We Blew It
O'ROURKE, P.J.
We Blew It A look back in remorse on the conservative opportunity that was squandered BY P. J. O’ROURKE Let us bend over and kiss our ass goodbye. Our 28-year conservative opportunity to fi...
...And her husband didn’t even deliver on Eleanor’s promises...
...We railed at welfare and counted it a great victory when Bill Clinton confused a few poor people by making the rules more complicated...
...Here,” she said, “is the most powerful man in the world...
...George W. Bush, at his most benefi cent, said if illegal immigrants wanted citizenship they would have to do three things: Pay taxes, learn English, and work in a meaningful job...
...There are enough yarmulkes among the neocons to show that Jews are not immune to conservatism...
...Liberalism had been running wild in the nation since the Great Depression...
...Since the early 1980s I’ve been present at the conception (to use the polite term) of many of our foreign policy initiatives...
...Taxpayer money composted to produce a fuel made of alcohol that is more expensive than oil, more polluting than oil, and almost as bad as oil with vermouth and an olive...
...Reagan managed to reach out to blue collar whites...
...Jim Jerk down the road from me, with all the cars up on blocks in his front yard, falls behind in his mortgage payments, and the economy of Iceland implodes...
...P.J...
...In 1984, I visited the site where the Marines were murdered...
...The left has no idea what’s going on in the fi nancial crisis...
...We may argue with the people as a man may argue with his wife, but in the end we must submit to the fact of being married...
...Conservative immigration policies are as stupid as conservative attitudes are gross...
...news media from a parallel universe...
...The principle is fi scal responsibility...
...Take just one example of our unconserved tendency to poke our noses into other people’s business: abortion...
...Barack and Michelle will be by in a moment with some subsidized ethanol to top up our gas tank...
...We would, however, be able to have a smoke at the latter establishment...
...They’re crying and whining for government bailouts just like the billionaire stakeholders in banks and investment houses...
...And then we can turn the key...
...Some people truly have the courage of their convictions...
...We can infl ate the currency, destroying your ability to plan for the future, wrecking the nation’s culture of thrift and common sense, and giving free rein to scallywags to borrow money for worthless scams and pay it back 10 cents on the dollar...
...And, damn it, we were...
...It’s not hard to move a voting bloc...
...Who says Republicans don’t have much on the ball...
...I don’t know if I’m one of them...
...And I don’t mean in the matter of tricky and private concerns like gay marriage...
...Separate isn’t equal...
...But there his reach stopped, leaving many people on our side, but barely knowing it...
...The aftermath of the Gulf war still makes me sick...
...I had a look into the eyes of the future rulers of Afghanistan at a sura in Peshawar as the Soviets were withdrawing from Kabul...
...They’re in it for the money...
...And Japanese tourists may go so far as socks in sandals, but their liberal nonsense stops at the ankles...
...How about a constitutional amendment against fi rst marriages...
...Agriculture is a business that has been up to its bib overalls in politics since the fi rst Thanksgiving dinner kickback to the Indians for subsidizing Pilgrim maize production with fi sh head fertilizer grants...
...When we go to Hooters is the government tending bar making sure that one out of three margaritas is on the house...
...We can raise taxes...
...If our spouse is feeling romantic and we’re tired, does the government come over to our house and take care of foreplay...
...We might get knocked down for not whoring after bioenergy votes in the Iowa caucuses...
...Now we’re talking...
...What was Reagan thinking, landing Marines in Lebanon to prop up the government of a country that didn’t have one...
...We Blew It A look back in remorse on the conservative opportunity that was squandered BY P. J. O’ROURKE Let us bend over and kiss our ass goodbye...
...In how many ways did we fail conservatism...
...And where is the world we promised these children of the Conservative Age...
...Mind you, they won’t live in Hyde Park...
...If the taxes are levied across the board, money will be taken from everyone’s pocket, the economy will stagnate, and the poorest and least advantaged will be harmed the most...
...Hey, waiter, are the burgers any good...
...And we can borrow, building up a massive national debt...
...Although this probably would have required a U.S...
...What’s the matter with Sharon Stone...
...A “farm” today means 100,000 chickens in a space the size of a Motel 6 shower stall...
...And with that much horse s—, you just know there’s a pony in there somewhere...
...Where was the meum and the tuum in our shakedown of Washington lobbyists...
...Liberalism wasn’t zapped and rolled away on a gurney and confi ned somewhere until it expired from natural causes such as natural law or natural rights...
...It’s one more job we botched...
...And I notice Danny Ortega is back in power anyway...
...But our horn rims were so fogged with detestation of Clinton that we couldn’t see how really detestable he was...
...Of Rwanda, I cannot bear to think, let alone jest...
...Conservatives should say to voters, “You can raise spending...
...Meanwhile we can, with the public’s blessing, refuse to spend taxpayers’ money on killing, circumscribe the timing and method of taking a human life, make sure parental consent is obtained when underage girls are involved, and tar and feather teenage boys and run them out of town on a rail...
...Or do we just exist to help the world’s rich people make and keep their money...
...Lying to the government: It’s called April 15th...
...Liberals consider people to be nuisances...
...Nations that fl aked off of the Soviet Union in southeastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus...
...Thus we ensured our loss before we even began our winning streak...
...Under constant political pressure, which went almost unresisted by conservatives, a lot of lousy mortgages that would never be repaid were handed out to Jim Jerk and his drinking buddies and all the ex-wives and single mothers with whom Jim and his pals have littered the nation...
...Are they all good little Democrats...
...Scan the list of the Ten Commandments and see how many could be enforced even by Rudy Giuliani...
...There are no farms left...
...Southern whites were on—begging the pardon of the Scopes trial jury—an evolutionary course toward becoming Republican...
...After that they got huffy and began stuffi ng dynamite down their pants before consulting with the occupying forces...
...Is the government doing a third of our dishes...
...To our surprise the electorate gave us cold comfort...
...Sensible adults are conservative in most aspects of their private lives...
...Then, half a generation later, when we returned with our armies, we expected to be greeted as liberators...
...And I honor their confusion...
...Good as cash...
...Kids are stupid...
...Anyway, it’s no use blaming Wall Street...
...But my oldest boy, he got to readin’ . . . ” There was no need to piss off the entire black population of America to get Dixie’s electoral votes...
...Yes, this would make for longer and less pithy stump speeches...
...Get a pro-life friend drunk to the truth-telling stage and ask him what happens if his 14-year-old gets knocked up...
...The real message of the conservative pro-life position is that we’re in favor of living...
...When—to switch metaphors yet again—such a white elephant is not discarded someone will eventually try to ride in the howdah on its back...
...Fall of the Berlin wall...
...Since then modern conservatism has been plagued by the wrong friends and the wrong foes...
...Unfortunately, no, a lot of them aren’t after attempting to cross our borders...
...Instead, he’s hitting on an emotionally disturbed intern barely out of her teens...
...A nationwide program to test whether kids are what...
...We, the conservatives, who do understand the free market, had the responsibility to—as it were—foreclose upon this mess...
...We’ve had the rule of law largely in our hands since 1980...
...Atlas shrugged...
...Although I must say we’re doing good work on our fi nal task—attaching the garden hose to our car’s exhaust pipe and running it in through a vent window...
...We’ve had nearly three decades to educate the electorate about freedom, responsibility, and the evils of collectivism, and we responded by creating a big-city-public-school-system of a learning environment...
...Our vacuuming...
...Being there was fun...
...I might kill the baby...
...Is there a moral dimension to foreign policy in our political philosophy...
...What if they deserve to be left behind...
...If the taxes are levied only on the wealthy, money will be taken from wealthy people’s pockets, hampering their capacity to make loans and investments, the economy will stagnate, and the poorest and the least advantaged will be harmed the most...
...But never, since the Mayfl ower knocked the rock in Plymouth, has anything as putrid as the Farm, Nutrition and Bioenergy Act of 2008 been spread upon the land...
...And who can count that high...
...And we managed it in just 12...
...Those leafy precincts will be reserved for the micromanagers and macro-apparatchiks of liberalism—for Secretary of the Department of Peace Bill Ayers and Secretary of the Department of Fairness Bernardine Dohrn...
...Yes, we got a few tax breaks during the regimes of Reagan and W. But the government is still taking a third of our salary...
...It was a beachfront bivouac overlooked on three sides by hills full of hostile Shiite militia...
...And we accused Clinton of lying about sex, which all men spend their lives doing, starting at 15 bragging about things we haven’t done yet, then on to fi bbing about things we are doing, and winding up with prevarications about things we no longer can do...
...Take a wide enough variety of lousy mortgages— some from the East, some from the West, some from the cities, some from the suburbs, some from shacks, some from McMansions—bundle them together and put pressure on the bond rating agencies to do fancy risk management math, and you get a “collateralized debt obligation” with a triple-A rating...
...I’m missing a few pieces of this puzzle myself...
...Nobody with kids is a liberal, except maybe one pothead in Marin County...
...But you can’t pass a law making yourself weigh 185...
...A constitutional amendment against gay marriage...
...But are we men and women of principle...
...The Democrats will have plenty of time to do all this because conservatism, if it is ever reborn, will not come again in the lifetime of anyone old enough to be rounded up by ACORN and shipped to the polling booths...
...Jeeze, 230 pounds...
...troops are standing between you and yard care...
...But he was dead wrong...
...Instead of fl attening the Department of Education with a wrecking ball we let it stand as a pulpit for Bill Bennett...
...Fence the border and give a huge boost to the Mexican ladder industry...
...The free market is a bathroom scale...
...The last is optional and includes, but is not limited to, me, my friends in New Hampshire, and Sarah Palin...
...What will destroy our country and us is not the fi nancial crisis but the fact that liberals think the free market is some kind of sect or cult, which conservatives have asked Americans to take on faith...
...Fine to save the fat, greedy Kuwaitis and the arrogant, grasping house of Saud, but to hell with the Shiites and Kurds of Iraq until they get some oil...
...No, I speak, once again, of the geological foundations of conservatism...
...O’Rourke is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...There’s a joke in Arkansas about a candidate hustling votes in the country...
...When it comes to a full-on, hemp-wearing, kelp-eating, mandala-tatted, fool-coifed liberal with socks in sandals, I have never met a Muslim like that or a Chinese and very few Hispanics...
...Actually, during the Clinton administration . . . ) Anyway, a low tax rate is not—never mind the rhetoric of every conservative politician—a bedrock principle of conservatism...
...Is the government doing a third of our job...
...If this weren’t so, imagine driving on I-95: The majority of drivers are drunk, stoned, making out, or watching TV, while the rest are trying to calculate the size of their carbon footprints on the backs of Whole Foods receipts while negotiating lane changes...
...For almost three decades we’ve been trying to teach average Americans to act like “stakeholders” in their economy...
...Wall Street looked at the worthless paper and thought, “How can we make a buck off this...
...The “Southern Strategy” was bequeathed to the Republican party by Richard Nixon—not a bad friend of conservatism but no friend at all...
...immigrants from the Indian subcontinent fi ll that bill (the odd charlatan yogi excepted), nor do immigrants from Africa, Eastern Europe, or East Asia...
...And where would you rather eat...
...And where were we while Clinton dithered over the massacres in Kosovo and decided, at last, to send the Serbs a message: Mess with the United States and we’ll wait six months, then bomb the country next to you...
...The law cannot be made identical with morality...
...Few practicing Catholics vote Democratic anymore except in Massachusetts where they put something in the communion wafers...
...After the events of the 20th century—national socialism, international socialism, inter-species socialism from Earth First—anyone who is still on the left is obviously insane and not responsible for his or her actions...
...The market is a measurement, but that measuring does not work to the advantage of a nation or its citizens unless the assessments of volume, circumference, and weight are conducted with transparency and under the rule of law...
...I’ve got six sons,” the farmer says...
...To go from slime to the sublime, there are the lofty issues about which we never bothered to form enough principles to go out and break them...
...Now it’s going to cost us at least $285 billion...
...Are not immigrants alive...
...What is the coherent modern conservative foreign policy...
...In our preaching and our practice we neglected to convey the organic and universal nature of freedom...
...The progeny of the Reagan Revolution will live instead in the universe that revolves around Hyde Park...
...At the end of the Carter administration we had it cornered in one of its dreadful low-income housing projects or smelly public parks or some such place, and we held the Taser gun in our hand, pointed it at the beast’s swollen gut, and didn’t pull the trigger...
...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...
...Bush doesn’t meet two out of three of those qualifications...
...We have three ways to pay...
...The South Side of Chicago is what everyplace in America will be once the Democratic administration and fi libusterresistant Democratic Congress have tackled global warming, sustainability, green alternatives to coal and oil, subprime mortgage foreclosures, consumer protection, business oversight, fi nancial regulation, health care reform, taxes on the “rich,” and urban sprawl...
...Postal Service to get weapons to anti-Communists...
...And now, to glue and screw the lid on our coffi n, comes this fi nancial crisis...
...But this bill passed with bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress and was happily signed into law by President Bush...
...He took an admirably principled stand on states’ rights...
...Then average Americans will learn the wisdom of Ronald Reagan’s statement: “The ten most dangerous words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the federal government, and I’m here to help.’ ” Ask a Katrina survivor...
...Democracy—be it howsoever conservative—is a manifestation of the will of the people...
...If we cared anything about “nutrition” we would—to judge by the mountainous, jiggling fl ab of Americans—stop growing all food immediately...
...We don’t want our retirement accounts to get a 2 percent return...
...An entire generation has been born, grown up, and had families of its own since Ronald Reagan was elected...
...Until it wasn’t...
...We impeached Clinton for lying to the government...
...None of this is the fault of the left...
...And despising cracker trash who have a laundry hamper full of bedsheets with eye-holes cut in them does not make a man a liberal...
...What if they deserve a smack on the behind...
...I would rather have had a beer with Leonid Brezhnev...
...People are even more conservative if they have children...
...You’d urge your daughter to date Rosie O’Donnell before you’d put troops ashore in such a place...
...This will cause all of the above things to happen plus it will fund Red Chinese nuclear submarines that will be popping up in San Francisco Bay to get some decent Szechwan take-out...
...We have lived up to no principle of conservatism...
...And voters—all the voters, right up to the tippy-top corner offi ce of Goldman Sachs—think so too...
...They took no oath of offi ce...
...Iran-contra was about as smart as using the U.S...
...We have all of this going for us, worldwide...
...We have fattened the stalled ox and hatred therewith rather than dined on herbs where love (and the voter) is...
...At a Vietnamese restaurant...
...And yet we chose to deliver our sermons only to the faithful or the already converted...
...Brokerages were saying, “We’re going to sell you a room full of horse s...
...One of our supposed own did...
...Being there was not so fun...
...The answer was to wrap it in a bow...
...They will make what homes they can in the physical, ethical, and intellectual slums of the South Side of Chicago...
...Stupid...
...But the “Frenchbread lines” for the rich, the “terrapin soup kitchens,” continue their charity without stint...
...But at least we wouldn’t land on our scruples...
...Government is bigger than ever...
...And everyone hates his wife...
...That’s about fi ve times the gross domestic product of prewar Iraq...
...They learned...
...Put the National Guard on the Rio Grande and know that U.S...
...We consider people— with a few obvious exceptions—to be assets...
...I will kill the boy...
...I don’t get it...
...That’s not what the free market is...
...No, we on the right did it...
...Our laundry...
...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...
...The people on Wall Street never claimed to be public servants...
...It might cost us, short-term...
...People are always needing more government resources to feed, house, and clothe them and to pick up the trash around their FEMA trailers and to make sure their self-esteem is high enough to join community organizers lobbying for more government resources...
...What if it’s rape...
...And it should be especially easy to move voters to the right...
...The Southern Strategy wasn’t needed...
...No U.S...
...You, the electorate, can, if you choose, have an infi nite number of elaborate and expensive government programs...
...We may think of this as a post 9/11 problem, but it’s been with us all along...
...Although that sounds pretty good at the moment...
...Our 28-year conservative opportunity to fi x 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...
...You may hate what you see when you step on the scale...
...Where is the transparency...
...And “bioenergy” is a fraud of John Edwards-maritalfi delity proportions...
...People were glad to see us, until they noticed that we’d forgotten to bring along any personnel or provisions to feed or doctor the survivors of shock and awe or to get their electricity and water running again...
...Of course the trailer park Protestants yell “Amen...
...When the Monica Lewinsky news broke, my wife set me straight about the issue...
...It took a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives 40 years—from 1954 to 1994—to get that corrupt and arrogant...
...The free market is just a measurement, a device to tell us what people are willing to pay for any given thing at any given moment...
...You’ve got kids...
...If the citizenry insists that abortion remain legal—and, in a passive and confl icted way, the citizenry seems to be doing so—then give the issue a rest...
...Would that blame could be put on our strategies instead of ourselves...
...Barry Goldwater was an admirable and principled man...
...The candidate asks a farmer how many children he has...
...No Child Left Behind...
...Or, put another way, Wall Street was pulling the “room full of horse s—” trick...
...But we’d be showing ourselves to be men and women of principle...
...Or in the Ayn Rand Caf...
...But we, the government, will have to pay for those programs...
...Roosevelt made some sympathetic noises in 1932...
...If we do have morals, where were they while Bosnians were slaughtered...
...Blacks used to poll Republican...
...They did so right up until Mrs...
...Civil marriage is an issue of contract law...
...Not like the one grampa grew up on...
...For what we will spend on the Farm, Nutrition and Bioenergy Act of 2008 we could have avoided the war in Iraq and simply bought a controlling interest in Saddam Hussein’s country...
...If you were handling rattlesnakes and keeping dinosaurs for pets, would you vote for the party that gets money from PETA...
...Our impeachment of President Clinton was another example of placing the wrong political emphasis on personal matters...
...Our attitude toward immigration has been repulsive...
...The sludge and dreck of political muck-funds fl owing to prosperous businesses and individuals have gotten deeper and more slippery and stink worse than ever with conservatives minding the sewage works of legislation...
...Are we not pro-life...
...Well,” the farmer says, “fi ve of ’em are...
...Ask a kid whose parents are divorced...
...Everybody wants his or her children to respect freedom, exercise responsibility, be honest, get educated, have opportunities, and own a bunch of guns...
...Just the name says it...
...The formerly independent citizens of our previously self-governed nation will live, as I said, around Hyde Park...
...Conservatives should never say to voters, “We can lower your taxes...
...And a fi ne job we’ve been doing of that lately...
...Aid, I can assure you, will be forthcoming from President Obama...
...I was in Baghdad in April 2003...
...And we could get up again with dignity intact, dust ourselves off, and take another punch at the liberal bully-boys who want to snatch the citizenry’s freedom and tuck that freedom, like a trophy feather, into the hatbands of their greasy political bowlers...
...If we had stayed our hand in the House of Representatives and treated the brute with shunning or calls for interventions to make him seek help, we might have chased him out of the White House...
...the candidate asks...
...Such things as letting the abortion debate be turned against us and using the gravity of the impeachment process on something that required the fl y-swat of pest control were strategic errors...
...The fi nancial crisis that is hoisting us on our own petard is only the latest (if the last) of the petard hoistings that have issued from the hindquarters of our movement...
...Blaming Wall Street for being greedy is like scolding defensive linemen for being big and aggressive...
...We pay them to be in it for the money...
...Liberals think you can...
Vol. 14 • November 2008 • No. 9
