I've got your elitist snob right here

Carla Axtman

I've often noticed that those of us who surf the left side of American politics are often spurned by the punditry class who inhabit the right. We're the latte-drinking liberals whose penchant for snottily emphasizing our education bona fides is only eclipsed by our rancid desire to pick the pockets of the taxpayer. We're the elitists, the snobs, the lookie-loos who peer down our noses at the great unwashed masses of the red swath on the national map.

Yeah..well kiss my ass righties. PJ O'Rourke has now out-snobbed the liberals.

Apparently its not we liberals fault that we're goosestepping morons who believe that freedom and liberty is the toilet paper by which we wipe the words of the founding fathers off our morally corrupt backsides.

No wonder the GOP is losing the electorate.

  • Joel H (unverified)
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    Huh?

    It's a pretty good article about the total, unambiguous, catastrophic, probably permanent failure of the GOP, from a semi-libertarian conservative icon. Don't take the sniping at "liberals" personally... He's wrong about that, but he's totally right about the degeneration of "conservatives".

  • Scott Jorgensen (unverified)
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    Two things are apparent from that article and this post:

    1. Carla Axtman has no sense of irony.
    2. P.J. O'Rourke is one million times the writer Carla is, or could ever hope to be.
  • Joel H (unverified)
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    And by the way...

    Anyway, a low tax rate is not--never mind the rhetoric of every conservative politician--a bedrock principle of conservatism. The principle is fiscal responsibility.

    Pay attention to this guy.

  • Zarathustra (unverified)
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    He may be right, but he's still full of himself. That's why the right foam at the mouth about Ted Kennedy; he's the only leftie to get that inflated Rep. air.

    It's like listening to an AA confession. But it's about how they wasted the best years of our lives. So, how about he establishes his credentials to be explaining things to those that always said it would play out this way and didn't make the same mistake? Right to react to name calling in that context!

  • gabe (unverified)
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    More than willing Carla but is it a "nice one" ?

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    Some are apparently blind to what is staring them in the face: the Self-righteous arrogance that fairly oozes out of O'Rourke's petulant rant.

    Sheer, unadulterated arrogance is the horse that dragged the GOP cart over the precipice last week. But it's a journey that conservatives have been on since Reagan took office. Dubya and McCain were merely the guys lashing the horse from the cart seat at the end of a long journey.

    Perhaps a better metaphor... O'Rourke's rant is the equivilent of arguing over how to selectively log trees in midst of a forest fire while sloshing gasoline around. Removing the trees he points out won't change anything as long as he continues to slosh gas around.

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    Carla, you forget: P.J. is the "funny" conservative. if P.J. writes it, it's funny. cuz he's the "funny" conservative.

    you're just a sore loser.

  • Rulial (unverified)
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    Mr. O'Rourke's laissez-faire economic ideology hasn't appealed to me since I went through my Ayn Rand-reading phase as a teenager. (Yes, I regret that phase very much.) However, I would greatly prefer it to what the GOP has been dishing out for the last few decades. At least the libertarians wouldn't have run up the nation's credit card, started an appalling war, run roughshod over our civil liberties, and tried to drum up electoral support by crapping on LGBT people.

    Also, I found this passage hilarious:

    George W. Bush, at his most beneficent, said if illegal immigrants wanted citizenship they would have to do three things: Pay taxes, learn English, and work in a meaningful job. Bush doesn't meet two out of three of those qualifications.

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    So is the only way for a conservative libertarian to really get to the bottom of the abject failures of the Republican Party to blame themselves for the wretched liberals and their freedom-hating, anti-patriotic ways?

    And I'm supposed to see this as ironic? Seriously?

    Fans of this guy (not to mention O'Rourke) need to get over themselves. As long as they continue to hump this kind of rhetoric, they can't possibly win back the electorate.

  • Rulial (unverified)
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    Carla, I agree that much of what O'Rourke wrote about liberals was asinine, especially the bit about I-95. I wouldn't want to live under his heartless leadership. But even his heartlessness would be an improvement over the heartlessness topped with cronyism and incompetence that has been pushed by the current administration. I am truly ecstatic that this will come to an end in a few months.

  • Zarathustra (unverified)
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    George W. Bush, at his most beneficent, said if legal
    immigrants wanted citizenship they would have to do three
    things: Pay taxes, learn English, and work in a meaningful job. Bush doesn't meet two out of three of those qualifications.

    Which one does he meet? "Learn" implies study of correct syntax and grammar as opposed to just picking up some. I assume that was the one he was supposed to meet.

    Any kind of humor or irony feels kreepy given the reality. Lest we forget, at his least beneficent he said it was OK to snipe across the border.

  • joel dan walls (unverified)
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    Two things are apparent from that article and this post:

    1. Carla Axtman has no sense of irony. 2. P.J. O'Rourke is one million times the writer Carla is, or could ever hope to be.

    O'Rourke used to be funny. That Weekly Standard piece was simply obnoxious, not funny. Ms. Axtman had it just right.

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    PJ O'Rourke is a worthless jagbag.

    I welcome a right-wing assault on Hyde Park (a place O'Rourke and his friends wouldn't even get out of their cars--except to go to B-School) as a hot bed of elitism. What a self-evidently ridiculous crusade that will be.

    As someone who spent five of the most meaningful years of his life living in that neighborhood, I can't even imagine how the old folks eating breakfast at the Valois would react to being told they are the new elite! Ha! I wonder if that means the Chicago Police Department will stop shooting their grandkids?

  • admiral_naismith (unverified)
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    Well, that was fun. I guess I'm off to drag my hemp-wearing, mandela tatted, America hating self off to my lice-ridden smelly bed in my crack-infested liberal neighborhood housing project in the hardcore streets of Roseburg. Maybe play me some cop-killa rap to help boogie me to sleep while I'm at it.

    It's a privilege to take constructive criticism from someone who clearly knows us as well as ol' PJ.

  • Neal Skorpen (unverified)
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    The guy makes some good points and shows signs of human decency. But I don't see how he can reconcile this:

    The real message of the conservative pro-life position is that we're in favor of living. We consider people--with a few obvious exceptions--to be assets. Liberals consider people to be nuisances. People are always needing more government resources to feed, house, and clothe them and to pick up the trash around their FEMA trailers and to make sure their self-esteem is high enough to join community organizers lobbying for more government resources.

    with the oozing contempt here:

    Under constant political pressure, which went almost unresisted by conservatives, a lot of lousy mortgages that would never be repaid were handed out to Jim Jerk and his drinking buddies and all the ex-wives and single mothers with whom Jim and his pals have littered the nation.

    Anyway, no one is a bigger elitist snob than George Will.

  • Jason (unverified)
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    "Yeah..well kiss my ass righties."

    Carla, welcome to 8th grade.

    How sophomoric.

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    I found it encouraging Carla.

    The guy is still trapped by his lists of "obvious" truths. Toward the end of the article while decrying liberal depictions of "the free market" as religion, he continues to make faith based rather than fact based agruments in its favor.

    Couple this with Michael Barone's recent call for Obama to strive for the precision in public speech exhibited by Bush, I'm just delighted at the intellectual backruptcy of these idiots.

    The image of a freshly decapitated snake keeps crossing the inside of my eyelids.

  • ChickieBlue (unverified)
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    What always astounds me about his writing is how little he understands liberalism.

    Anyway, this is fairly classic P.J., in its style. I just sounds so SNOOTY.

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    It's not that he doesn't understand liberalism. It's just easier for demagogues to thrash a Strawman Fallacy than to be intellectually honest with their audience. I don't doubt for a second that O'Rourke understands liberalism. Nor do I doubt that he was under any delusions about the Strawman he chose to create in this piece.

    O'Rourke isn't ignorant. He's dishonest.

  • EngineerScotty (unverified)
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    O'Rourke is first and foremost, a humorist, and a fine one. While it may be the case that "many a truth is spoken in jest"; it seems to me he's making fun of conservative stereotypes of liberals (i.e. the whole getting stoned on I-95 thing) rather than liberals themselves.

    Given the source, I wouldn't get too upset about this. This is a lot different than Rush Limbaugh or Sarah Palin ranting about treacherous leftists.

  • s.gothman (unverified)
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    Jeez, this yet another new low for BlueOregon. We, as a nation, as supposed to be rolling up our sleeves and coming together to fix the many problems we as Americans face. Bashing a humorist -- and one that, as we speak, is battling cancer -- does nothing to move us forward, and, instead, seeks only to divide us even further. As a flaming liberal, it sickens me to see what children a lot of you are. Grow the F up.

  • LiveRideOR (unverified)
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    First, this is divisive and unproductive rhetoric that does nothing but dichotomize the "right" vs. the "left." I'm sincerely dreaming of a day when we will all just be Oregonians and Americans working together for pragmatic solutions.

    Second, please learn how to use punctuation if you ever want your writing to be read with legitimacy.

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    O'Rourke's take on conservatism has been more succinctly summed up by Rick Perlstein in just seven words when he observed that, for conservatives, "conservatism never fails, it is only failed." If a conservative President like George W. Bush turns in one EPIC FAIL of a Presidency, he must not really be a conservative because a conservative by definition cannot be a failure; instead, it is only because George W. Bush was too weak to resist the siren song of liberalism that his Presidency is one giant shitberg, the complete dimensions of which still remain concealed from view, or so the line of reasoning goes.

    This pathetic excusemaking by conservatives reminds me of some conversations from around the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, when someone would say "The collapse of the Soviet Union proves that communism was a complete failure," and someone would respond by saying "No, we'll never know if communism was a failure or not because true communism has never really been tried." I expect we will hear more of this over the coming years, as conservatives insist that real conservatism was never really tried and that Delay, Gingrich, Hastert, Bush, Cheney, Rummy, Lott, McConnell and all the other Republicans who played such a prominent role in our politics from 1994 to 2008 weren't real conservatives.

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    Jim Jerk vs. Joe the Plumber. Smackdown!

  • Chuck Butcher (unverified)
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    The problem for conservative humorists and their fans is that they've killed most forms of it, irony is pointless when your party is one long exercise in it, satire is impossible when your existance is based on exaggeration, what is left is Rickles humor, snide half clever insults. You tell people, "If you keep doing this, this is going to happen," and then they blame you because it happened. It is Rush calling this the Obama Recession/Depression. How are you going to satirize this or exercise irony?

    This level of "humor" exercised by PJ may appeal to Joel Dan but most of us got over this about the time we got driver's licenses, the ones that didn't voted for the crap PJ is so over wrought about. PJ's a smart guy, but he put his intellect to work fluffing the surface of his ideology rather than investigating it, he is flatly lazy. PJ does the comic book version of Ayn Rand's potboiler egocentric novels based on the surface appearance of an ideology that has managed to fail spectacularly every time leaving someone else to pick up the pieces and put it back together until the next memory lapse. Ayn may have the excuse of recoiling from Communism and an ignorance of capitalistic history but PJ is a child of privilege and high zoot education - maybe a class induced lack of work ethic is his problem.

    He can't figure out the investment mess? You've got $6T in mortgages and $60T paper written on them and you can't figure out why it went wrong? You've got $10 bet on every $1 how many of the $1 going south kills you? Not many and then it cascades because credit is gone and wages going and lay offs... But PJ's real smart real funny guy. He and his wealthy friends will walk away from this wealthy, the rest of us? So what's your recourse? Make me laugh. There is one, but it's frowned upon and illegal since they don't issue tags for ratbastards...there'd be a long line if they did.

    Now PJ wouldn't find that line funny would he?

  • joshuawelch (unverified)
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    You rock Carla!

  • rw (unverified)
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    I always laughed at O'Rourke. It's just humor. From either side, it slices and sometimes is unpleasantly right on. I'm sure that any conservatives who were listening to Wait Wait Don't Tell Me yesterday [ok, that's me in fantasy land - never happens!], they'd be foaming at the mouth at the skewers that were repeatedly delivered to Palin et. al. I found myself cackling guiltily.

    I knew it was cheap, but, hell, she is still circulating and plans to try for it again. So they plan, as they say, to "We'll stop when SHE stops".

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