LB, we might all need a dose of P J O'Rourke~~ Here's his thoughts on "Politics" earlier this fall while at a dinner here in Washington State....The laughs will help us get through this next "mess"......
Speaker Notes
washingtonpolicy.org
Annual Dinner Speech
September 29, 2004
P. J. O'Rourke
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me here this evening. And I would like to personally apologize for what Mt. St. Helen 's is about to do to the Pacific Northwest . I had no idea Mt. St. Helen 's was a Republican. Of course this is a non-partisan event tonight and it's not that the Washington Policy Center doesn't take sides. It does take sides. The Washington Policy Center is opposed to many Democratic politicians. It's also opposed to many Republican politicians. It is even, conceivably, opposed to libertarian politicians if and when Libertarian politicians get elected in any significant numbers. And this is because what the Washington Policy Center opposes is anyone who believes that politics is the answer to all of society's ills. By thinking that politics is the answer for everything it is like writing a cookbook where everything is fried. The fruit cocktail is fried. The soup is fried. The salad is fried. So is the ice cream and the cake and your pinot noir is rolled in bread crumbs and dunked in the deep fat fryer. This is no way to cook up policy.
Now I'm here tonight, I guess, in my capacity as a political humorist. But, you know, after 30 years of making fun of political issues I have decided, contrary to all the accepted rules of political humor, that I hate politics. And I don't just hate bad politics. I hate all politics. I even hate democracy. Imagine if our clothes were selected by a majority vote. We would be all sitting here with our midriffs exposed. Not a good idea for some of us. Imagine if child-rearing were conducted by universal suffrage. The Bush twins would be our problem. Of course, democratic elections are necessary. So are colonoscopies. What would we think about a person who eagerly looked forward to frequent experience of colonoscopies or elections? I am, as you perhaps can tell, not a get-out-the-vote kind of guy. I figure America has all the ignoramus voters it needs. I wish MTV would run ads saying, you know, election 2004, could you kids care less. Why don't you just stay home and smoke dope?
Politically, it's an interesting situation right now. We have two forces for change in the world, Al Qaeda and the Democratic Party, both with the same message: We're gonna fix you, America . On the whole, the terrorists have a more straightforward plan for fixing things. They're gonna blow themselves up. Although, come to think of it, Howard Dean did that. Two big political issues in this election are Iraq and the economy. The democrats were all set to run on the economy and then, damn it, the economy got better. That left Iraq . John Kerry said that he was in favor of threatening to use force on Saddam Hussein, but that actually using force on Saddam Hussein was wrong. The technical term for this in political science is bullshit. Personally, I liked Howard Dean's stance on Iraq a lot better. Howard, I miss Howard Dean, I do. Howard Dean wanted a cold war on terrorism. Dean said that. He said we won the Cold War without firing a shot, a statement that came as something of a surprise to veterans of Korea and Vietnam , but that's what Dean said. He said we won the cold war without firing a shot because we were able to offer the communists a better ideal. And I'm thinking, well, gee, okay, but what is this better ideal that Dean wants to offer the Islamic fundamentalists? Is Dean going to go to the suicide bombers and say to them, "Our President is a born-again. You're religious lunatics, we're religious lunatics. America was founded by religious lunatics, how ‘bout those Salem witch trials? Come to America -- You could be Osama Bin Ashcroft. You could have your own state like Utah run by religious lunatics. You can have the Islamic Fundamentalists Winter Olympics if you wanted."
What happened to Howard Dean? Everybody loved him because he acted like Daffy Duck and then in Iowa he acted like Daffy Duck and, ka-bam ! He was standing there with charred feathers and his beak blown off. I was upset because I belong to a core group of Dean fans. We're called George Bush voters and we've shifted our support to Ralph Nader. Yes, I am a Bush voter. But I've got to tell you, I'm a reluctant Bush voter, because don't even get me started on some of my frustrations with President Bush. Basically, I'm voting for him because the other guy is John Kerry and I think of John Kerry as Ted Kennedy with a designated driver.
Okay, faith-based initiatives. Now religious charities work because the government isn't involved. So I know what to do, let's involve the government, right? No Child Left Behind. What if they deserve to be left behind? What if they deserve a smack on the behind? National testing program to test whether kids are, what, stupid? You have kids, kids are stupid. Constitutional ban on gay marriage. I don't get it. How about a constitutional ban on first marriages? Then we'd be talking about something. Homeland security sounds like a failed savings and loan. Didn't grandma lose 20 grand when homeland security went under? I'm pretty sure. And a war on terrorism where we get an Iraqi on the end of a dog leash instead of Osama Bin Laden on the end of a noose. Bush only got to be President because the Supreme Court said so. You know, when JFK became President, by fraud, at least his old man had enough respect for America 's free market principles to buy the election.
But it's no use; it's no use hating politics. Politics is a natural function of the body. Politics is dirty. Natural functions often are. The body politic produces disgusting substances, among which are presidential campaigns. And this is healthy. You know, it's much better that the disgusting substances be deposited in Washington D.C. than that they accumulate in the home or workplace. I think we should give privacy when they're practicing politics and we should try not to step in the results. Results such as Iraq . Now the Democrats say we won the war but we're losing the peace because Iraq is so unstable. Well, when Iraq was stable it attacked Israel in 1967 and '73. It attacked Iran , it attacked Kuwait , it gassed the Kurds, it butchered the Shiites, it fostered terrorism in the Middle East . Who wants a stable Iraq ? The Bush administration doesn't have the answers in Iraq , but then again, what are the questions? I mean, was there this bad man? Was he running a bad country that did bad things? Did it have a lot of oil money to do bad things with? Was it gonna do more bad things? Okay, if those are the questions, is the answer UN-led democratic elections and infrastructure repair? No. The answer is blow the place to bits. Some say the U.S. didn't have a plan to solve the problem of Iraq . I say we blew the place to bits, what's the problem? Now, of course, blowing a place to bits does leave a mess behind. But it's a mess without a military to fight aggressive wars. It's a mess without the facilities to develop dangerous weapons. It's a mess that can't systematically kill torture and oppress millions of its own citizens. It's a mess with a message. The message being, "Don't mess with us."
Saddam Hussein was reduced to the Unibomber. I mean, Ted Kazinski, a nut case hiding in the sticks, you know? Yes, the terrorism by his supporters is frightening hence its name, terrorism. I mean, killing innocent people by surprise is not called A Thousand Points of Light. But as frightening as that terrorism is, it is the weapon of losers. I mean, the minute somebody sets off a suicide bomb, you can be pretty sure that person does not have career prospects. And no matter how horrendous a terrorist attack is, it is conducted by losers. Winners don't need to highjack airplanes, winners have an air force.
Not that I disagree with everything that the opponents of the war said. I don't blame the UN for not supporting us because the world is full of loathsome governments run by criminals, thugs and beasts. And when President Bush mentioned regime change, hairy little ears pricked up all over the world. Beads of sweat broke out on low sloping brows. Blood-stained grasping hands began to tremble. I mean, poor Colin Powell, he had to get on the phone to various hyenas in high office and explain to them that America itself needed regime change from 1992 to 2000. And we didn't precision-bomb the fellow that was responsible. We only impeached him a little. I think Kim Jong IL , Robert Mugabe, Jacque Chirac, they should quit worrying. They should look at Bill Clinton and know that the fate that awaits them is a lucrative lecture tour, a best-selling book and many willing plump young women. And I don't blame France . France is a treasure to mankind. French ideas, French beliefs, French actions form a sort of loadstone for humanity. Because a moral compass needle needs a butt end. And whatever direction France is pointing, towards Nazi collaboration, communism, existentialism, Jerry Lewis or veto of UN resolutions, we can go the other direction with a quiet conscience. And anyway, what does John Kerry propose to do? I mean, give Saddam Hussein a mulligan, let him take his tee shot over?
So it turns out that the big election issue is the economy after all. And one of the reasons that the economy is an issue, even though the economy is in pretty good shape right now, is that I think people are still sick and dizzy from the 1990's. There was a diarrhea of money moving around the world in the 1990's. A fiduciary El Nino, you know, blowing mutual funds floods to one place and T-Bill droughts to someplace else. Cash winds lofting real estate prices into the sky, speculatory lightening strikes sending currencies down in flames. Junk bond mudslides, price-earning racial hurricanes, convenience stores putting 20-dollar bills in the "Take-one, Leave-one" tray. The World Bank giving toasters to Malaysia . Now the democrats say something needs to be done to tame these wild excesses of capitalism. But what? Maybe the government should nationalize Microsoft? You know, you nationalize Microsoft, you don't pay the taxman, taxman pays you, right? But, see, I've been covering politics for a long time. I know government. Government wouldn't nationalize Microsoft. Government would nationalize the Studebaker Corporation. Studebaker's a heavy industry, right? Heavy industry provides high-paying jobs. A heavy industry improves the balance of trade and Studebaker automobiles produce very little pollution because they're only about 300 of them left on the street. Now our government isn't going to nationalize Microsoft.
Hey, but maybe there's something government can do about the soaring costs of healthcare. You know, just the fact that healthcare is a big issue, this is a sure sign that my Baby Boom generation has finally matured. I mean, we have gone straight from gazing at our navels to those colonoscopies I was talking about. And speaking of Baby Boomers, didn't the Clinton administration already try to reform healthcare? I mean, just the outline of that Clinton healthcare reform plan, just the outline was 1400 pages long. You could stand on it to paint the ceiling. The entire U. S. Constitution could be printed on five pages, that's five pages to run an entire country for 228 years versus three reams of government pig Latin if you slam your thumb in the car door. I guess we're supposed to want the kind of nationalized healthcare that they have in Canada , a nation that's completely broke from social spending. It isn't a good comparison anyway. I mean, Canada is a sparsely-populated country with a shortage of gunshot wounds, crack addicts and huge tort judgments. And what are Americans supposed to learn from a medical system devoted to hockey injuries and sinus infections from trying to pronounce French vowels?
And another thing government can do something about is business corruption. Business corruption, that's a big election year issue. Although you're thinking Halliburton while I'm thinking Eliot Spitzer. I'm not saying that Eliot Spitzer, that the Attorney General of New York State is personally financially corrupt, although I would love to discover that Spitzer shorted Martha Stewart Omnimedia about half an hour before Martha was indicted. But no. Eliot Spitzer is corrupt simply because he is a politician. No offense to any politicians here. But politics is inherently corrupt. Not because politicians are bad people but because of a fundamental law of political science. When buying and selling are controlled by politics, the first things that get bought and sold are politicians. And do politicians understand that law? Well, of course they do. They're lawyers. And incidentally, letting lawyers write laws is like letting pharmaceutical companies invent diseases.
Yes, there are some bad people in business. My broker. Free market economics can be ugly, we all know that. But the only alternative to the purgatory of business is the hell of politics. And personally I would rather start a Mike Tyson quick bite fast food chain than trust politics to solve my economic problems. We've got the democrats. Democrats are the party of government activism. The party that says government can make you richer, taller, smarter, better looking, take a dozen strokes off your golf game. Then we've got the republicans. Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it. Democrats say we don't know what's wrong with the economy but we can fix it. Republicans say there's nothing with the economy and we can fix that. So politics versus business, I'll take business. A dishonest businessman will steal from you directly instead of getting the IRS to do it for him. And when businessmen ruin the environment, destroy the supply of affordable housing and wreck the industrial infrastructure at least they make a buck off it.
Now if you want to understand political corruption, don't go talk to James Traficant in prison. No, no. Go talk to all the other people who are still in Congress. Because political corruption isn't about getting graft. Political corruption is about giving graft to political constituencies and making sure the taxpayer picks up the bill, right?
If you want to understand political corruption, look at big agriculture. That is a political constituency that has been on the take since the Whiskey Rebellion. Go read the Farm Security Act of 2002. Five-year, omnibus $180 billion barrel of -- in this case, literally -- pork. I mean, the Farm Security Act of 2002, it is the original hole in the ground that government pours our money into. $180 billion to subsidize corporate farms of wealthy landowners. Meanwhile, Willie Nelson will always have a job doing benefits for poor farmers who, by law, are not allowed to grow any good stuff to sell to Willie. $180 billion. $180 billion is more than all the tech bubble bankruptcies put together. $180 billion is three and a half times the gross domestic product of pre-war Iraq . For what the Farm Security Act is costing, we could have avoided that war in Iraq , and just assuming we got a good multiple, we could have just bought Saddam Hussein's country.
Like most American's my age, my actual experience with agriculture is, per Willie Nelson, pretty much limited to raising marijuana plants under grow lights in my off-campus apartment years ago. But I did once help artificially inseminate a cow. I had this half-baked friend, a complete city slicker, who, out of the blue decides to raise cattle. So he buys a farm in New Hampshire and he buys some cows, and I am up visiting him when it is time for the cows to get in a family way. Now, this is not done like I would have thought, with a cow and a bull in a heart-shaped stall and some Celine Dion tapes. Breeding cows is like teenage pregnancy, except more so. I mean, not only isn't the bull around to help raise the calf, the bull isn't even there to get the cow knocked up. What happens instead is there's this liquid nitrogen thermos bottle full of frozen bull semen -- and let's not even think about how they get that -- and then there's this device that looks like a giant hypodermic needle. Well, again, my friend gets a real farmer, Pete, to actually come in and do the honors. So I'm holding the cow's head, and my friend is holding the cow's middle. Pete takes this freezing cold syringe thing and inserts it into a very personal and private part of the cow. Then what Pete does is he sticks his arm into an even more personal and private place of the cow, all the way up to the elbow. Now Pete does this, not in order to get involved in the Cincinnati Art Museum lawsuit about Robert Maplethorpe photographs, but so that he can feel the tip of the inseminator tube through the cow's intestine wall, and guide the tip into the cow's uterus. Now, this is a pretty gruesome thing to watch, and I'm glad to say, since I was up at the cow's other end, I didn't watch it. But I will tell you one thing: I will never forget the look on that cow's face. It was the same look that I got on my face, and for the same reason, when I read the Farm Security Act of 2002. Now, did I think that George Bush was going to eliminate this kind of political corruption? If I did, I must have been smokin' some of that off-campus-Willie-Nelson-grow-light stuff in the voting booth. First federal budget that Bush proposed to Congress in 2001 was, in fact, 4% larger than the last Clinton budget, and that was before 9/11. You know that pork barrel spending has actually risen under the Republicans? I mean, pork barrel spending has gone from $6.9 billion a year, when the Democrats last controlled both houses of Congress in 1994, to more than $20 billion a year now. Spending for things like the Dr. Seuss monument in Springfield , Massachusetts -- this really exists -- the Cat in the Hat puts his snout in the trough, or something, I don't know. Yes, we got a tax cut from George W. Top tax bracket was lowered from almost 40%, way down to about 38%.
It only takes $150,000 a year to get into that 38% category. Now a hundred and fifty long is nice money, but it's not exactly Wild Willy Gates income territory. There you are, doing good, working hard, making America strong and prosperous, and the government is taking a third of your pay. Is the government doing a third of your job? Is the government doing a third of your laundry? Now when you go to Hooter's, is the government tending bar, making sure that one out of three margaritas is on the house? If your spouse is feeling romantic and you're tired, does the government come over to your house and take care of foreplay? Actually, during the Clinton Administration…
And now there's President Bush's Medicare prescription drug program give-away. I'm getting pretty close to Medicare benefit age myself. I'd love to get some free Lavitra from the government. What's that TV ad say? If the condition persists for more than eight hours, see medical help? Preferably from a cute doctor.
But household net worth for Americans over 65 averages more than half a million dollars. Averages more -- I mean, granny could kick in a little something for her doctor bills. It's not like she's saving for a jet ski. And incidentally, I am getting just a little tired of this greatest generation stuff, okay? I mean, no offense to any decorated veterans of Iwo Jima who might be in the audience, but coming as I do from the next Not-So-Hot generation, I look at the greatest generation and I think, 1929 stock market crash. The Dow only fell 191 points. You know, it could do that tomorrow if Dick Cheney sneezes. The Great Depression. Think about the people who bought AOL-Time Warner at $175 a share, that's depression. Greatest generation has one little market correction and it takes them a dozen years to go out and get a job. Then they wait around till Germany and Japan have conquered half the world before it occurs to them to get involved in World War II. After that they get surprised by a million Red Chinese in the Korean War. Now, where do you put a million Red Chinese so that they're going to be a surprise? They spend the entire 1950s watching Lawrence Welk and designing tail fins, they come up with the idea for Vietnam -- thanks -- and they elect Richard Nixon. Now they're the greatest generation. That's what we call them, unless we're standing behind them at the check-out counter, then we call them something else.
So, when it comes to more Social Security and Medicare benefits, to hell with them. Or, actually, to hell with me. Because I am the one who's going to be old and broke with the Social Security chain letter finally runs out of suckers. Put your name at the bottom of the list, mail a check for $1,650 to everyone over 65, break this chain and you'll never be elected to national political office, okay? There's no money in the Social Security Trust Fund, and there never was . Money is a government I. O. U. The government cannot create a trust fund by saving its own I. O. U.'s, any more than I could create a trust fund by writing, "I get a chunk of money when I turn 21" on a piece of paper. And Social Security is just such a piece of paper except it says, "I get a chunk of money when I turn 65. The government promises." Consult American Indians for a fuller discussion of government promises.
Well, you know, it is easy for us to feel sorry for ourselves during a presidential election. We have to put up with these fellows, with Bush, who reminds everyone of their own or their wife's first husband, and Kerry, who's basically a bad blind date, and we won't even mention Ralph Nader. And in the end, we've got to go to the prom with one of these guys, even though we'd much rather stay home and wash our hair. But tonight, in closing, I would like to ask all of you to feel sorry for the candidates, too, okay? They're just trying to be what we tell them what we want them to be. And anybody who's had parents knows what hell that is.
And politics is a conundrum. Spending cannot be lowered with contracting public services. Public services cannot be expanded without damaging personal and economic freedoms. I mean, the problems that politicians face, such as high taxes and bad social programs, are problems that politicians created by raising taxes and instituting social programs. Politicians spend most of their time cleaning up most of their own messes. Presidential candidates, well, they're skunks running around with cans of aerosol room deodorizer, basically. And the candidates can't tell the truth. They can't tell the truth to us voters. And it's not really their fault, because imagine what even the smallest amount of truth would sound like on the campaign stump: "No. I can't fix public education. The problem is not funding inequities or lack of vouchers or teachers' unions or absence of computer equipment in the classroom. The problem is your damn kids. And let me tell you something about your kids -- scientific fact -- half of your kids are below average in intelligence." How would that go down on the campaign trail?
And finally, and this is what really makes me feel truly sorry for Bush and Kerry, they always, always have to sound visionary and grand. You check them tomorrow night. They will be sounding visionary and grand. And I say you try always sounding visionary and grand. You try saying, "My dear wife and beloved children, I say to you this: I shall mow the lawn. Lawns are a symbol of America 's spacious freedoms and green prosperity. Such noble tokens of well-being and independence must not go untended, lest we show the world that liberty is mere license, and see the very ground upon which we stand as Americans grow tangled in the dandelions of irresponsibility and be fruitful only in the crabgrass of greed. I will give the grass clippings to the poor."
Thank you all very much.
[applause]
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