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Comment by trts | Hacker News Reader

Although he was mainly conservative, O'Rourke was a popular iconoclast with respect to both major U.S. political parties. That you could read him in the Washington Post and also find him on an NPR show like Wait, Wait, Don't Tell me points to a time seemingly in the distant past when the U.S. wasn't so politically entrenched and polarized. If you didn't agree with what he said, it was still easy to enjoy his writing and find truth in it.

Not sure there is any comparable figure today that comes to mind.

Last week I enjoyed listening to a rebroadcast of his appearance on James Altucher's podcast: https://jamesaltucher.com/podcast/pj-orourke/

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Here's a transcript from one of his appearances on "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" giving his opinion on the 2016 candidates:

> I have a little announcement to make. I mean my whole purpose in life basically is to offend everyone who listens to NPR. No matter what position they take on anything like I'm on the other side of it you know.

> I'm voting for Hillary.

> I am endorsing Hillary and all her lies and all her empty promises. I am endorsing Hillary. The second worse thing that could happen to this country, but it's she's way behind in second place you know.

> I mean she's wrong about absolutely everything but she's wrong within normal parameters.

> I mean she’s wrong about absolutely everything but she’s wrong within normal parameters.

I don’t know why but I just love that line. It really captures a mood/mentality from that moment.

Not sure if you've read it, but his bit about how God is a Republican and Santa Claus is a Democrat is great.

And this endorsement is coming from a latte' sipping out-of-touch east coast liberal.

edit: you can find the full bit here: http://www.paulburns.com/Quotes/pj.shtml

I'd say he also encapsulated the appeal of Trump: he's wrong, sure — they're all wrong — but at least he's a different kind of wrong. People thought they'd give it a shot, because how could it be worse? I'm honestly not sure if it was or not, even yet.

> how could it be worse? I'm honestly not sure if it was or not, even yet.

By showing us that it is all lies by lying about literally everything, we will become wiser? By demonstrating that our democracy is weak by attempting to topple it, we will become stronger?

It sounds like some kind of Tough Love dream. I don't care for it, though, I think draining the swamp is an admirable idea so long as filling it back up with the sewer isn't the second part of that plan. I'm not convinced the path to a better country requires that we destroy it first.

One of the dumbed-down lessons I had re-solidified over those years and choices is that change is not always good.

Which I now realize is a bit ironic, considering who I learned it from.

I subscribe to the idea that people become more conservative as they get older because they've seen all the times change has resulted in worse outcomes, and have lost faith that change will result in something better, so would rather stick with what they know and have spent decades learning to work with than mix it up some more. Life beating pessimism into people until they are jaded.

On the flip side, you have the young who are optimistic enough to think that things will only get better because so many people are hoping to make things better, and with that backing how could it get worse?

This progression might be greater or lesser in some people, or even go in reverse. Regardless, I suspect somewhere in the middle of this is where we usually should be. Where people want change but are cautious because they've seen good intentions backfire and movements be subverted, but also when they haven't become so jaded as to not want change for the sake of not having to deal with it anymore, even when it's important issues that help a lot of people.

That I view myself at where I describe as a good spot in this progression is probably informed by a non-negligible amount of subconscious bias on my part.

I'm pretty sure if Covid had happened during a Hillary Clinton administration, she wouldn't have been stealing PPE and test supplies from state governors and stuff like that.

Pretty sure 100's of thousands of people wouldn't have died.

Pretty sure she would have sanctioned Russia a lot harder, to try to, oh, dissuade them from invading Ukraine.

Don't think that a Clinton presidency would have nudged needle one way or the other in regards to Covid. The only thing we did that had a real impact was get the vaccines, and that would not have been any quicker with Clinton.

There were two things that had a major impact. One was the vaccine. The other one was the massive improvement in care and containment practices between March and May 2020. The case fatality rate dropped substantially; infections of care personnel became much less common. (Masks had a controversial-relevance impact, but seeing as the international community at large didn't get to masking any faster than the US, it's unlikely Clinton would have changed anything here.)

On that second point, Clinton absolutely would have made a difference, because we know that the administration was aware of the pandemic well before the cases started spiking in New York, and we know [1] that Trump autonomously decided not to publicly release that information or tell the CDC to prepare for a major epidemic. That was a major, avoidable mistake. I doubt it would have prevented 100k deaths; rather somewhere in the range of 10k-50k.

Also, Trump really energized vaccine denialists; he was already catering to them in 2016 [2], and a loss in 2016 would likely have significantly reduced his audience on this point. It's not clear how many more people would have gotten vaccinated in a world where Clinton won in 2016, but it might be significant. Densely urbanized blue states led in deaths per capita before the vaccine came out, but now only New York and New Jersey are in the top 10, and my state of Rhode Island dropped from 4th-most DPC to 18th [3] -- I don't recall there being a strong correlation between Republicans and vaccine denialism before Trump, and in fact, the correlation may have reversed since 2011 [4].

1: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-told-bob...

2: https://www.historyofvaccines.org/trump-and-vaccines

3: https://worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us

4: https://reason.com/2011/10/04/more-anti-science-democrats-or...

> massive improvement in care and containment practices between March and May 2020.

This was 100% attributable to Dr. Cameron Kyle-Sidell's rebellion video to youtube, where he called out the academic doctors for giving doctors like him the terrible advice to ventilate SARS-CoV-2 patients as the best treatment.

Dr. Kyle-Sidell's journal letter discussed his observation of hypocapnic hypoxia. This would've been easy to treat, if Medicine hadn't forgotten about #OxygenToxicity.

There would presumably been less chaos and drama. Maybe; the Trump supporters would still have been out there. But there isn't a lot to suggest outcomes would have been a lot different.

The only thing that would have changed meaningfully would be the attitude of the press.

You're getting downvoted, clearly, but I think you're more right than wrong. I still think the feds would have screwed up the response and just as many people would have died. But the spats with governors likely would not have happened. And she's certainly far more of a hawk than Trump, so I expect you're right that she'd have been more aggressive towards Russia. Not sure if it would have dissuaded them from invading Ukraine, though, Putin is pretty crazy.

I mean, to the first part, yes, but why aren't you sure it was worse? Do you really want to be ruled by a facist dictatorship in the USA, which is what we'd now have if Trump had a second term? We may yet have that under someone else, but Biden bought us a couple of years, at least.

Or do you just not see the actual danger here and think Trump was a fairly decent guy who's just a bad/corrupt real estate huckster as opposed to a sociopathic grifter?

From back then...

the news article: https://www.npr.org/2016/05/09/477339063/conservative-author...

the episode: https://www.npr.org/2016/05/07/477085149/whos-bill-this-time - its about 3 minutes in.

If your population is NPR listeners in 2016, that isn't exactly an unbiased sample of the US political spectrum.

>> Although he was mainly conservative

I agree this is how he was classified on the modern spectrum but I think he was really a classic liberal, a pre-Peter Thiel libertarian without all the distracting noise. He's a hard person to fit cleanly into any single bucket, which is a good thing that isn't received well in our current binary environment.

"There is only one basic human right: the right to do as you please, without causing others harm. With it comes our only basic human duty: the duty to accept the consequences of our actions."

We're pretty good at the former, and almost universally ignore the latter.

He indicated repeatedly that he believed the bit about individualism and human rights applied to today's conservatives. I find his writing delightful and amusing, certainly, but he definitely fits squarely into the current political tribal definitions. Though as much as he tried to be satirical about it, he definitely saw his own side through much rosier glasses than he saw the left.

He was hard to classify because he was equal parts libertarian and libertine.

He was militantly anti-gay rights and anti-gay marriage. I'm not familiar with the rest of his conservative views, but I don't find much iconoclastic or libertarian in there- he was a standard-issue Republican in the GWB era

He was pro-gay marriage:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhTge9k1gmQ

And pro-gay rights:

> I'm so conservative that I approve of San Francisco City Hall marriages, adoption by same-sex couples, and New Hampshire's recently ordained Episcopal bishop. Gays want to get married, have children, and go to church. Next they'll be advocating school vouchers, boycotting HBO, and voting Republican.

— "I Agree With Me" (July/August 2004)

Are you sure you're referring to the same P.J. O'Rourke?

It's also entirely possible to be pro-gay marriage in 2004 and anti in the 1980s. Certainly a ton of people fit that description. That said, I've probably read most of his books and I don't remember him talking about gay rights one way or the other though who knows what stereotypes he wrote about that simply didn't register 25+ years ago?

Being anti-gay-marriage in the 1980s would make you wrong, but it wouldn't make you a Republican. Don't-ask-don't-tell and DOMA were both implemented by Bill Clinton, after all.

On the other hand, inventing the term "Republican Party Reptile" probably makes you a Republican. Because, like, you know.

Democrats were commonly anti gay marriage as well. Obama was anti-gay marriage in 2008.

But I believe you're wrong about his view on that anyway.

“Anti-gay marriage” isn’t the same as “not pushing for gay marriage.” Both are evil and unfair to the LGBT community, to be clear, but I find it pretty disingenuous to “both sides” that issue in the late 2000’s, especially as democrat states one after the other were legalizing it.

> Not sure there is any comparable figure today that comes to mind.

The obit already mentioned the late great Christopher Hitchens.

In his (frequent) funnier moments, I think Scott Alexander channels the same daemon.

Not to laser in too much on something that's not key to your point but, are you saying that it's notable that as a conservative he was in those places, or to indicate a significant gulf between the political leanings of the Washington Post and NPR? Because I, and I think most people, would slot both outlets in a pretty similar place.

"Not sure there is any comparable figure today that comes to mind."

There isn't.

Every single one of that breed is gone (from the conservative to the liberal, because there is no replacement for Molly Ivins either). The closest we have are a few UK public intellectuals/satirists (e.g. Stephen Fry, Ian Hislop) but even they aren't quite the same animal. There are writers of a certain quality that are massively entertaining and brilliant, like Cintra Wilson (Her book on the national Fame-virus epidemic, "A Massive Swelling" is essential), but her focus isn't just on political satire, so it's still not quite the same.

> iconoclast

That’s a new word for me, does it carry any specific connotation?

It used to mean someone who literally destroyed icons— as in statues and things that folks would worship.

Nowadays it mostly refers to “A person who attacks cherished beliefs or institutions”. [1]

It connotes that someone isn’t afraid to loudly voice a (potentially) minority or unpopular opinion. See also ‘shit-stirrer’, ‘skeptic’.

It’s also in the title of a classic Simpsons episode. [2]

[1] https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/iconoclast

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_the_Iconoclast

Attacking icons; the classic iconoclasts wanted to destroy sacred church imagery as a distraction from the proper worship of god.

In O'Rourke's case it meant that while saying that he was a republican and having a go at cyclists and fat women and other "safe" targets, he was also happy to rip into Reagan for supporting Marcos against the peaceful Yellow Revolution, or his seminal essay on the war on drugs, "The Whiffle Ball Life", where he pointed out that the people selling the war could always be sure that they or their kids would never suffer any serious consequence for their own drug use, but that it would be borne by black teens and young men.

He was a butcher of sacred cows.

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