P.J. O’Rourke has the inaugural speech that Bush should give this week. A selection:
MY FELLOW AMERICANS, I had intended to reach out to all of you and bring a divided nation together. But I changed my mind. America isn’t divided by political ethos or ethnic origin. America isn’t divided by region or religion. America is divided by jerks. Who wants to bring a bunch of jerks together with the rest of us? Let them stew in Berkeley, Boston, and Ann Arbor.
The media say that I won the election on the strength of moral values. If the other fellow had become president, would the media have said that he won the election on the strength of immoral values? For once the media would have been right.
We are all sinners. But jerks revel in their sins. You can tell by their reaction to the Ten Commandments. Post those Ten Commandments in a courthouse or a statehouse, in a public school or a public park, and the jerks go crazy. Why is that? Christians believe in the Ten Commandments. So do Muslims. Jews, too, obviously. Show the Ten Commandments to Hindus, Buddhists, Confucians, or to people with just good will and common sense and nobody says, “Whoa! That’s all wrong!”
But jerks take issue with every one of the Ten Commandments. Jerks are particularly offended by the first two Commandments. Of course people of faith, decent people, differ on interpretations of the first two Commandments. For example, we don’t all agree about the meaning of “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.” However, we do all agree about “Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them” when them is Freud, Marx, and Dan Rather.
Personally, I’d love it if Bush got up to the podium, cleared his throat, waiting a second and then simply said: “Hey Dan, neener, neener, neener!” then sat down again. On the other hand, that wouldn’t exactly be the most elegant inaugural address in the world, but it would be the most personally satisfying.
How would such a divisive rant be any different than the regional warfare Bush and the righties were waging throughout the entire campaign? Nary a day passed when the Bush campaign (or indeed Bush himself) didn’t chastise “liberals from Massachusetts” or those whose recreational pastimes included windsurfing. If the best that the always insipid and juvenile O’Rourke can do in defining “jerks” from Berkeley, Boston and Ann Arbor (???) is to focus on the small number of people who are making a priority of removing the Ten Commandments from courthouses, then the country is not at all divided. The vast majority of people, including blue staters, are not actively embroiled in the effort to remove the Ten Commandments.
Clearly, O’Rourke needed to piggyback on that unpopular group if he was to make his point that the 49% of Americans who didn’t vote for George Bush are “jerks” but still fan the flames of the culture war by espousing the lowest denominator of GOP pseudo-populism. In other, the patriotic Democratic steelworker from Duluth is scum for not agreeing with O’Rourke on every other issue, but he should be united with Bush in scorn over the “jerks” removing the Ten Commandments from courthouses.
Damn, and I used to think O’Rourke was cool…