P. J. O'Rourke
P. J. O'Rourke
Patrick Jake "P. J." O'Rourkeis an American political satirist and journalist. O'Rourke is the H. L. Mencken Research Fellow at the Cato Institute and is a regular correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, The American Spectator, and The Weekly Standard, and frequent panelist on National Public Radio's game show Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!. Since 2011 O'Rourke has been a columnist at The Daily Beast. In the United Kingdom, he is known as the face of a long-running series of television...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionComedian
Date of Birth14 November 1947
CountryUnited States of America
The anti-individualist enemies that Ayn Rand battled are still the enemy, but they've shifted their line of attack. Political collectivists are no longer much interested in taking things away from the wealthy and creative.
As a longtime former resident of 15 years in Washington, I wish that everybody would stay off the Mall with their political cause so that we can get out there, you know, and play flag football or Frisbee, or walk the dog or something - you know, which is, you know, what the National Mall should be for, in my personal opinion.
Political discourse has become so rotten that it's no longer possible to tell the stench of one presidential candidate from the stink of another.
War will exist as long as there's a food chain.
The wonder is that communism lasted so long. But then again, modern poetry lasted a long time, too.
It takes a lot of weapons to do good works (as Richard the Lionhearted could have told us). And this is not just a Somali problem. We have poverty and deprivation in our own country. Try standing unarmed on a street corner in Compton handing out twenty-dollar bills and see how long you last.
The Constitution is an equally forthright piece of work and quite succinct ... giving the complete operating instructions for a nation of 250 million people. The manual for a Toyota Camry, which only seats five, is four times as long.
In comparative terms, there's no poverty in America by a long shot. Heritage Foundation political scientist Robert Rector has worked up figures showing that when the official U.S. measure of poverty was developed in 1963, a poor American family had an income twenty-nine times greater than the average per capita income in the rest of the world. An individual American could make more money than 93 percent of the other people on the planet and still be considered poor.
The body is forever teaching us lessons. There are all sorts of things that we can't do, shouldn't do, had better not do very often or do for too long as we get older. The body makes its presence known.
Golf combines two favorite American pastimes: taking long walks and hitting things with a stick.
Long conversations with pals when neither you nor they have had a drink can be a test of palship.
We will win an election when all the seats in the House and Senate and the chair behind the desk in the Oval Office and the whole bench of the Supreme Court are filled with people who wish they weren't there.
The subculture of felons is in great vogue among adolescents. Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, and so forth allow us Republicans to say to America's young people, 'We be thugs.' The GOP may capture the youth vote at last.
I spent a lot of time behind the Iron Curtain, and their cars were abysmal.