Free Republic

Well, here you are at your college graduation. And I know what you’re thinking: “Gimme the sheepskin and get me outta here!” Not so fast. First you have to listen to a commencement speech. Don’t moan. I’m not going to “pass the wisdom of one generation down to the next.” I’m a member of the 1960s generation. We didn’t have any wisdom. We were the moron generation. We were the generation who believed we could stop the war in Vietnam by growing our hair long and dressing like circus clowns. We believed drugs would change everything—which they did, for John...

America is in the midst of an all-important electoral campaign. But, talking to Europeans, I've discovered that there is puzzlement and misinformation on your continent about what's happening on ours. Europeans feel an understandable confusion when faced with a political system consisting of two houses of Congress and a White House, and nobody is home in any of them. Also, America's political parties are indistinguishable to the European eye. A British journalist once described the situation thus: "America is a one-party state, but just like Americans they've got two of them." (I forget which British journalist said that. But there...

O'Rourke will be interviewed about his writing and respond to viewer call-ins between noon and 3PM EST on C-Span2's "In Depth" Sunday afternoon......

William O’Rourke of the State Correctional Institution at Dallas fears for his safety. JACKSON TWP. (PA) – For 10 years William O’Rourke says he’s tolerated the name calling and threats leveled at him in retaliation for reporting the theft of thousands of pounds of meat from the State Correctional Institution at Dallas. Catcalls of “snitch” and “rat” were common, as were threats to plant drugs in his car and a host of other “petty” acts meant to irritate and harass him, he said. But when he discovered the lug nuts on one wheel of his 1995 Chevrolet Blazer had been...

  A writer's life: P J O'Rourke (Filed: 20/12/2005) The author and essayist tells Christopher Bray he'd rather clean the fridge than write.  "America has to act. But, when America acts, other nations accuse us of being 'hegemonistic', of engaging in 'unilateralism', of behaving as if we're the only nation on earth that counts. We are." Who wrote this? That's right. It's P J O'Rourke, letting another poor booby tire himself out by bouncing pompously around the ring until such time as our man deems it fitting to deliver one of his knockout, two-syllable blows. No big words for...

CHIEF AMONG THE MARVELOUS QUALITIES of liberalism is its ability to see the good in human suffering--and make a good thing of it. How like the early Christians, if the early Christians had been in politics. Hurricane Katrina was a blessing to liberals, a consecrated opportunity to make advocates of small government look small, to enlarge largess with a public dole of private goods, to expand the elemental purview of politics to include earth, water, air, and (with gas at $3) fire, and to shrink the reputation of a despised president. Hurricane Rita, with its sensible actions by state and...

On Sunday, October 2 at 10:45 pm A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War Victor Davis Hanson Description: Author and military historian Victor Davis Hanson speaks about his new book, "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War." It chronicles the 27-year battle fought around 400 B.C. between Athens and Sparta. Mr. Hanson draws some parallels between the Greek war and the wars of today, including the present war in Iraq. The book classifies the Peloponnesian War as one consisting of enormous battles (on land and at...

The first issue of this magazine appeared in September 1995, part way through the Clinton administration, and less than a year after the Republican victory in the congressional elections of 1994. The pressing foreign policy issue of the day was Bosnia. The world seems a very different place today. To mark our 10th anniversary, we invited several of our valued contributors to reflect on the decade past and, at least indirectly, on the years ahead. More specifically, we asked them to address this question: "On what issue or issues (if any!) have you changed your mind in the last 10...

GuadeloupeTHE FRENCH REFERENDUM on the E.U. constitution was a story that demanded to be viewed and understood from a thoroughly European perspective, so I went on vacation. Guadeloupe, in the Caribbean, is a full-fledged département of France. Here the European Union could be contemplated as the socio-politico-economic masterwork of a civilization, an edifice of human hope. And never mind that previous attempts to unify Europe by Hitler, Napoleon, and Attila the Hun didn't work out, it had been a cold, rainy spring in New England.At passport control there were two lines. One official sat complacently in a booth doing nothing...

Atlantic Unbound | August 2, 2004 Interviews A Conversation With Colin Powell Colin Powell and P. J. O'Rourke discuss foreign policy, Volvos, Elvis, and more. The full transcript of an interview from the September 2004 Atlantic ..... deas are important, and, of course, actions are. But interviews are rude. Any child will let you know this when pumped about what he did in school that day. And imagine interviewing your spouse at breakfast: "What's your opinion of passing the toast? How do you feel about the eggs you made? Will we stay married?" On the other hand, conversation is good,...

1) Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself. ............Mark Twain 2) I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle. ........Winston Churchill 3) A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul. .............George Bernard Shaw 4) A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money. ............G. Gordon Liddy...

1) My opponent, Massachusetts senator John Kerry--or, as I like to think of him, Teddy Kennedy with a designated driver . . .

Frankly, nothing concerning foreign policy ever occurred to me until the middle of the last decade. I'd been writing about foreign countries and foreign affairs and foreigners for years. But you can own dogs all your life and not have "dog policy".You have rules, yes - Get off the couch! - and training, sure. We want the dumb creatures to be well behaved and friendly. So we feed foreigners, take care of them, give them treats, and, when absolutely necessary, whack them with a rolled-up newspaper. That was as far as my foreign policy thinking went until the middle 1990s,...

On Sunday, June 27 at 12:30 am and at 9:30 am and at 7:00 pm Peace Kills: America's Fun New Imperialism P.J. O'Rourke Description: Olsson's Books and Records in Arlington, Virginia, welcomes author P.J. O'Rourke to talk about his new book "Peace Kills: America's Fun New Imperialism." In his eleventh book, a collection of essays, Mr. O'Rourke takes a look at American foreign policy. He includes an account of his trips to Israel and Egypt and looks at the attacks of September 11 and the effect they had on airport security. After the discussion, Mr. O'Rourke answers questions from the...

I have only one firm belief about the American political system, and that is this: God is a Republican and Santa Claus is a Democrat. God is an elderly or, at any rate, middle aged male, a stern fellow, patriarchal rather than paternal and a great believer in rules and regulations. He holds men accountable for their actions. He has little apparent concern for the material well being of the disadvantaged. He is politically connected, socially powerful and holds the mortgage on literally everything in the world. God is difficult. God is unsentimental. It is very hard to get ...

The individual is the wellspring of conservatism. The purpose of conservative politics is to defend the liberty of the individual and - lest individualism run riot - insist upon individual responsibility. The great religions (and conservatives are known for approving of God) teach salvation as an individual matter. There are no group discounts in the Ten Commandments, Christ was not a committee, and Allah does not welcome believers into Paradise saying, "You weren't much good yourself, but you were standing near some good people." That we are individuals - unique, disparate and willful - is something we understand instinctively from...

It's been almost a century since America had an ex-President who occupied such commanding ground. Bill Clinton is full of energy, full of ambition, full of other things. What Clinton will do next is an always interesting question, the more so now, when there is so little left that he hasn't done. A man who's devoted his life to scaling a height has run out of summit. Will he descend like Moses? Fall like Teddy Roosevelt? Jump? Be pushed? Or will Bill Clinton keep climbing past the peak, in the manner of a cartoon character, on into the air? For...

In the linked interview at The Atlantic Online, P. J. O'Rourke has this to say about the differences between libertarianism and conservatism: Libertarianism is a way of measuring how the government and other kinds of systems respect the individual. At the core of libertarianism is the idea that the individual is sacrosanct and that anything that's done contrary to the well-being of the individual needs some pretty serious justification. The burden of proof should always be on people who want to restrict the individual's liberty and responsibility. That's different from conservatism. In its worse forms, conservatism is a matter of...

Corporate corruption has its advantages. CORPORATE CORRUPTION endangers everything in which we have, over the past many years, invested our time, effort, and money--particularly Republican control of the House of Representatives. And our 401(k) plans aren't doing so well either. In this period of gloom--with liberals seeking to make hay from capitalist foibles and our own capitalist foibles reduced in value to bales of ditto--it behooves us to look for a moment at the bright side of corporate corruption. That is, assuming there's any corruption. It may be semantics. When senators and representatives get together in Congress to fix prices...

Guidelines for Bias-Free Writing, by Marilyn Schwartz and the Task Force on Bias-Free Language of the Association of American University Presses A review by P.J. O'Rourke [From The American Spectator August, 1995.] Says the press release that arrived with this volume, "Anyone who spends even a few minutes with the book will be a better writer." And, indeed, I feel a spate of better writing coming on. The pharisaical, malefic, and incogitant Guidelines for Bias-Free Writing is a product of the pointy-headed wowsers at the Association of American University Presses, who in 1987 established a "Task Force on Bias-Free Language"...