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
People say, 'Oh, politics is so polarized today,' and I'm thinking... '1861, that was polarized.'
No doubt the ridiculous politicians are right to like politics. They have found careers in which success can be achieved by being ridiculous. Imagine Jimmy Carter or George W. Bush rising to the top of any other profession.
Politics is the attempt to achieve power and prestige without merit.
Politics is a necessary evil, or a necessary annoyance, a necessary conundrum.
There are two factors in American politics that may seem strange to Europeans: race and religion.
Is Bill Clinton so good at politics, or are other politicians so bad?
Politics is - once in a while - a forum for serious debate about political philosophy.
I think that humor has become a principle means of communication among Americans about politics.
Politics is the one field you don't age out of.
The minute somebody joins a committee... they immediately suffer from committee brain. They become wildly over-enthusiastic, over-optimistic, over-pessimistic. Committees turn people into idiots, and politics is a committee.
The Bible is very clear about one thing: Using politics to create fairness is a sin.
The best and brightest don't go into politics. The best and brightest are at Goldman Sachs.
The baby boomers' politics have covered a wide band of silliness, from the Weather Underground to the Timothy McVeigh types. The great majority of us are well in the middle of that spectrum, but still, there's been both leftie silliness and right-wing silliness.
Conservatives really don't believe in politics as the primary instrument of getting along in life and therefore don't tend to put their energy into it a way people left of center do.