grow...
...A victim of prejudice against racial minorities...
...If we want to prevent childhood cancers caused by high-tension power lines, we have to quit our jobs, go back to school and earn degrees in medicine, biochemistry, physics, and electrical engineering...
...We assumed you were too hip to be Republican...
...They think you're a moron...
...And some Republicans want children to read a prayer before school...
...The Department of Education doesn't have a prayer...
...How about a sword fight once in a while...
...Just look at all those smug white people with the good-paying government jobs...
...The National Endowment for the Arts is threatened...
...We don't have that many ideas...
...Yeah, hip, that's me...
...All right, I sympathize...
...What bothers me is how the terrible government things are always for the greater common good...
...Mom...
...For instance, you can't find a good-paying job...
...Also talking on C-Span, listening to Rush Limbaugh, and signing enormous book deals...
...So it can help you...
...In you go, Teddy...
...And a large welfare bureaucracy to make sure they stay in the housing projects and don't get out and start wandering around the parts of town where politicians live...
...In Washington, the Republicans are (in their wingtip-hobbled, suspender-entangled, Old Spice–befogged way) trying to destroy big government...
...G overnments do terrible things...
...The thing I like about Republicans is that they're no damn good at all...
...And you're a victim.of what you earn and give it to poor people...
...And, if they do, we have to remove all the high-tension power lines and convince 250 million people to light their homes with the little candles left over from the last big birthday cake the kid got before he died...
...And the nose ring—is negotiating a temporary removal for grandma's visit going to require the intervention of Jimmy Carter...
...I guess good people are just naturally attracted to government...
...Plus you're disabled...
...Public broadcasting is also at risk...
...Did you receive the following reaction...
...We care so much we can't sleep...
...Cleaning my room, an exile to the mines of Siberia...
...All a politician has to do is care...
...Senate-less, too...
...Poor people don't really need money anyway...
...It explains in language that young people can understand what's happening in Washington now that Republicans have won control of Congress, and why those Republicans are a good thing, even for people with tongue studs and facial tattoos...
...You're too selfish to help the poor...
...The politicians need to get that money away from you...
...No woman is safe from dinner table conversations about unfunded mandates...
...There are certain Republicans who would like to get rid of immigrants (these Republicans being under the impression that Pat Buchanan is a Cherokee name...
...I'll sue you under the Americans with Disabilities Act...
...You remember them from high school—the Senior Class President, the Sophomore Class Secretary, the Chairgirl of the Junior Prom Decorations and Refreshments Committee...
...Better let the government look after your cash...
...And you need help, too...
...Republicans are cheaper...
...The Republicans want to do away with whole sections of government...
...House-less, anyway...
...Communists, Nazis, and more than a few democratically elected leaders of the free world have told us in plain language that their loathsome acts were justified by felicific calculus—the most good for the greatest number...
...Or trying to get an NEA grant to write a film script about all of the above...
...They'll save the rain forest if they have to...
...And the people who control that big government, the people who care so much, really are better than the rest of us...
...Numerous congressional committees have already been eliminated, causing a severe business downturn in America's snoozing, doodling, and yawn-suppression industries...
...You'll be busted to the lowest rank of the Airport Security Service and made to sit in front of a PA system microphone all day endlessly repeating, 'The space by the curb is for immediate loading and unloading only!'" I spit on dominion and control...
...I always did...
...Democrats have lots of them...
...So do all the earth's animals...
...Who knows...
...But there is one shred of beatnikery to which I cling...
...My every bedtime was a Bataan Death March...
...You just buy Newman's Own salad dressing, give some money to PETA, wear a red ribbon on your bridesmaid's dress at your sister's wedding, and applaud for Barbra Streisand, and you think you've done your bit...
...Then we have to do years of research to determine whether or not high-tension power lines actually cause cancer...
...Where I come from even the circus clowns dress all in black, and the only reason a dozen of them get in that little car is to show kids how miserably cramped life is for veal calves...
...It's all coming back now...
...Does he or she possess an all-ebony wardrobe, have a lop-sided haircut, and know what "latte" is...
...is the International Affairs Desk Chief at the with-it and trendy Rolling Stone magazine...
...I still detest authority...
...That's just one way the government can help...
...Underprivileged children may be deprived of "All Things Considered...
...You must know that the politicians loathe you...
...They'd better do something about the Amazon or they'll be teeing off with their kids' hackysacks...
...You'd fall right out of the car if it weren't for seatbelt laws...
...Now say, "Newt Gingrich...
...Alas, you betcha...
...theatrical sigh] It's like . . . [eyes roll toward ceiling] Oh, man . . . " Yes, a conservative tide is rising all across the political landscape of America, but some members of "Generation X" have climbed onto the outhouse roof of intellectualism and managed to keep their Doc Martens dry...
...Hunter S. Thompson personally...
...If Republicans have their way, poor people in crime-ridden neighborhoods will no longer be given squalid housing, they'll have to buy it...
...Men risk having their taxes slashed in broad daylight...
...They might even get promoted to manager of Kinko's copy center...
...And one more extremely important thing about Republicans...
...The activists, the advocates of worthy causes, the idealistic leaders, the self-sacrificing organizers—all the good people—care even more than you enlightened youth...
...You see, it's hard for us not-so-good people to accomplish things...
...I'm hip from Hip Street and it gets hipper as you go along and my pad is in the last crib, Daddy-O...
...We can't eat...
...And if Republicans notice that their oceanfront property is allocean and no front, they'll pass a law against polar ice cap melting in a minute...
...Amazing how well-meaning, how virtuous, how good the people in authority always are...
...We leave you alone...
...Sure you care...
...I'm a 47-year-old middle-class male with a job...
...Navel ring...
...We care about high-tension power lines in places that don't even have electricity...
...And housing projects...
...It could change their lives...
...They say, "Oh, you...
...It explains in language that young people can understand what's happening in Washington now that Republicans have won control of Congress and why those Republicans—schmucks that they are—are a good thing, even for people with tongue studs and facial tattoos...
...You may not know it...
...Ha, ha, a little Christian Coalition joke...
...And so does Rover...
...Censorship, genocide, the Volstead Act, wholesale expropriations of private property, segregation, religious persecution, mass deportations, and vaporizing Nagasaki have all been "for the good of the nation," "good for mankind," "good for us in the long run," "good for future generations...
...And I would be too, except I am one...
...And fund educational TV...
...He knows Dr...
...These pay well...
...We're against gun control...
...I do terrible things myself...
...You didn't see Michael Milken going to jail for not selling junk bonds...
...The Republicans I like okay...
...See here, Mr...
...You'd spend it on fatty foods and cigarettes or a power boat that would harm the environment...
...But that's about it in the way of Republican innovations...
...And .. . whack . . . mind the nuns...
...Why, you could take one of those kids—pry his sucker-like mouth off the career counselor's behind—and, heck, make him President of the United States...
...They weren't like some kids I could name, keeping the car out till all hours looking for crossing guards to run over...
...As a special service to our readers, TAS has P. J. O'Rourke, a member of The American Spectator's editorial board, is the author most recently of All the Trouble In the World: The Lighter Side of Overpopulation, Famine, Ecological Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague and Poverty (Atlantic Monthly Press...
...And because we care more than you do we're better people than you are...
...He speaks their lingo...
...Now Republicans aren't really evil...
...Because you'd watch nothing but football and "Melrose Place" if it weren't for serious and informative nature programs about how Democrats are facing extinction...
...But big government can find a good-paying job for you because, when government gets bigger, there are more jobs in the government...
...Everyone in the thoughtful, progressive, sensitive, corn-passionate, objective, and fair media world which I inhabit is awful upset about these darn Republicans...
...R They rove where they will, sacking and looting, or, as it were, voting and golfing...
...Although whether it is the Republican insistence on children learning to pray or the Republican insisYou're a victim of lots of things...
...A Republican just wants to get rich, buy oceanfront property, dump the old wife and get a new blonde one who'll listen attentively while the Republican talks about unfunded mandates over the arugula salad...
...Pathetic groups of unemployed Democrats huddle on Capitol Hill, homeless...
...You write for Rolling Stone...
...B ut all my Republican buddies cavorting on Capitol Hill . . . aren't they politicians, too...
...The same thing with the car companies and all those dangerous cars they make...
...And you can't be trusted with money...
...You should sue...
...Get shot...
...They have to raise taxes quick...
...Bill can forget about midnight basketball...
...Every time a politician gets an idea it costs you money, and sometimes, in the case of wars, it costs you your skin...
...That would mean you have a cognitive disability exhibited by not knowing you're disabled...
...Although it's getting harder to find somebody to do them with now that I'm 47 and a Republican...
...Some credit their loss of faith to a beneficent deity permitting the existence of evil...
...Great, hulking, greasy, obese, gobbling, omnivorous, ever-aggrandizing, fat-witted government—I am not its friend...
...It is a frightful scene...
...Or making a lifetime career out of going to college...
...Or still working in a Kinko's copy center at the age of 28...
...They need government programs...
...Everybody realizes we're SOBs...
...I guess good people are just naturally attracted to government...
...And never mind the 320 postage stamp...
...Think of what big governments have gotten up to in this century: not one but two world wars, the Gulag, the Holocaust, aerial bombing of civilian population centers, the Berlin Wall, nuclear explosions, the Post Office...
...It wrecked our marriage...
...You don't want a politician trying to drown you while the whole world thinks he's giving you a bath...
...Every hippy-dippy thing that's thought up—from heroin addiction to special vegan lunch lines in the local high school cafeteria—I get to pay for...
...And he claims that he can actually tell the difference between Hootie and the Blowfish and the noise a washtub full of cats makes when you throw it down the cellar stairs...
...To this day I will not bring the car home before eleven, even though it's my car and nobody lives in the house but me...
...Government will do worthwhile things with your paycheck, such as lend it to Mexico...
...And the greater the power, the more my abomination...
...The kids in school government were good kids...
...A villainous corporation could afford them but has to market the products...
...And when Republicans pull some sleazy thing like Whitewater, at least it works...
...And we did...
...And, under the Republicans, certain large corporations and business interests no doubt will be allowed to run wild, as opposed to the way the Clinton administration cracked down on Tyson's Chicken and cattle futures trading...
...With black and Hispanic birth rates going through the roof, you'll soon be a minority, too...
...Tongue stud...
...epublican hordes have descended on Washington...
...The president was forced to make a conciliatory State of the Union speech, the short version of which was, "Hillary, you'd better go home and fix dinner...
...It would be nice if they stuck to the lovely task of destroying government...
...And you're as mean as you are stupid...
...Tsk...
...So you're suffering from repressed memory syndrome, too...
...Get killed...
...For one thing, some of us Republicans I are anti-abortion on the theory that every fetus is a Republican or, if adopted by a Amazing how well-meaning, how virtuous, how good the people in authority always are...
...You can shoot us...
...The American Spectator May 1995 21 wicked individual might want these, but he wouldn't have the cash and connections to get them...
...Perhaps you don't recall any difficulty walking, talking, seeing, etc...
...You were probably molested as a child by a beloved member of your household...
...Staff and assistants handle the rest...
...You'll be court martialed...
...And so what if you're a smug white person yourself...
...Try this test...
...Then the poor people wouldn't be poor and would turn into Republicans or something...
...The Vietnam draft would be a tough sell for even the most fiendish businessmen...
...such as...
...That's because, in the 1980s, rich people took all the good pay and used it up...
...Whole species are facing extinction...
Vol. 28 • May 1995 • No. 5
