A Plague of ‘A’ Students

Why it’s so irksome being governed by the Obami.

By P. J. O'Rourke
The Weekly Standard
May 3, 2010, Vol. 15, No. 31
http://weeklystandard.com/

Barack Obama is more irritating than the other nuisances on the left. Nancy Pelosi needs a session on the ducking stool, of course. But everyone with an ugly divorce has had a Nancy. She’s vexatious and expensive to get rid of, but it’s not like we give a damn about her. Harry Reid is going house-to-house selling nothing anybody wants. Slam the door on him and the neighbor’s Rottweiler will do the rest. And Barney Frank is self-punishing. Imagine being trapped inside Barney Frank.

The secret to the Obama annoyance is snotty lecturing. His tone of voice sends us back to the worst place in college. We sit once more packed into the vast, dreary confines of a freshman survey course—“Rocks for Jocks,” “Nuts and Sluts,” “Darkness at Noon.” At the lectern is a twerp of a grad student—the prototypical A student—insecure, overbearing, full of himself and contempt for his students. All we want is an easy three credits to fulfill a curriculum requirement in science, social science, or fine arts. We’ve got a mimeographed copy of last year’s final with multiple choice answers already written on our wrists. The grad student could skip his classes, the way we intend to, but there the s.o.b. is, taking attendance. (How else to explain this year’s census?)

America has made the mistake of letting the A student run things. It was A students who briefly took over the business world during the period of derivatives, credit swaps, and collateralized debt obligations. We’re still reeling from the effects. This is why good businessmen have always adhered to the maxim: “A students work for B students.” Or, as a businessman friend of mine put it, “B students work for C students—A students teach.”

It was a bunch of A students at the Defense Department who planned the syllabus for the Iraq war, and to hell with what happened to the Iraqi Class of ’03 after they’d graduated from Shock and Awe.

The U.S. tax code was written by A students. Every April 15 we have to pay somebody who got an A in accounting to keep ourselves from being sent to jail.

Now there’s health care reform—just the kind of thing that would earn an A on a term paper from that twerp of a grad student who teaches Econ 101.

Why are A students so hateful? I’m sure up at Harvard, over at the New York Times, and inside the White House they think we just envy their smarts. Maybe we are resentful clods gawking with bitter incomprehension at the intellectual magnificence of our betters. If so, why are our betters spending so much time nervously insisting that they’re smarter than Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement? They are. You can look it up (if you have a fancy education the way our betters do and know what the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary is). “Smart” has its root in the Old English word for being a pain. The adjective has eight other principal definitions ranging from “brisk” to “fashionable” to “neat.” Only two definitions indicate cleverness—smart as in “clever in talk” and smart as in “clever in looking after one’s own interests.” Don’t get smart with me.

The other objection to A students is what it takes to become one—toad-eating. A students must do what teachers and textbooks want and do it the way teachers and texts want it done. Neatness counts! A students are very busy.

Such brisk apple-polishing happens to be an all-too-good preparation for politics. This is because a student’s success at education and a politician’s success at politics are measured mostly by input rather than outcome. Yes, one got elected. Yes, the other became class valedictorian. But to what end? It can take decades to measure the outcome of an education. Did the A student at architecture school become a respected partner at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, or did he become Albert Speer? Likewise with politics. Did Woodrow Wilson’s meddling in Europe wreak havoc upon the globe? We wouldn’t know for 20 years. Did Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal totally destroy the fabric of American society? We’re not absolutely certain even now. Meanwhile Woodrow Wilson, FDR, the class valedictorian, and Albert Speer were inputting like crazy.

The C student starts a restaurant. The A student writes restaurant reviews. The input-worshipping universe of the New York Times is like New York itself—thousands of restaurant reviews and no place we can afford to eat.

Let us allow that some intelligence is involved in screwing up Wall Street, Washington, and the world. A students and Type-A politicians do discover an occasional new element—Obscurantium—or pass an occasional piece of landmark legislation (of which the health care reform bill is not one). Smart people have their uses, but our country doesn’t belong to them. As the not-too-smart Woody Guthrie said, “This land was made for you and me.” The smart set stayed in fashionable Europe, where everything was nice and neat and people were clever about looking after their own interests and didn’t need to come to America. The Mayflower was full of C students. Their idea was that, given freedom, responsibility, rule of law and some elbow room, the average, the middling, and the mediocre could create the richest, most powerful country ever.

Thus in America nobody loves a smart-ass. What’s interesting about Obama is that he didn’t start out being one. Lips (and academic records) are sealed at Occidental College and Columbia, but Obama doesn’t seem to have been an A student as an undergraduate. He learned to “make it or fake it” at Harvard Law where he graduated magna cum laude. Worse than an A student is somebody pretending to be one, witness Al Gore.

However, perhaps I should hold my tongue and temper my ire. I have just received my junior high school daughter’s report card. She’s an A student. I questioned her, and it turns out so is every one of her girlfriends including the numbskull jock and the complete feather-brain who’s besotted with Justin Bieber.

I can’t imagine what kind of input my daughter’s school is measuring (although I assume my daughter delivers it via Twitter). But when input is valued enough, America turns into that blissful land of social justice so desired by Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Barney Frank—outcomes are equal at last. I’m old-fashioned in my criticism of Barack Obama. He graduated from Harvard Law in the 1990s, barely yesterday. I’d forgotten the wonderful progressiveness of the American educational system. We’re all A students now.

P.J. O’Rourke, a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, is author, most recently, of Driving Like Crazy.

A Dynamite Prize

The Nobel Prize for peace that passeth understanding.

by P. J. O'Rourke
The Weekly Standard
10/26/2009, Volume 015, Issue 06
http://www.weeklystandard.com/

Once the sniggering is over and the king of Norway has had his smoked salmon spit-take toweled off, everyone will realize that giving Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize was an inspired choice.

The peace prize committee members have achieved what Buddhists call satori. Enlightenment came to them through contemplation of an ancient Zen koan, "What is the sound of one American president doing *$@#-all?" The answer is "ka-ching"--a $1.4 million Nobel Peace Prize.

The five members of the prize selection committee (chosen by the Norwegian Parliament, apparently at random from the local methadone clinic) will now travel the world offering all of humanity release from the endless cycle of death and rebirth. Or did the 1989 peace prize winner, the Dalai Lama, do that already?

The Nobel Peace Prize has always been a joke--albeit a grim one. Alfred Bernhard Nobel famously invented dynamite and felt sorry about it. In fact, he was a good deal worse than that. Dynamite's okay--clearing beaver dams, blowing stumps, blasting hillsides to spend Obama stimulus money on pointless HOV interstate lanes. But Nobel was the experimental progenitor of all modern high explosives. Nobel was the man who transformed the cannon from a pirate-ship pop gun to an airmail express delivery system for slaughter. Nobel was the fellow who allowed assassins to make the evolutionary leap from cloak and dagger Caesar-stickers to Timothy McVeigh. Plus Nobel invented smokeless gunpowder, which dispelled the fog of war and turned the modern battle into a pellucid field of fire. As murderous -industrial magnates go, Alfred Nobel is right up there with Ray Kroc, franchiser of McDonald's.

Nobel left most of his huge fortune to an endowment that funds the prizes named after himself. Beginning in 1901 five Nobels have been awarded pretty much annually. They are given for chemistry, physics, medicine, literature "of an ideal tendency," and peace. Since 1969 there's been a sixth prize, for economics--to no good effect, judging by my 401(k). I don't know enough about chemistry, physics, medicine, or literature of an ideal tendency to say whether these prizes have done harm. But the peace prize stinks.

Theodore Roosevelt got the 1906 prize for ending the Russo-Japanese War after it was over. Never mind his role in starting the Spanish-American War, an altogether less worthwhile conflict. We conquered Puerto Rico! And the 1919 honoree, Woodrow Wilson, gave us America's participation in World War I, and then, with his Versailles Treaty, he gave us everybody's participation in World War II. "Woody's World" is with us right down to the present day in places such as Kosovo. Thus, with President Wilson alone, the Nobel Peace Prize death toll is over 50 million and counting.

Occasionally the peace prize has gone to actual peace negotiators but usually, per Teddy Roosevelt, when there was nothing left to negotiate. Carlos Saavedra Lamas got his in 1936 for mediating between Bolivia and Paraguay in the Chaco War (1932-35). Both nations were exhausted, 100,000 soldiers were dead, and the Chaco was--as it had been and remains--a vast, useless weed patch. Likewise, Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan (1976) and John Hume and David Trimble (1998)--the four of them were standing around when, after 500 years, the fool residents of my ancestral homeland ran out of ammo and beer.

Nelson Mandela (1993) and Menachem Begin (1978) didn't negotiate peace; they negotiated their manner of winning. Martin Luther King (1964) was a pacifist, perhaps, but his real genius was showing how, in a democracy (however imperfect), under rule of law (ditto), violence is counterproductive. The rioting after his death proved his point.

Other peacemakers were even less effective. William McKinley's secretary of war (sic), Elihu Root, was honored for advocating a League of Nations, rather prematurely, in 1912. Worse yet was the timing of Henri La Fontaine, a member of Parliament in gallant little Belgium. He received a prize for being president of the Permanent International Peace Bureau in 1913. Aristide Briand (1926) and Frank B. Kellogg (1929) forged the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 in which Germany, France, Great Britain, the United States, Italy, Japan, and nine other nations forswore "recourse to war for the solution of international controversies." But the Japanese ate their Wheaties and invaded Manchuria.

Ralph Bunche (1950) attempted to soothe the hard feelings between Jews and Arabs in Palestine. Thanks "a Bunche," Ralph. Lester Pearson (1957) tried to end the Suez conflict (though it was Dwight Eisenhower--no prize--who ended it). Dag Hammarskjold (1961) brought lasting harmony to the Congo or surely would have if his plane hadn't crashed. Kim Dae-jung (2000) created the concord and amity with North Korea that we enjoy today. Kofi Annan (2001) left us with--I quote the prize committee--"a better organized and more peaceful world." And there's no end to the good that Jimmy Carter (2002) did--for Republicans.

Some peace prize winners experienced precious little peace at the time of their winning: Andrei Sakharov (1975), Lech Walesa (1983), Desmond Tutu (1984), Aung San Suu Kyi (1991).

Of course, if you go around giving prizes left and right (mostly left) for more than a century, you're bound to give some to worthy people once in a while. With the Nobel committee this usually involves the Red Cross (1901, 1917, 1944, 1963). But the Red Cross doesn't bring peace, it brings bandages. Then there are such estimable folks as Albert Schweitzer (1952), Mother Teresa (1979), Elie Wiesel (1986), and micro-credit banker Muhammad Yunus (2006). I'm glad they had a payday. I'm a fan of their work. But, huh?

Lately the peace prize committee is just messing with our heads. They honored Mohamed ElBaradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency in 2005, by which time India, Pakistan, Iran, and hence every cab driver in New York had the bomb. In 2008 they gave the prize to "Martti Ahtisaari," supposedly a former president of Finland, "for his important efforts, on several continents and over more than three decades, to resolve international conflicts." They're pulling that out of their boxer shorts. And let's not mention Al Gore (2007) except to note that Abraham Lincoln did not urge us, in his Second Inaugural Address, to "achieve and cherish a just and lasting cap on carbon emissions among ourselves and with all nations."

Speaking of justice, where in the list of Nobel Peace Prize winners are the men and women of Lincoln's mettle, who brought just and lasting peace to whole continents? Where is Winston Churchill? Franklin Roosevelt? Harry Truman? Margaret Thatcher? Ronald Reagan? Instead what we get is Mikhail Gorbachev (1990) and Barack Obama.

Paddy walks into the bar and shouts, "Drinks all around! Me wife's next in line for the Nobel Peace Prize!"

"Paddy," says the barkeep, "Yer wife's been in a coma since January."

"Ah!" says Paddy, "Isn't peace grand!"

P. J. O'Rourke is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

Book Review: The Protest Singer

Red Warbler

Marching in step with a song and a smile.

by P.J. O'Rourke
The Weekly Standard
10/12/2009, Volume 015, Issue 04
http://www.weeklystandard.com/

The Protest Singer
An Intimate Portrait of Pete Seeger
by Alec Wilkinson
Knopf, 152 pp., $22.95


We are the folk song army,
Every one of us cares.
We all hate poverty, war, and injustice,
Unlike the rest of you squares.

So join in the folk song army,
Guitars are the weapons we bring
To the fight against poverty, war, and injustice,
Ready, aim, sing!

--Tom Lehrer

This is an important book. As with any book about which this needs to be said, what's meant is that it isn't important at all. It's a hagiography of Pete Seeger--and not even a proper, thorough one with sheet music, lyrics, and recording history. But there are important aspects to the book, none of them intentional.

Pete Seeger is a modest, unassuming, cheerful, and kind-natured man. He's a good folk singer, if you can stand folk singing. And he's such an excellent banjo player that you almost don't wish you had a pair of wire cutters. His abilities as a composer range from the fairly sublime ("Turn, Turn, Turn") to the fairly awful ("If I Had a Hammer") by way of the fairly ridiculous ("Where Have All the Flowers Gone?").

He built his own house--rather badly, as far as I can tell. And he lives in it--rather well, with a loving wife and frequent visits from doting friends and relatives. He's spent his life being in favor of the right things, such as decent wages, racial equality, peace, and a clean Hudson River, and being opposed to the wrong things such as hunger, bigotry, violence, and a dirty Hudson River. He was also a member of the Communist party long past that organization's youthful-idealism sell-by date. Seeger is candid on the subject, his initial adverb notwithstanding:

Innocently I became a member of the Communist Party, and when they said fight for peace, I did, and when they said fight Hitler, I did. I got out in '49, though. .  .  . I should have left much earlier. It was stupid of me not to. My father had got out in '38, when he read the testimony of the trials in Moscow, and he could tell they were forced confessions. We never talked about it, though, and I didn't examine closely enough what was going on. .  .  . I thought Stalin was the brave secretary Stalin, and had no idea how cruel a leader he was.

Thus is raised a momentous question, maybe the most momentous question of the modern era: How is it that legions of modest, unassuming, cheerful, and kind-natured people pledge their troth to political systems that burn continents and bury innocents by the hundred million?

No doubt the companionship of Pete Seeger is to be preferred to the company of country club Republicans like myself--proud, grasping, crabby, and with hearts as hard as three-wood clubheads. But at least our idea of world domination is to conquer the dogleg on the seventh hole (from the ladies' tee, if no one is looking). Yet when it comes to hagiographies we have to hire some out-of-work English Ph.D. to ghost-write our own: How I Made a Fortune in Downloadable Estate Planning Software--My Triumph of the Will.

Anyway, nice, sweet, and well-meaning busybodies have been wreaking havoc with the globe since at least the days of Rousseau. The Protest Singer offers a pretty good explanation of how the hopeful and the helpful manage to wander into a position of support for a Committee of Public Safety, a Nazi party, a Soviet Union, a Sarajevo, an al Qaeda, and a typical American university education. You don't even have to read the book to gain this understanding; simply scan page three and the dust jacket. The secret of the too-good's complicity in the too-bad seems to lie in a certain feckless disassociation from the real world. This is Alec Wilkinson's sketch of Pete Seeger's early history:

He went to Harvard, joined the tenor banjo society, and studied sociology in the hope of becoming a journalist, but at the end of his second year he left before taking his exams and rode a bicycle west, across New York State.

And this is the publisher's thumbnail biography of Alec Wilkinson:

Alec Wilkinson began writing for The New Yorker in 1980. Before that, he was a policeman in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, and before that a rock-and-roll musician. .  .  . His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lyndhurst Prize, and a Robert F. Kennedy Book Award.

Wellfleet, by the way, is a resort town on Cape Cod where the principal crime problems are nude sunbathing and dune buggies crushing plover nests.

Fold two portions of scrambled egghead personal journey into one quote from Seeger's journal.

I seem to stagger about this agonized world as a clown, dressed in happiness, hoping to reach the hearts and minds of the young.

Mix vigorously with a statement by Wilkinson.

.  .  . all human beings are created equal and have equal rights. In the early and middle parts of the twentieth century, such a conviction made a person not a patriot, but a socialist.

And you get a taste of the sharing, caring, lame-o lefty mind omelet that spreads mood-poisoning to the masses.

The other momentous question of the modern era is what to do about it. The Protest Singer tells us what not to do. The slim volume is padded with a 28-page transcript of Seeger's August 18, 1955, testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee. (This committee is sorely in need of reconstitution, considering how many new activities have emerged that are un-American. The other day I saw a fellow turn off his BlackBerry before sitting down to a restaurant meal--and I had no one to report him to.)

Seeger was questioned by HUAC's chairman, Democratic congressman Francis E. Walter of Pennsylvania, a New Deal hack and coauthor of the McCarran-Walter "Yellow Peril" Act that tried to limit non-European immigration. Assisting the inquiry was the committee counsel, Frank S. Tavenner Jr., who seems to have been an idiot. The result of Seeger's being grilled was a sort of reverse waterboarding that, had it gone on much longer, would have had committee members and staff confessing to attempted suicide attacks on Joseph McCarthy.

Here are a few tidbits.

MR. TAVENNER: What is your profession or occupation?

MR. SEEGER: Well, I have worked at many things .  .  . and I make my living as a banjo picker--sort of damning, in some people's opinion. .  .  . It is hard to call it a profession. I kind of drifted into it and I never intended to be a musician, and I am glad I am one now, and it is a very honorable profession, but when I started out actually I wanted to be a newspaperman, and when I left school--

CHAIRMAN WALTER: Will you answer the question, please?

MR. SEEGER: I have to explain that it really wasn't my profession. .  .  .

CHAIRMAN WALTER: Did you practice your profession?

MR. SEEGER: I sang for people, yes .  .  . and I expect I always will.

MR. TAVENNER: I have before me a photostatic copy of the June 20, 1947, issue of the Daily Worker [containing] this advertisement: "Tonight--Bronx, hear Peter Seeger and his guitar, at Allerton Section housewarming." I ask you whether or not the Allerton Section was a section of the Communist Party? .  .  .

MR. SEEGER: I am not going to answer any questions as to my association, my philosophical or religious beliefs or my political beliefs .  .  . or any of these private affairs. I think these are very improper questions for any American to be asked. .  .  .

MR. TAVENNER: I have before me a photostatic copy of .  .  . the June 1, 1949, issue of the Daily Worker [containing] this statement: The first performance of a new song, "If I Had a Hammer," .  .  . will be given at a testimonial dinner .  .  . at St. Nicholas Arena. .  .  . MR.

SEEGER: I shall be glad to answer about the song, sir, and I am not interested in carrying on the line of questioning about where I have sung any songs. .  .  .

CHAIRMAN WALTER: .  .  . I direct you to answer .  .  .

MR. SEEGER: I am sorry you are not interested in the song. .  .  . I am saying that my answer is the same as before. I have told you that I sang for everybody.

CHAIRMAN WALTER: Wait a minute. You sang for everybody. Then are we to believe, or to take it, that you sang at the places Mr. Tavenner mentioned? .  .  .

MR. SEEGER: .  .  . I will tell you about my songs, and I am not interested in who listened to them.

We all know the types who listen to Pete Seeger songs; even Pete admits they aren't interesting. Nonetheless, Seeger has labored long and hard among these featherheads. As Wilkinson says, "He hoped that by making people feel themselves to be elements of a collective identity, he could intensify their experience--enlarge and encourage them and help hold oblivion at arm's length."

Oblivion being what Robespierre, Mao, Pol Pot, et al. pressed to their bosoms. Pete Seeger fans do, indeed, keep such gruesome results of their ideological turpitude at arm's length, as Pete himself did. And we sensible conservatives should be thankful to Seeger for all he's done to help make himself and the rest of these nitwits less effective at generating oblivion.

It's hard to build a gulag when you're busy organizing a hootenanny.

- P.J. O'Rourke, a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is the author, most recently, of Driving Like Crazy.

Outsourcing Hate

The burdens of conservatism in the Obama age.

by P.J. O'Rourke
The Weekly Standard
10/05/2009, Volume 015, Issue 03
http://www.weeklystandard.com/

Whew, I'm pooped. Jimmy Carter has got me run ragged with all the hating I'm supposed to do. Jimmy says I'm a racist because I oppose President Obama's health care reform program. Even Jimmy Carter can't be wrong all the time. And since Jimmy Carter has been wrong about every single thing for the past 44 years, maybe--just as a matter of statistical probability--he's right this time.

I hadn't noticed I was a racist, but that was no doubt because I was too busy being a homophobe. Nancy Pelosi says the angry opposition to health care reform is like the angry opposition to gay rights that led to Harvey Milk being shot. Since I do not want America to suffer another Sean Penn movie, I will accept that I'm a homophobe, too. And I'm a male chauvinist due to the fact that I think Nancy Pelosi is blowing smoke--excuse me, carbon neutral, biodegradable airborne particulate matter--out her pantsuit.

Also, I'm pretty sure Rahm Emanuel is Jewish, and you can't be against (or even for) President Obama without the involvement of Rahm Emanuel, so I'm an anti-Semite. Furthermore, although I personally happen to be a libertarian on immigration issues, I do agree with Joe Wilson that you can't say you're expanding health care to the poor and then pretend you're going to turn those poor away if their driver's licenses look a little Xeroxy and what's on their Social Security cards turns out to be a toll-free number for a La Raza hotline. Thus I'm prejudiced against Hispanics as well.

I'm a 61-year-old man with three young children and a yard to rake. While I appreciate the attention from our most ex- of ex-presidents, I'm really too busy to properly accomplish all this loathing and detestation. I quit smoking so I don't even have a lighter to set crosses on fire. We don't happen to own white bed sheets and I'm five nine and--dressed in Ralph Lauren candy stripes and tripping on fitted corners--I'd feel like a fool at Klan rallies (and Tea Parties and Town Hall meetings, to the extent that there's a difference).

Then I have the task of finding people to disrespect, denigrate, and discriminate against. I know people who are black, gay, Jewish, and Hispanic. But, unfortunately, I like them. When you like a person it's difficult to treat him (or even her) with the kind of vigorous and unrestrained bigotry that Jimmy Carter expects me to engage in. I have to go looking for people (people of the proper race, creed, and ethnic origin) whom I can't stand. That jackass from the gas company who kicked my dog (even though Valkyrie hardly broke the skin) won't do. The meter reader is a New Hampshire Yankee.

This is exactly the problem. I live in rural New Hampshire and we are, frankly, short on people who are black, gay, Jewish, and Hispanic. In fact, we're short on people. My town has a population of 301. When it comes to bias we're pretty much reduced to an occasional slur against French-Canadians. But my grandfather was French-Canadian, so I feel that it is somewhat inappropriate for me to express scorn for Frenchies. That is, liberals have a monopoly on self-loathing as a result of neurosis entitlements and affirmative anxiety programs for which I, as a Republican, do not qualify. Thus it is that I have to drive all the way to Dorchester and then out to Provincetown and down to New York City and back to be narrow minded enough to satisfy Jimmy Carter, Nancy Pelosi, Rahm Emmanuel, and their friend Hugo Chávez.

When it comes to oppressing those who are differently gendered, I have the opposite difficulty. With two daughters, a wife, and a female dog that bites, I'm badly outnumbered. It's all I can do to make an occasional wisecrack about time spent in the bathroom (or kennel) with the hairdryer. Even then I end up sleeping in the car. (The dog gets the couch.)

I thought about going to a "Hate Coach" to help me focus my insensitiv-ity and anger. But all the radio hosts were booked months in advance. In--stead I've decided to follow the example of large capitalist institutions (which are themselves famous for racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, maltreatment of illegal aliens, and glass ceilings for Nancy Pelosi, who will become a senator from California about when Arnold Schwarzenegger gets the Billy Crystal role in a remake of When Harry Met Sally). I am outsourcing my hate.

I have contracted with al Qaeda, Russia, and Cuba. When it comes to treating women and gays like hell (not to mention Jews), it's hard to beat the Islamic fundamentalists. The Russians are no slouches with a pogrom either, and they are racists par excellence. Russians not only vehemently despise blacks, they believe Africa begins at the Ukraine border. And when it comes to repression of Latinos, Cuba takes the gold, tyrannizing 11,184,022 out of 11,184,023 Cubans.

Fortunately for me the Obama administration has taken time out from its pursuit of health care reform to go wobbly in Afghanistan, cuddle up to Havana, and scrap the missile defense system in Eastern Europe to appease Moscow. This puts Osama bin Laden, Raúl Castro, and Vladimir Putin in a position to destroy the minorities and the disadvantaged in America. Of course, they'll destroy the rest of us too. But, meanwhile, I'm spared a lot of effort and aggravation. And I may have time to get all the autumn leaves bagged before the apocalypse.

P. J. O'Rourke is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD

Still 'Crazy' -- And Proud of It

Conservatives induce a case of the vapors at the Washington Post.

by P.J. O'Rourke
The Weekly Standard
08/31/2009, Volume 014, Issue 46
http://www.weeklystandard.com/

Us right-wing nuts sure is scary! That's the message from the Washington Post. To put this in language a conservative would understand, the fourth estate has been alarmed once again by the Burkean proclivities of our nation's citizens. The Post is in a panic about (to use its own descriptive terms) "birthers," "anti-tax tea-partiers," and "town hall hecklers."

If, last Sunday, you spent a profitless hour reading the Washington Post (itself not too profitable), you noticed the loud yapping and desperate nipping at those who disagree with liberal orthodoxy. It was as if top management were a toy schnauzer accidentally mistaken for a duster and traumatized by being run back and forth through the venetian blinds. The wise and prestigious broadsheet institution was so barking mad that it sent three (Three! In these times of hardship for the print media! When reporters are being laid off right and left--well, mostly right--and stories are going uncovered from rapidly warming pole to pole! Three!) journalists to do battle with "The Return of Right-Wing Rage."

That was the subtitle of Rick Perlstein's section B leader. The title was "In America, Crazy Is a Preexisting Condition." Perlstein wrote the book Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus so you can intuit (or "grok" as Perlstein might put it, given his prose style) the contents of his article. Yes, Rick, right-wing rage has returned. It was up at my place for the weekend. But it's back, and it's not like right-wing rage ever really went away. It didn't, as you would say, Rick, "move on."

Accompanying the Perlstein screed was a sidebar by Alec MacGillis explaining how "health care reform is not that hard to understand, and those who tell you otherwise most likely have an ulterior motive."

All you town hall hecklers, calm down and go home. Never mind that Alec MacGillis is a rat, something that's evident by the sixth sentence of his piece: "Fixing [health care] could be very simple: a single-payer system." And never mind that his writing is more than uninformative, it is informationally subtractive. Read him and you'll know less than you know now about what the government is going to do to you and your doctor. Read him carefully and you'll know nothing.

But calm down and go home, because the Washington Post said so. This is exactly the joke that used to be told in the Soviet Union. An old guy's wife tells him to go to the butcher shop and get some meat. He goes to the butcher shop and stands in line for hours. Finally the butcher says, "We're out of meat." The old guy blows his top. He yells, "I am a worker! I am a proletarian! I am a veteran of the Great Patriotic War! I have fought for socialism all my life, and now you tell me you're out of meat! What kind of a system is this?! You are fools! You are thieves! . . . " A big man in a trench coat comes up to the old guy and says, "Comrade, Comrade, not so loud. In the old days you know what they would do if you said such things." The big man in the trench coat makes a pistol motion with his hand. He says to the old guy, "Calm down and go home." The old guy shrugs and leaves. He comes back empty-handed, and his wife says, "What's the matter, are they out of meat?" "Worse than that," says the old guy, "they're out of bullets."

So there was Rick Perlstein calling everyone to the right of Nikita Khrushchev a candidate for the state psychiatric ward with Alec MacGillis playing his KGB Bozo sidekick, firing blanks and honking his "End-of-life care eats up a huge slice of spending" airhorn. Then, to add idiocy to insult, the Post sent Robin Givhan to observe the Americans who are taking exception to various expansions of government powers and prerogatives and to make fun of their clothes.

Givhan writes a column called "On Culture," and this is what passes for culture at the Post: "Of the hundreds of thousands of style guides currently for sale on Amazon, not one . . . was prescient enough to outline the appropriate attire for those public occasions when good citizens decided to behave like raving lunatics and turn lawmakers into punching bags." Meeting with Givhan's scorn were "T-shirts, baseball caps, promotional polo shirts and sundresses with bra straps sliding down their arm."

I've never seen Robin Givhan. For all I know she dolls herself up like Jackie O. But I have seen other employees of the Washington Post and--with the exception of the elegant and, I dare say, cultured, Roxanne Roberts--they look as if they got dressed in the unlit confines of a Planet Aid clothing-donation bin.

Perlstein, for all the highness of his dudgeon, doesn't catch the nuts saying anything very nutty. The closest he gets to a lunatic quote is from a "libertarian" wearing a holstered pistol who declares that the "tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time by the blood of tyrants and patriots." And those are the words of lefty icon Thomas Jefferson. I myself could point out the absurdity of protestors' concerns about government euthanasia committees. Federal bureaucracy has never moved fast enough to get to the ill and elderly before natural causes do. And what's with those "birthers"? Why their obsession with a nonentity like Obama? How about John Adams with his Alien and Sedition Acts choke-hold on the First Amendment? Or Jefferson? He could tell his Monica Lewinsky, "I own you," and he wasn't kidding. Or John Quincy Adams, pulling the original Blagojevich, buying the presidency from Henry Clay? Or that backwoods Bolshevik Andrew Jackson? Or William Henry Harrison, too dumb to come in out of the rain? Not one of these scallywags was born in the United States of America--look it up.

But Perlstein couldn't be bothered. Instead he resorts to lazy fallacies of post hoc ergo propter hoc and argumentum ad verecundiam to try to prove that the Obama administration is a wise and prestigious political institution because nuts are attacking it the way nuts previously attacked other wise and prestigious political institutions, such as Adlai Stevenson. Even with the force of illogic on his side Perlstein cannot make his case. He tells about Stevenson speaking on United Nations Day in 1963. "Then, when Stevenson was walked to his limousine, a grimacing and wild-eyed lady thwacked him with a picket sign. Stevenson was baffled. 'What's the matter, madam?' he asked. 'What can I do for you?' The woman responded with self-righteous fury: 'Well, if you don't know I can't help you.' "

And I can't help the Washington Post. Why is the paper intimidated by dissent that's tame even by Adlai Stevenson standards? Not that the Post has ever been exactly a "profile in courage." (A little joke there about the propensity to endorse anything with a Kennedy stuck to it.) No doubt it's always alarming to the know-it-alls when ordinary people decide they'd like some say in ordinary life, when regular folk tell the know-it-alls to take their fishwrap and go blog themselves. And the Post has been extra jumpy since it got caught trying to pimp Washington's power elite to K Street lobbyists at a pay-to-play bun fight in the publisher's manse. Personally I thought this was great--the first time the newspaper had shown any respect for the free market system since Eleanor Roosevelt was a pup. But terror, like the Post, is not a thing of reason. Dread lurks in wise and prestigious institutions across the land. Rick Perlstein has a phrase that gives poignant expression to this fear and trembling: "America, where the crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendency."

Oh, it's a crazy tree. And the taller it grows, the crazier it gets. And I roost upon the tip-top branch. Ye of the Washington Post, Don't park your SmartCar under my perch.

P. J. O'Rourke is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

Between the Covers with John J. Miller

P.J. O'Rourke on Driving Like Crazy



(Click on title to play audio)

The End of the Affair

The fate of Detroit isn’t a matter of economics. It’s a tragic romance, whose magic was killed by bureaucrats, bad taste and busybodies. P.J. O’Rourke on why Americans fell out of love with the automobile.

By P.J. O’ROURKE
The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/home-page
MAY 30, 2009

The phrase “bankrupt General Motors,” which we expect to hear uttered on Monday, leaves Americans my age in economic shock. The words are as melodramatic as “Mom’s nude photos.” And, indeed, if we want to understand what doomed the American automobile, we should give up on economics and turn to melodrama.

Politicians, journalists, financial analysts and other purveyors of banality have been looking at cars as if a convertible were a business. Fire the MBAs and hire a poet. The fate of Detroit isn’t a matter of financial crisis, foreign competition, corporate greed, union intransigence, energy costs or measuring the shoe size of the footprints in the carbon. It’s a tragic romance—unleashed passions, titanic clashes, lost love and wild horses.

Foremost are the horses. Cars can’t be comprehended without them. A hundred and some years ago Rudyard Kipling wrote “The Ballad of the King’s Jest,” in which an Afghan tribesman avers: Four things greater than all things are,—Women and Horses and Power and War.

Insert another “power” after the horse and the verse was as true in the suburbs of my 1950s boyhood as it was in the Khyber Pass.

Horsepower is not a quaint leftover of linguistics or a vague metaphoric anachronism. James Watt, father of the steam engine and progenitor of the industrial revolution, lacked a measurement for the movement of weight over distance in time—what we call energy. (What we call energy wasn’t even an intellectual concept in the late 18th century—in case you think the recent collapse of global capitalism was history’s most transformative moment.) Mr. Watt did research using draft animals and found that, under optimal conditions, a dray horse could lift 33,000 pounds one foot off the ground in one minute. Mr. Watt—the eponymous watt not yet existing—called this unit of energy “1 horse-power.”

In 1970 a Pontiac GTO (may the brand name rest in peace) had horsepower to the number of 370. In the time of one minute, for the space of one foot, it could move 12,210,000 pounds. And it could move those pounds down every foot of every mile of all the roads to the ends of the earth for every minute of every hour until the driver nodded off at the wheel. Forty years ago the pimply kid down the block, using $3,500 in saved-up soda-jerking money, procured might and main beyond the wildest dreams of Genghis Khan, whose hordes went forth to pillage mounted upon less oomph than is in a modern leaf blower.

Horses and horsepower alike are about status and being cool. A knight in ancient Rome was bluntly called “guy on horseback,” Equesitis. Chevalier means the same, as does Cavalier. Lose the capitalization and the dictionary says, “insouciant and debonair; marked by a lofty disregard of others’ interests, rights, or feelings; high-handed and arrogant and supercilious.” How cool is that? Then there are cowboys—always cool—and the U.S. cavalry that coolly comes to their rescue plus the proverbially cool-handed “Man on Horseback” to whom we turn in troubled times.

Early witnesses to the automobile urged motorists to get a horse. But that, in effect, was what the automobile would do—get a horse for everybody. Once the Model T was introduced in 1908 we all became Sir Lancelot, gained a seat at the Round Table and were privileged to joust for the favors of fair maidens (at drive-in movies). The pride and prestige of a noble mount was vouchsafed to the common man. And woman, too. No one ever tried to persuade ladies to drive sidesaddle with both legs hanging out the car door.

For the purpose of ennobling us schlubs, the car is better than the horse in every way. Even more advantageous than cost, convenience and not getting kicked and smelly is how much easier it is to drive than to ride. I speak with feeling on this subject, having taken up riding when I was nearly 60 and having begun to drive when I was so small that my cousin Tommy had to lie on the transmission hump and operate the accelerator and the brake with his hands.


Car Culture/Corbis

A 1950 Studebaker Commander Convertible, with its famous ‘bullet-nose’ front end.

After the grown-ups had gone to bed, Tommy and I shifted the Buick into neutral, pushed it down the driveway and out of earshot, started the engine and toured the neighborhood. The sheer difficulty of horsemanship can be illustrated by what happened to Tommy and me next. Nothing. We maneuvered the car home, turned it off and rolled it back up the driveway. (We were raised in the blessedly flat Midwest.) During our foray the Buick’s speedometer reached 30. But 30 miles per hour is a full gallop on a horse. Delete what you’ve seen of horse riding in movies. Possibly a kid who’d never been on a horse could ride at a gallop without killing himself. Possibly one of the Jonas Brothers could land an F-14 on a carrier deck.

Thus cars usurped the place of horses in our hearts. Once we’d caught a glimpse of a well-turned Goodyear, checked out the curves of the bodywork and gaped at that swell pair of headlights, well, the old gray mare was not what she used to be. We embarked upon life in the fast lane with our new paramour. It was a great love story of man and machine. The road to the future was paved with bliss.

Then we got married and moved to the suburbs. Being away from central cities meant Americans had to spend more of their time driving. Over the years away got farther away. Eventually this meant that Americans had to spend all of their time driving. The play date was 40 miles from the Chuck E. Cheese. The swim meet was 40 miles from the cello lesson. The Montessori was 40 miles from the math coach. Mom’s job was 40 miles from Dad’s job and the three-car garage was 40 miles from both.

The car ceased to be object of desire and equipment for adventure and turned into office, rec room, communications hub, breakfast nook and recycling bin—a motorized cup holder. Americans, the richest people on Earth, were stuck in the confines of their crossover SUVs, squeezed into less space than tech-support call-center employees in a Mumbai cubicle farm. Never mind the six-bedroom, eight-bath, pseudo-Tudor with cathedral-ceilinged great room and 1,000-bottle controlled-climate wine cellar. That was a day’s walk away.

Getty Images

Henry Ford and his Model T.

We became sick and tired of our cars and even angry at them. Pointy-headed busybodies of the environmentalist, new urbanist, utopian communitarian ilk blamed the victim. They claimed the car had forced us to live in widely scattered settlements in the great wasteland of big-box stores and the Olive Garden. If we would all just get on our Schwinns or hop a trolley, they said, America could become an archipelago of cozy gulags on the Portland, Ore., model with everyone nestled together in the most sustainably carbon-neutral, diverse and ecologically unimpactful way,

But cars didn’t shape our existence; cars let us escape with our lives. We’re way the heck out here in Valley Bottom Heights and Trout Antler Estates because we were at war with the cities. We fought rotten public schools, idiot municipal bureaucracies, corrupt political machines, rampant criminality and the pointy-headed busybodies. Cars gave us our dragoons and hussars, lent us speed and mobility, let us scout the terrain and probe the enemy’s lines. And thanks to our cars, when we lost the cities we weren’t forced to surrender, we were able to retreat.

But our poor cars paid the price. They were flashing swords beaten into dull plowshares. Cars became appliances. Or worse. Nobody’s ticked off at the dryer or the dishwasher, much less the fridge. We recognize these as labor-saving devices. The car, on the other hand, seems to create labor. We hold the car responsible for all the dreary errands to which it needs to be steered. Hell, a golf cart’s more fun. You can ride around in a golf cart with a six-pack, safe from breathalyzers, chasing Canada geese on the fairways and taking swings at gophers with a mashie.

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Louis Chevrolet sits behind the wheel of his prototype car in 1911.

We’ve lost our love for cars and forgotten our debt to them and meanwhile the pointy-headed busybodies have been exacting their revenge. We escaped the poke of their noses once, when we lived downtown, but we won’t be able to peel out so fast the next time. In the name of safety, emissions control and fuel economy, the simple mechanical elegance of the automobile has been rendered ponderous, cumbersome and incomprehensible. One might as well pry the back off an iPod as pop the hood on a contemporary motor vehicle. An aging shade-tree mechanic like myself stares aghast and sits back down in the shade. Or would if the car weren’t squawking at me like a rehearsal for divorce. You left the key in. You left the door open. You left the lights on. You left your dirty socks in the middle of the bedroom floor.

I don’t believe the pointy-heads give a damn about climate change or gas mileage, much less about whether I survive a head-on with one of their tax-sucking mass-transit projects. All they want to is to make me hate my car. How proud and handsome would Bucephalas look, or Traveler or Rachel Alexandra, with seat and shoulder belts, air bags, 5-mph bumpers and a maze of pollution-control equipment under the tail?

And there’s the end of the American automobile industry. When it comes to dull, practical, ugly things that bore and annoy me, Japanese things cost less and the cup holders are more conveniently located.

The American automobile is—that is, was—never a product of Japanese-style industrialism. America’s steel, coal, beer, beaver pelts and PCs may have come from our business plutocracy, but American cars have been manufactured mostly by romantic fools. David Buick, Ransom E. Olds, Louis Chevrolet, Robert and Louis Hupp of the Hupmobile, the Dodge brothers, the Studebaker brothers, the Packard brothers, the Duesenberg brothers, Charles W. Nash, E. L. Cord, John North Willys, Preston Tucker and William H. Murphy, whose Cadillac cars were designed by the young Henry Ford, all went broke making cars. The man who founded General Motors in 1908, William Crapo (really) Durant, went broke twice. Henry Ford, of course, did not go broke, nor was he a romantic, but judging by his opinions he certainly was a fool.

Bettmann/CORBIS

Preston Tucker, in one of the few Tucker cars produced, celebrates being acquitted of charges of fraud over the failure of his automobile business in 1950.

America’s romantic foolishness with cars is finished, however, or nearly so. In the far boondocks a few good old boys haven’t got the memo and still tear up the back roads. Doubtless the Obama administration’s Department of Transportation is even now calculating a way to tap federal stimulus funds for mandatory OnStar installations to locate and subdue these reprobates.

Among certain youths—often first-generation Americans—there remains a vestigial fondness for Chevelle low-riders or Honda “tuners.” The pointy-headed busybodies have yet to enfold these youngsters in the iron-clad conformity of cultural diversity’s embrace. Soon the kids will be expressing their creative energy in a more constructive way, planting bok choy in community gardens and decorating homeless shelters with murals of Che.

I myself have something old-school under a tarp in the basement garage. I bet when my will has been probated, some child of mine will yank the dust cover and use the proceeds of the eBay sale to buy a mountain bike. Four things greater than all things are, and I’m pretty sure one of them isn’t bicycles. There are those of us who have had the good fortune to meet with strength and beauty, with majestic force in which we were willing to trust our lives. Then a day comes, that strength and beauty fails, and a man does what a man has to do. I’m going downstairs to put a bullet in a V-8.

P.J. O’Rourke is the author of 13 books, including “Driving Like Crazy.”

Manifesto for Banana Republicans

Welcome to the Third World.

by P.J. O'Rourke
The Weekly Standard
06/01/2009, Volume 014, Issue 35
http://www.weeklystandard.com/

The other day a journalist friend of mine in Washington got a phone call from a colleague in South America. "How's it feel to be a fellow citizen of the Third World?" my friend's friend asked.

"What?" said my friend.

"You know," said the Latin reporter, "the new government gets in office, the old government goes to jail."

The caller was referring, of course, to the prosecution--or threatened prosecution or mooted prosecution or proposal for prosecution to be publicly disavowed but tacitly permitted to go forward--of six Bush administration officials involved with the legal issues concerning "enhanced interrogation techniques."

Note that Attorney General Eric Holder and assorted Obama allies and ilk have been picking on people of whom you've mostly never heard. Aside from former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, it is unknown notables who are suffering besmirchment, sabotage, shredding, and wreckage of their characters, careers, reputations, and personal lives. John Yoo was a lawyer at the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. Jay Bybee was in charge of that office. Douglas Feith was an undersecretary of defense. William Haynes was the Defense Department's general counsel. And David Addington was the vice president's chief of staff.

The targets of calumny do not include any people who actually employed enhanced interrogation techniques. No CIA agents or agency contractors are on the black list. Of course not. It's beneath the dignity of Dianne Feinstein to have to get down on her knees every morning and look under her Prius to see if there's an IED from The Firm.

Nor has there been proscription of the political leaders who decreed how Guantánamo miscreants and associate miscreants were to be questioned. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney aren't threatened with legal action, not even by lunatic Iberian jurist Balthasar Garzón. (I received a post-cocktail hour email from a redneck pal: "Hope Don Greaser tries to serve the subpoenas in person. Body mount of Spanish judge in full plumage sure would dress up my game room.") Indicting the top members of the ousted Republican government would attract attention from the wrong people--regular people. Public opinionmakers are vehement in their fastidiously ethical support of the Democratic party's stand on anti-cruelty to terrorists. Public opinion is not so certain. Broad polling might uncover opinions to the effect of, "Water-boarding? What's with water-boarding. How about kerosene-boarding!"

The Democrats know--as they knew during Iran-contra and the Valerie Plame kerfuffle--that it's best to steer clear of both the chiefs and the Indians and hang obscure go-betweens. (Or, as is the American way, crush them to death beneath legal bills.)

Do Democrats really have a conscience about torture? They've been loud enough with their protests when Nancy Pelosi is tortured in the press. But to judge by the nasty sneak of a lying, conniving, mendacious piece of powergrubbing vote trash that is the speaker of the House of Representatives, the Democrats are no more virtuous than the rest of us.

Torture is an evil thing. There are, however, many tortured people in the world outside Guantánamo Bay. (Some are right outside, in Cuba.) These people are innocent of any wrongdoing or suspicion of wrongdoing or knowledge of wrong-doers or even of capacity to do wrong. Infants, the aged, the infirm are tormented, racked, and scourged from Sri Lanka to Belarus, from Harare to Port-au-Prince. Thanks to perversion of political power and idiocy of collectivist thinking a full billion of the world's people are living on less than $1 a day. Plaintively asking if there's any food is an enhanced interrogative indeed. Mistreatment of al Qaeda members and their friends and hangers-on is something I number among my moral concerns. But it's number 1,000,000,001.

The Democrats aren't raising the torture issue because they want to make the United States into a better place. They're raising the torture issue because they want to make the United States into Venezuela del Norte. The leaders of the Democratic party yearn to be like Hugo Chávez or Manuel Noriega, and, frankly, they've got the looks for it.

I don't mind America becoming a Third World country. The weather is better in the Third World than it is where I live in New Hampshire. And household help will be much cheaper. Does Carl Levin do windows? At my hacienda he won't have much choice. The troubled economy will soon be a thing of the past. Once we've got Third World-style full-blown business and government corruption, there won't be an economy. There will be, however, plenty of money after Beijing hauls away all our coal, oil, uranium, bourbon, and other natural resources that China lacks. Best of all, the GOP has a serious incentive to rebuild itself as a party and score some victories at the ballot box. Nothing motivates like "Win or Die."

And we will win. The Republicans will be back like Danny Ortega is back in Nicaragua--because this is the Third World. When we return to power I'm sure you Democrats will understand our having a little fun of the enhanced interrogation kind with some midlevel members of the Obama administration. (The ex-president himself and Michelle and the kids will be pleasantly ensconced in Cap d'Antibes, as befits a Third World former head of state.) On a sad note, there'll be no last cigarette as the blindfold is put in place. The political rule of developing nations is plus ça change .  .  . so we'll leave many Democratic programs in place--fastidiously ethical anti-tobacco legislation for example. It will be a smoke-free firing squad.

Now to pick our first victim of 2012. (Sooner, if Attorney General Holder orders the Guantánamo detainees to be tried in the District of Columbia night court and they get less time than Marion Barry.) I say Rahm Emanuel. Not just because he isn't important and nobody likes him, but because he's the flunky in the Obama White House who's already chosen his famous last words: Never let a crisis go to waste.

P.J. O'Rourke is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

A Nation of Moochers

Happy April 15.

by P.J. O'Rourke
The Weekly Standard
04/13/2009, Volume 014, Issue 29
http://www.weeklystandard.com/


As April 15 rolls around let us take a moment to recall why we Americans pay taxes: Because some of our country's good-for-nothing bums are too chicken to rob us at gunpoint. That would be members of Congress and the executive branch. How come we keep electing politicians who will tax the bejeezus out of us? Especially Democrats? At least Republicans are smart enough to lie about it.

We keep electing them because taxes are a pretty good deal. The American government will spend $3.6 trillion this year. There are 306 million of us Americans. We each get $11,765. Sure, we get it mostly in transportation pork projects, agricultural price supports, GM charitable contributions, the Marine Corps, and interest payments on Chinese T-bills when we'd rather get it in cash. But, still, $11,765 isn't bad. Let's say you're a family of five: a dad, a mom and three lovely, high-scoring kids participating in enough community service programs to pad their college applications. You're the kind of family we conservatives endorse. And you're getting $58,825. Even Republicans are on the dole. Dad (conservative women are proud to be stay-at-home moms) will have to make a pile of money to pay $59K in taxes so you can each get $11,765 from the government.

Although it is unclear just how big a pile of money Dad will have to make to ensure that he's feeding, housing, and grooming America for the future rather than sucking her teat.

For one thing there's the possibility that President Obama will make all income greater than the 2009 Madoff investor average return subject to punitive capitation. Also U.S. income taxes are so complex that even Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner can't understand them. Plus we all cheat on our taxes (except for Timothy Geithner who can't understand his). Furthermore, personal income tax, Social Security, and Medicare exactions account for only 75 percent of federal receipts. Corporate taxes provide 13 percent, 6 percent is borrowed, and 6 percent comes from that $9 pack of Marlboros you just bought because April 15 is stressing you out.

Pete Sepp of the National Taxpayers Union did some complicated mathematics and says, "By my reckoning, somewhere between 85 and 95 million households out of 115 million total have a smaller tax liability than the per-capita spending burden." The breadwinners for 18 to 26 percent of our households are shoveling coal in the engine rooms of the ship of state, while everybody else is a stowaway, necking with Kate Winslet like Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic.

Pete Sepp goes on to note that those breadwinners doing all the work are also less likely to be on welfare or receiving other government largesse and are more likely to have their Social Security benefits taxed. "If we were to compensate for this," he says, "I imagine that more like 100 million households have a smaller liability than the per-capita spending burden." One hundred out of 115 is 87 percent. Our nation is 87 percent mooch, 87 percent leech, 87 percent "Spare (hope and) change, man?"

It may be even worse than that or--depending on how greedily liberal you are--better. Let's abandon the complicated mathematics of taxation. We don't understand complicated mathematics. We were liberal arts majors. If we understood complicated mathematics we'd be wealthy hedge managers in jail today. Let's go to arithmetic. The U.S. gross domestic product for 2008 has been calculated by the Department of Commerce's Bureau of Economic Analysis as $14.2 trillion. Say the recession keeps recessing and GDP shrinks a bit in 2009. We'll round down to $14 trillion. The federal budget, being $3.6 trillion, is 25.7 percent of the gross domestic product. The government makes off with 25.7 percent of our goods and services. This is our real rate of national taxation. Then the government gives us an $11,765 kickback. If we figure out what $11,765 is 25.7 percent of, we see that before you can call yourself a taxpayer instead of a tax vampire you have to earn $45,778 if you're single, and $228,890 if you're supporting that family of five.

How many households have this kind of income? The president's does, and with only two kids. The president is taxing himself. Good. But all the rest of the U.S. government's operating expenses are being paid by AIG bonus recipients, the ten or a dozen hedge fund managers who aren't in jail yet, a couple of "debt restructuring" scam artists advertising at 3 A.M. on the Food Channel, and Bill Gates.

America's grossly unfair tax system won't lead to class war. Or, if it does, the war will be brief. There are millions upon millions of us Sponge Bobs and relatively few of the sucker fish we're soaking. On the other hand, young people--with no dependents except their Twitter followers--need to earn only double their age to be ladling gravy to Uncle. These are the devotees of the multi-culti who most adore super-diverse Barack, and they're being "bled white," as it were. They could turn on the president if they started thinking about this--or anything else.

The rest of us are in clover. True, we have to "give" 25.7 percent of our work week to the IRS. That's 10 hours, 16 minutes, and 48 seconds. Call it all of Wednesday and most of Thursday morning. But nothing gets done on Monday or Friday. Tuesday we had to go get our kid from school because a peanut was discovered in the food dish of the 5th grade's gerbil and the whole building had to be hypo-allergenicized. On Thursday, after an early lunch, we left the computer on in our cubicle, draped our suit jacket over the back of our chair, and went and caught a Nationals game. So we shouldn't worry that out-of-control government spending or an insane tax structure will destroy the American economy--because we have government jobs.

P. J. O'Rourke is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

Doubling Down on the Welfare State

Get ready to pay twice for everything.

by P.J. O'Rourke
The Weekly Standard
04/06/2009, Volume 014, Issue 28
http://www.weeklystandard.com/


The good news is that, according to the Obama administration, the rich will pay for everything. The bad news is that, according to the Obama administration, you're rich.

You may be surprised to discover you're rich, especially if you're broke. How do you know you are a member of the penurious plutocracy? Take this simple test: See if you pay double for everything.

The financial bailout, for example. Pay for it once with your IRA and 401(k) plan investments. Now pay for it again with your tax dollars.

Ditto with the economic stimulus. Write checks to cover your mortgage payment, utilities, insurance premiums, car loan, basic cable, high-speed Internet access, Visa, MasterCard, and American Express bills, and turn your teens loose in the Old Navy store. Think you're done stimulating the economy? I think not. You've also lent President Obama a godzillion dollars to go on an economically stimulational shopping spree of his own. For collateral the Bank of Obama is using a mortgage on that home of yours called America and a lien on all the future earnings of your children.

How about the new car you've paid for with government largesse to GM and Chrysler? They didn't even send a thank you note containing a scratch-and-sniff card with that new car smell. If you want a car that's visible in your driveway, you'll have to--you guessed it--pay double.

Of course paying double for everything didn't start with the Meltdown of '08. It's an integral part of the modern welfare state.

Beginning with welfare. Your tax dollars pay for federal, state, and local welfare programs. Then you pay for your daughter to pursue a career in "holistic dance liberation." You pay for your son's Internet start up idea--"Buttbook," a website where everybody is an enemy. Plus there's your bum of a brother-in-law, drunk in the double-wide, watching Cartoon Network on the widescreen high-definition television you paid for.

Same with schools. Your school taxes pay for Sara Jane Olson Public High School--conveniently right down the street, inconveniently full of methamphetamine and 9mm handguns. So you also pay tuition at Friar Torquemada Parochial High.

At school, home, or work, the most important purpose of government is to protect your person and property. That's what the police department is for. And you get to pay the police and pay for burglar alarms, private security patrols, and guard dogs, such as our family guard dog, Pinky-Wink. (For the information of any prospective robbers of the O'Rourke house, Pinky-Wink isn't really a Mexican Hairless. He's .  .  . um .  .  . a Rhodesian Ridgeback, weighing 100 .  .  . make that 150 .  .  . pounds. Uh, the kids named him. Stop yapping, Pinky-Wink.)

The second most important purpose of government is trash pickup. Municipal garbage collectors pick up the trash from your house. But not until you've sorted it into its proper recycling bins--which you do by picking up the trash from your house. What you don't pay double for in money you pay double for in time and effort.

But usually it's money. When you pay a hospital bill you're really paying two hospital bills--one bill for you because you have a job and/or insurance and can pay the hospital and another bill, which is tacked onto your bill, to cover the medical expenses of someone who doesn't have a job and/or insurance and can't pay the hospital. Your tennis elbow underwrites the Sara Jane Olson Public High School student's 9mm handgun wound.

And never is paying double as doubly troubling as it is in the matter of retirement. You have to pay into Social Security and into your IRA and your 401(k) plan and put some more money in your savings account too. You have to pay Medicare tax and buy Medicare supplemental insurance and contribute to a medical savings account and make doctor bill co-payments besides. And the funding for Social Security and Medicare is so under-financed and actuarially shaky that you cannot be certain those programs will exist at all by the time you're eligible for them. And you're 64.

Would you like to know what ordinary taxpayers are getting out of this deal? You and me both. How do we benefit from this twinning, this twoing, this duality? Damned if I can figure it out. Barkeep, make that a double.

P. J. O'Rourke is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

Special Envoy to the Taliban

How Jeremiah Wright can serve his country.

by P. J. O'Rourke
The Weekly Standard
03/30/2009, Volume 014, Issue 27


"  .  .  .  part of the success in Iraq involved reaching out to people that we would consider to be Islamic fundamentalists, but who were willing to work with us  .  .  . "

--President Obama, interview with the New York Times
published March 7, 2009

I've been pondering President Obama's idea to split the Taliban and get some of those maniacal fanatics on our side for a change. It's a magnificent idea. It's not, mind you, a good idea. But it's magnificent--grand, sumptuous, rich, splendid--a great, big, thought-filled ideal of an idea, the kind you'd expect from deep-thinking, idealistic Barack Obama. Boy, is this a thinking man's administration. They are thinking so hard over at the White House, having such bright, shining, effulgent, coruscating thoughts, that if you're a thoughtful person like me (and I'm sure you are), you can't help being carried away with enthusiasm. The next thing you know you're thinking yourself.

Of course I'm not an Ivy League-educated thinker like Obama. But I've got a notion that might help the president. I have the perfect person for the job of splitting the Taliban. I know who the president should appoint. Only one man fills the bill as Special Envoy to the Beard-o's and Weird‑o's to Get Them Quarrelling Among Themselves. That man is the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

I suppose the president isn't listening to me. I'm a Republican, a conservative, and I think the opinion that Rush Limbaugh voiced on Obama's efforts at economic stimulus was too much of an attaboy. But victory in Afghanistan is not a partisan issue. Even I am not Republican enough to wish for an Obama failure in Kabul. Furthermore, I know what I'm talking about. I've seen the Muslim world as an adult, without the distractions of rambunctious Indonesian madrassa schoolmates with their noisy games of dodge-fatwa.

The president isn't listening to me. And Jeremiah Wright isn't speaking to the president. So there are a couple of practical problems with my plan. But President Obama isn't the kind of fellow who'll let something as mundane as reality interfere with hope and change.

Splitting the Taliban is the same hope-to-hell, change-a-roo that the FBI used to destroy Boston organized crime. The FBI gave sympathy, comfort, and wire tap information to Whitey Bulger, Steve "the rifleman" Flemmi, and other members of the Winter Hill Gang. This caused a split between Irish mobsters and Italian mafia. Now all of Boston's organized crime figures are on the lam or in jail and--bonus--so are most of the Boston FBI agents. Organized crime has been eliminated in Boston. Crime is no longer elitist and exclusionary; it has been returned to the common people of Roxbury, Dorchester, and Jamaica Plain.

To give another example, there's the financial bailout strategy to split the assets of troubled banking institutions. Good assets will go to a "good bank." Bad assets will go to a "bad bank." I'm opening a checking account at a bad bank ASAP. New customers at bad banks won't get good things like toasters, they'll get bad things like liquor and guns. And the personalized checks in bad bank checkbooks won't have pretty pictures on them, they'll have printed messages: "This Is a Stick-Up."

Therefore President Obama shouldn't let the fact that Pastor Wright and I are ticked off at him stand in the way of high hopes for big changes in Islamic fundamentalism any more than I let the fact that Pastor Wright is a left-wing loony stand in the way of how much I love the guy.

I'm serious about that. Jeremiah Wright is a kick-ass preacher of the Christian gospel. In his infamous post-9/11 "America's chickens are coming home to roost" sermon, Wright talks about Psalm 137, the reggae song one, "By the rivers of Babylon. " Wright points out that "this psalm is rarely read in its entirety." Easy to see why when you get to the end and hear the psalmist describe the fun the Hebrews will have when they defeat the Babylonians. "Look at the verse, Verse 9," Wright says,

"Happy they shall be who take your little ones and dash them against the rocks." The people of faith .  .  . moved from the hatred of armed enemies to the hatred of unarmed innocents. The babies. The babies. Blessed are they who dash your babies' brains against a rock.  .  .  . Yet that is where the people of faith are in 551 B.C., and that is where far too many people of faith are in 2001 A.D.

Whew. A message applicable to Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike, not to mention Bob Marley. On the other hand Wright draws some conclusions from the gospels that I wouldn't. But so did St. Paul (I Corinthians 7:1, "It is good for a man not to touch a woman").

There's a love of rhetorical skill in the Muslim world. Osama bin Laden doesn't just go on tape cassettes and say, "America sucks." He recites poetry, he finds things that "America sucks" rhymes with. On the flip side of the orthodoxy coin, Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses is hardly a Unitarian mumble of skepticism about the formal doctrines of established religion. The Koran itself is oratory, dictated by the prophet, who could not read or write. (One wonders a bit about Christ's literary, as opposed to rhetorical, learning. In Luke, when Jesus goes to the synagogue and reads from the Book of Isaiah, he gets the text wrong--and improves it.)

Preachers at black churches are the last people left in the English-speaking world who know the schemes and tropes of classical rhetoric: parallelism, antithesis, epistrophe, synec-doche, metonymy, periphrasis, litotes--the whole bag of tricks. A speaker of Arabic can't buy a fig in the market without using most of these at least once. And embodied in a love for rhetoric is an embrace of contradiction--which, in the form of oxymoron, is itself a rhetorical trope.

In 1984, before Obama was born, I was covering the civil war in Lebanon. I was in the southern suburbs of Beirut, an area controlled by Hezbollah, and I got stopped at a checkpoint by teenage Islamic fundamentalists waving their guns around with the safeties off. I turned over my American passport, and one young man began yelling at me. He yelled at me for half an hour, sticking his gun in my face and shouting about how all the terrible things in the world were America's fault--poverty, war, injustice, Zionism. And then, when he was done yelling, he handed back my passport and said, "As soon as I get my Green Card I am going to dentist school in Dearborn, Michigan."

That brings me to another point in favor of letting Pastor Wright deal with the Taliban. They hate America. He hates America. Wright's "God Damn America" sermon, which Obama slept through in 2003, should give the pastor and the Taliban numerous talking points and a basis of mutual interest upon which to build the trust and understanding needed for progress and prosperity in Afghanistan.

Wright has progressed rather prosperously himself damning America. You begin to suspect that Wright's hatred of America is not unlike the hatred of America exhibited by the teen at the Hezbollah checkpoint. That kid's about 40 now, a prominent orthodontist in Bloomfield Hills, and I bet he voted for John McCain. "I stopped by to tell you tonight that governments change," is a less radio-talk-show-quoted passage from the "God Damn America" sermon. Imagine Wright's surprise when the change of government came from a member of his own congregation who would diss him worse than John McCain ever did.

Wright is amusing on the subject. In April 2008, after Obama had washed his hands of Trinity United Church of Christ, Wright told the National Press Club in Washington, "So when Jesus says, not only you brood of vipers, now he's playing the dozens because he's talking about their mamas. To say brood means your mother is an asp, A-S-P. Should we put Jesus out of the congregation?"

In my experience the Muslim world's love of language extends to that natural consequence of having a mouth on you, humor. I was in Kuwait during the run-up to the Iraq war. A shopping center got hit by an Iraqi missile. I went to see the damage and I found a perfume shop where every bottle had burst from the warhead concussion. An American store owner would have been on his cell phone screaming at his insurance agent. The Kuwaiti proprietor was seated comfortably in an armchair, sipping a cup of coffee. When I entered he smiled, gestured at the heaps of broken glass, and said, "Special price."

There is no downside to sending the Reverend Jeremiah Wright to Afghanistan. We'll be able to claim success, because the Taliban will split. The Afghans themselves say that if you put two Afghans in a room you get three factions. Never mind that the Taliban is unlikely to split in a way that leads to a peaceful, law-abiding Afghanistan that doesn't harbor terrorists. The last time there was an Afghanistan like that was in 1.6 million B.C., before humans had arrived in the region. Shipping Wright through the Khyber Pass will also get him out of the United States, much to the relief of the president, the first lady, and most United Church of Christ congregations other than Trinity's. Then there is the off chance that Pastor Wright, with his gifts of oratory, humor, and Afghan-level ability to make everyone furious, will convert the natives. I'm for it. And I'm glad President Obama is "willing to work with" religious fundamentalists. He'll need to when the 2012 GOP national convention is filled with mujahedeen.

P. J. O'Rourke is a contibuting editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

Stem Cell Sham

The president as sophist.

by P.J. O'Rourke
The Weekly Standard
03/23/2009, Volume 014, Issue 26
http://www.weeklystandard.com/


When a Democratic president goes from being wrong to being damn wrong is always an interesting moment: Bay of Pigs, Great Society, Jimmy Carter waking up on the morning after his inauguration, HillaryCare. Barack Obama condemned himself (and a number of human embryos to be determined at a later date) on March 9 when he signed an executive order reversing the Bush administration's restrictions on federal funding of stem cell research.

President Obama went to hell not with the stroke of a pen, but with the cluck of a tongue. His executive order was an error. His statement at the executive order signing ceremony was a mortal error: "In recent years, when it comes to stem cell research, rather than furthering discovery, our government has forced what I believe is a false choice between sound science and moral values."

A false choice is no choice at all--Tweedledee/Tweedledum, Chevy Suburban/GMC Yukon XL, Joe Biden/Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. Is there really no difference "between sound science and moral values"? Webster's Third New International Dictionary states that science is, definition one, "possession of knowledge as distinguished from ignorance or misunderstanding."

Let's look at the various things science has "known" in the past 3,000 years:

Lightning is the sneeze of Thor.

The periodic table consists of Earth, Wind, and Fire and a recording of "Got To Get You into My Life."

The world is flat with signs saying "Here Be Democrats" near the edges.

You can turn lead into gold without first selling your Citibank stock at a huge loss.

We're the center of the universe and the Sun revolves around us (and shines out of Uranus, Mr. President, if I may be allowed a moment of utter sophomoricism).

But, lest anyone think I'm not serious, let me quote with serious revulsion the following passages from the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1911)--that great compendium of all the knowledge science possessed, carefully distinguished from ignorance and misunderstanding, as of a hundred years ago:


[T]he negro would appear to stand on a lower evolutionary plane than the white man, and to be more closely related to the highest anthropoids.

Mentally the negro is inferior to the white.

[A]fter puberty sexual matters take the first place in the negro's life and thought.


The above are quoted--not out of context--from the article titled "Negro" written by Dr. Walter Francis Willcox, chief statistician of the U.S. Census Bureau and professor of social science and statistics at Cornell. I trust I've made my point.

Now let's look at the things morality has known. The Ten Commandments are holding up pretty well. I suppose the "graven image" bit could be considered culturally insensitive. But the moralists got nine out of ten--a lot better than the scientists are doing. (And, to digress, the Obama administration should take an extra look at the tenth commandment, "Thou shalt not covet," before going into nonkosher pork production with redistributive tax and spend policies.)

A false choice means there's no choosing. The president of the United States tells us that sound science and moral values are united, in bed together. As many a coed has been assured, "Let's just get naked under the covers, we don't have to make love." Or, as the president puts it, "Many thoughtful and decent people are conflicted about, or strongly oppose this research. And I understand their concerns, and I believe that we must respect their point of view."

Mr. President, sir, if this is your respect, I'd rather have your contempt or your waistline or something other than what you're giving me here. The more so because in the next sentence you say,


But after much discussion, debate and reflection, the proper course has become clear. The majority of Americans--from across the political spectrum, and of all backgrounds and beliefs--have come to a consensus that we should pursue this research.


Mr. President, you're lying. There is no consensus. And you are not only wrong about the relationship between facts and morals, you are wrong about the facts of democracy. In America we have a process called voting--I seem to remember you were once very interested in it. We the citizens determine whether and how to spend the proceeds of taxation, which we alone are empowered to impose upon ourselves through our elected representatives in Congress, not the White House. If you want to kill little, bitty babies, get Congress to pass a law to kill little, bitty babies, if you can. I'm not going to bother arguing with you about whether it's wrong. Surely you too gazed at the sonogram screen and saw a thumb-sized daughter tumbling in the womb, having the time of her life. And a short life it will be, in a Petri dish. But we've already established that you don't know wrong from right.

The question is not about federal funding for stem cell research, the question is are you a knave or a fool? I'm inclined to take the more charitable view. For one thing you have a foolish notion that science does not progress without the assistance of government.

Philosophy was once considered science. After Alexander the Great had accepted the surrender of Athens, he found Diogenes the Cynic living in a barrel.

"What can I do for you?" Alexander asked.

"Get out of my light," Diogenes said.

On the other hand, you, Mr. President, said that scientific progress "result from painstaking and costly research, from years of lonely trial and error, much of which never bears fruit, and from a government willing to support that work."

Thus it was that without King George's courtiers winding kite string for Ben Franklin and splitting firewood and flipping eye charts to advance his painstaking and costly research into electricity, stoves, and bifocals, Ben's years of lonely trial and error never would have borne fruit. To this day we would think the bright flash in a stormy summer sky is God having an allergy attack. We would heat our homes by burning piles of pithy sayings from Poor Richard's Almanac in the middle of the floor. And we would stare at our knitting through the bottoms of old Coke bottles.

We'd probably have telephones and light bulbs if President Rutherford B. Hayes (a Republican) had been willing to support the work of Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison. As you say, Mr. President, "When government fails to make these investments, opportunities are missed." (Although the light bulbs would now have to be replaced by flickering, squiggly fluorescent devices anyway, to reverse global warming.)

Also, Mr. President, you make a piss poor argument in favor of embarking on what you yourself admit is an uncertain course of action. You say, "At this moment, the full promise of stem cell research remains unknown, and it should not be overstated." And you find it necessary to say, "I can also promise you that we will never undertake this research lightly."

As your reasons for this research--which we are to perform with heavy hearts--you name a few misty hopes: "to regenerate a severed spinal cord," "lift someone from a wheelchair," "spare a child from a lifetime of needles." Then you undercut yourself by introducing a whole new fear. "And we will ensure that our government never opens the door to the use of cloning for human reproduction. It is dangerous, profoundly wrong, and has no place in our society." Because cloning cells to make a human life is so much worse than cloning cells from a human life that's already been destroyed. Why, it's as dangerous, as profoundly wrong, and has as little place in our society as being pro-life.

Mr. President, any high school debate team could do better. Even debate teams from those terrible inner-city public high schools that your ideology demands that you champion no matter how little knowledge they provide. And I particularly enjoyed the part of your speech where you said that "we make decisions based on facts, not ideology."

P.J. O'Rourke is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

The Next Big Stink

The killjoys are back. What do they have in store for us?

by P.J. O'Rourke
The Weekly Standard
http://www.weeklystandard.com/
02/09/2009, Volume 014, Issue 19


The killjoys are back in charge--the mopes, the fusstails, the glum pots. Their wet blanket has been thrown over the White House and Congress. They're worrying up a storm. (Good thing that George W. Bush is no longer in charge of the weather and FEMA the way he was during Hurricane Katrina.) America is experiencing a polar ice cap and financial meltdown, causing sea levels to rise and sending cold water flooding into Wall Street where the rapidly acidifying ocean is corroding our 401(k)s and releasing mortgage securities full of hot air into the atmosphere until our every breath is full of CO2 especially when we exhale, which should be banned when children are present lest their uninsured health care be harmed by second-hand greenhouse gases that are causing endangerment of plant and animal species (Republicans are extinct already), leading to a shortage of green, leafy vegetables vital to the fight against America's growing epidemics of obese hunger and housing foreclosures on the homeless.

You remember the killjoys. They've been all over liberal Democratic politics like ugly on an ape since the Carter adminis-tration. They are the people who conceived the late, little-mourned, double-nickel speed limit, which is doubtless now rising undead from its grave to turn us all into road zombies dragging ourselves down I‑70 numbed to a state of murderous catatonia by our 55-mile-per-hour rate of travel.

The killjoys initiated automobile crash standards so rigorous that we can't buy a car that hasn't been dropped from the top of a phone pole with our whole family strapped inside. (Click It or Ticket!) And they wrote the infant car seat regulations that require devices so complex, with such arcane rules for use, that each car seat now comes from the manufacturer with its own mechanical engineer and each infant comes from the maternity ward with its own lawyer.

Nor is the kid exempt from legislative backseat driving just because she (the pronoun that every publication with a Second Class mailing permit is federally mandated to use in alternate sentences) has emerged from the car. Children must now wear helmets to bike, ski, rollerblade, or skateboard and wear an additional helmet--in case they collide with hard porcelain and injure their tailbones--on their butts when they go to the toilet. The only time children are allowed to remove their safety helmets is when they catch a parent smoking cigarettes. In that case they can doff protective headgear to better reveal facial expressions of shock, horror, shame, and disappointment. (Barack, you stand warned.) Children learn these facial expressions in the 1,000 hours of compulsory anti-tobacco education that America's public schools have made time for by eliminating the minute of silence in the morning (courtesy of the ACLU) and also reading and math.

The only way I can sneak a smoke nowadays is to borrow a buddy's hunting cabin in the Maine backwoods, lock myself in the bathroom, and stand in the shower stall with the curtain pulled tight and the water running. You'd think this would extinguish my Marlboro Light. However, thanks to low-flow shower heads required by federal law to conserve a precious resource that I thought we were about to have too much of due to the melting of polar ice, I can smoke in the shower with the faucets on full blast and stay bone dry. (Flushing the filter tip down the water-conserving john is another matter.)

Sucking the fun out of life has always been a key component of political science. The inventors of modern politics, the English Puritans, are rightly a byword for buzz-kill and gloomocracy. The Puritans banned all theatrical performances because of the dangers of .  .  . mmmmm .  .  . they'd think of something .  .  . actors playing Mercutio and Tybalt having a sword fight in Romeo and Juliet without wearing bike helmets.

Creating alarms about trans fats or energy sustainability expands the purview of government almost as well as war, without all the patriarchal, exclusionist, sexist heroism and hurtful, insensitive, patriotic language. Gas prices frighteningly high? Declare a moral equivalent of Nagasaki. Arteries clogged? Pass a law requiring the chicken nugget fry-basket to be dunked in boiling mint tea.

Raining on parades requires no skill or effort on the part of a politician. This is what draws people--and Democrats--into politics. All a Democrat needs is the upper-story window of public attention and the chamber pot of rhetoric. How else to explain Joe Biden's rise as a flannel-mouthed, four-flushing, limelight-stealing head louse?

Being a poke-nose, a nanny-pants, and a wowser satisfies the pathetic need of the political class to feel self-important and powerful. Banning paper and plastic and making shoppers carry their groceries home in their mouths like dogs is just the thing to make a little tin humanist in the Obama West Wing think he's admiral of the Uzbek Navy.

Not that Pecksniff Buttinskiism is a strictly partisan matter. Long-lipped howler Republican Drys teamed up with spigot-bigot William Jennings Bryan to enact Prohibition. The GOP is home to blue noses of a size as if room had been made on Mt. Rushmore for a bust of Andrew Volstead. Meanwhile Democrats do have their pleasures--drinking bong water at gay weddings and so forth. Plus there is the Kennedy family to be considered, with their penchant for exciting risk--skiing into trees, sleeping with the babysitter, and claiming entitlement to New York Senate seats.

Republicans stick their schnozollas into other people's underpants and stashes (but not gun cabinets). In the matter of scolding foreigners and muscling in on the governance of lesser breeds without the law, Republicans are a regular pain in the atlas. But it is the Democrats who've learned to make political honey out of minding other people's beeswax. Not satisfied with mere bossy irritation of the public, Democrats have created whole branches of government--the Department of Labor, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education, the Department of Tofu and Sprouts. Democrats have opened barrels of (USDA inspected!) pork sufficient to feed all of their high-binding and wire-pulling friends, relatives, cronies, and the state government of Illinois. Democratic wisenheimers have managed to get themselves elected Big Chief Itch-and-Rub of every worry and to be appointed Pharaoh of Fret for every concern. They are the Party of Eliot Spitzer. And we the citizenry are Eliot Spitzer's wife.

How are the Democrats going to demean and humiliate us next? What issue will the Democrats fasten upon as a threat to the commonweal and a hazard to the planet? What busybody ordinance and ass-and-elbows regulation will be put upon the books for our own good?

It's important to find out what type of private interest or kind of human enjoy-ment the Democrats are going to pass a law against. We could lobby to defeat it. (Although our best lobbyists are in jail.) We could brace ourselves to endure it. (Although our endurance--witness the paltry vote against Timothy "H&R Block" Geithner--is nearly exhausted.) Or we could plan strategies to resist the oppression. (Dig hole behind garage; buy enormous freezer; hide the red meat.)

There are several ways to make a prediction about what the Democrats will outlaw. We might calculate the greatest statistical danger to Americans. That would be death. According to The Statistical Abstract of the United States there is a 1:1 rate of occurrence. But it's hard to engage in an Obama-style "dialogue" with dead people, even though they do vote in Cook County. There is, in theory, a "death tax," but enforcement difficulties arise when the deceased don't pay it. Rahm Emanuel is, we are almost certain, a vampire. But whether this will give the Obama administration a pro- or anti-death tilt is unclear.

Another way to foretell proscription is to look at the most common or frequently occurring danger to Americans. What causes the most crime, violence, unemployment, divorce, disease, and mental illness? But that brings us back to Andrew Volstead, who was a Republican. Democrats will have to be satisfied with nibbling around the edges of this issue, providing additional funding for local enforcement efforts to curtail Managing a Hedge Fund While Impaired, etc. Also Democratic party loyalist trial lawyers can be given greater scope, allowing more bar and restaurant patrons to sue for being "Over-Served." Some friends of mine and I are bringing a class action suit against P.J. Clarke's in New York, where we met our first wives.

Or we could simply poll the nation and determine what the average American perceives as the greatest danger. Young black males in hoodies. But any action on this front would put the Obama administration in danger of support by Bill Cosby.

In fact, we'd be wrong to use any of the above methods to foresee what Democrats will attempt to constrain or forbid. A better way to approach the problem is to ask, "What would annoy the most people the most often?" That is the true test of government intervention in life. The Secular Grail of liberal Democrats is a program or policy that combines the intrusion of the census, the depredations of the income tax, the duress of school busing to achieve racial balance, the expense of Social Security, the nuisance of Medicare paperwork, the inconvenience of car registration, the pettiness of a congressional investigation, and the fine print on the label of flame-resistant children's pajamas.

My guess is that the next great government crusade will be against soap. The president will appoint a Blue Ribbon Commission, which will determine that soap releases polluting grime into the ecosystem, leads to aquifer depletion, and contains fatty acids that laboratory studies have shown to be acidic and not fat-free. Soap encourages teenage pregnancy as well as adult sexual activity with multiple partners, driving America's divorce rate higher, causing more children to live under the poverty line in single-parent households. Soap is a factor in many cases of child abuse, according to small boys in bathtubs. Soap bubbles may contain methane, especially if rising to the surface of bath water containing small boys. Soap marketing sends the wrong message about the Ivory trade and also about Irish Spring, which is being altered by climate change. Soap degrades the flame-resistant properties of children's pajamas. And soap makes whales foam when they spout.

Socialism--you can smell it coming.

P.J. O'Rourke is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.