Conservative-on-Conservative Violence (of the written sort)
By Alan Stewart Carl | Related entries in Conservatism, LiberalismP. J. O’Rourke takes a rhetorical tire iron to the conservative movement of which he’s been on the libertarian side of since the 1970s. If you know O’Rourke, you know he has about as much love for modern liberals as dogs have for cats. Seems he now finds modern conservatives just as hideous.
You don’t have to agree with O’Rourke to enjoy this article. Some excerpts:
There was no need to piss off the entire black population of America to get Dixie’s electoral votes. And despising cracker trash who have a laundry hamper full of bedsheets with eye-holes cut in them does not make a man a liberal.
…
And “bioenergy” is a fraud of John Edwards-marital-fidelity proportions. Taxpayer money composted to produce a fuel made of alcohol that is more expensive than oil, more polluting than oil, and almost as bad as oil with vermouth and an olive.
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Is there a moral dimension to foreign policy in our political philosophy? Or do we just exist to help the world’s rich people make and keep their money? (And a fine job we’ve been doing of that lately.)
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Anyway, it’s no use blaming Wall Street. Blaming Wall Street for being greedy is like scolding defensive linemen for being big and aggressive…
What will destroy our country and us is not the financial crisis but the fact that liberals think the free market is some kind of sect or cult, which conservatives have asked Americans to take on faith. That’s not what the free market is. The free market is just a measurement, a device to tell us what people are willing to pay for any given thing at any given moment. The free market is a bathroom scale. You may hate what you see when you step on the scale. “Jeeze, 230 pounds!” But you can’t pass a law making yourself weigh 185. Liberals think you can. And voters–all the voters, right up to the tippy-top corner office of Goldman Sachs–think so too.
Ahh, it’s like mouthwash for libertarians. Read it.
h/t: Sideways Menken
This entry was posted on Monday, November 10th, 2008 and is filed under Conservatism, Liberalism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
November 10th, 2008 at 4:41 pm
I dunno, Alan. I read that article twice over the weekend and it seemed like a garbled mess. I hadn’t thought libertarianism at all when I read the piece, but rather, *How much Bushmills was left in that bottle?* Personally I find libertarianism to be mostly impractical, but then I make things harder than they have to be so it’s probably just me.
November 10th, 2008 at 4:58 pm
Remember that time on “Gilligan’s Island” when that wacky Japanese sailor coasts into the lagoon in his little submarine, and tries to take everybody hostage, because he thinks World War II is still going on?
Japanese sailor = O’Rourke
Ssubmarine = The 1980s
World Warl II = Ronnie Raygun (hey, double metaphor!)
The Castaways = The rest of us marooned in Reality
It’s nice for P.J. to drop by every so often, in his little time machine.
November 10th, 2008 at 7:40 pm
As long as the libertarians are the kind that buy into RNC talking points about the evil liberals, maybe.
November 14th, 2008 at 2:40 am
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