P.J. O’Rourke, once a great conservative slammer of liberal idiocies, now another half-drunk passenger on the same leaky “inclusive” boat along with the l likes of Peggy Noonan and Christopher Buckley. What can I say except that it looks like sooner or later the effects of being college-age in the Sixties come out, kind of like shingles. And the effects are just as painful and embarrassing — though usually the pain and embarrassment is suffered by onlookers and former fans.
Eh. Anyway, I think P.J. jumped the shark a while back. I haven’t been able to get through his latest couple of books, whatever they were called — they just rambled all over the place and repeated, weakly, things he’d already said in earlier, funnier works. Florence King had the sense to stop writing when she realized she’d run out of things to say. Time to put away the keyboard, Peej.
7 Responses to “Mow your own goddamn lawn, fat boy”
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November 9th, 2008 at 8:35 pm
Couldn’t agree more about the PJ books. I absolutely loved Holidays in Hell (and Republican Party Reptile was pretty good). But I couldn’t get through Eat the Rich and haven’t bothered with any since.
I think he lost it when he joined Cato. Libertarianism. A word that precise doesn’t allow room for ‘funny’.
November 10th, 2008 at 8:56 am
I used to enjoy P.J. quite a bit myself. I wonder (rather cynically) how much of it is him trying to broaden his audience?
November 10th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
Even P.J. O’Rourke gets sloppy.
The black vote was lost to the Republicans before the New Deal. That it was the Republicans that put LBJ’s Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act over the top has gained the party nothing except the satisfaction of being right.
November 10th, 2008 at 3:30 pm
“That it was the Republicans that put LBJ’s Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act over the top has gained the party nothing except the satisfaction of being right.”
For which there is, of course, something to be said…
November 10th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
Penn Jillette is libertarian and funny. I suspect that it’s more PJ O’R has worn out. Or maybe it was CATO and going establishment rather than libertarianism per se.
November 10th, 2008 at 9:05 pm
Yeh, I’m pretty sure they ‘straightened him out’ at Cato, although The Shaidle thinks it may have been the effect of marriage. Cato’s David Bose and the like are great people – it could be more of a New Libertarian thing, like New Christians, they tend to be humourless.
November 11th, 2008 at 1:30 am
Years ago, I came across P.J. O’Rourke’s writing and although then more of a liberal than I care to admit to now, I immediately became a fan. That enthusiasm dimmed mainly I think because P.J. didn’t seem to make the Internet leap that many other writers did: I’d read Mark Steyn or Lileks, for example, and think “I haven’t heard from P.J. for awhile” and what I did read of his no longer had neither the keen wit nor caustic insight of his earlier work. It’s a shame: one would have thought P.J. would’ve had been positioned to become a major blogger and while that may be mostly an empty title, he could’ve leveraged that status in the same way as Steyn or Lileks.