How the Hell Did This Happen? E-Book

P. J. O'Rourke

• Herausgeber: Grove Press UK
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

An essential take on the stranger-than-fiction 2016 presidential election from a quintessential voice on American politics and culture. With new, updated material, P. J. O'Rourke covers the whole election process from the pig pile of presidential candidates circa June 2015, through his come-to-Satan moment with Hillary and the Beginning of End Times in November 2016, to the current shape of US politics. How the Hell Did This Happen? answers the key question of the 2016 presidential election: Should we laugh or should we cry or should we hurl? (They are not mutually exclusive.)

Leseprobe

How the Hell Did This Happen?

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“I Was Tragically Hip and I Recovered! You Can Too!”

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Peace Kills

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A Minor Mister Opines upon a Master’s Magnum Opus

Driving Like Crazy

Thirty Years of Vehicular Hell-Bending Celebrating America the Way It’s Supposed to Be—With an Oil Well in Every Backyard, a Cadillac Escalade in Every Carport, and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Mowing Our Lawn

Don’t Vote—It Just Encourages the Bastards

A Treatise on Politics

Holidays in Heck

A Former War Correspondent Experiences Frightening Vacation Fun

The Baby Boom

How It Got That Way . . . And It Wasn’t My Fault . . . And I’ll Never Do It Again

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How the Hell Did This Happen?

A Cautionary Tale of American Democracy

P. J. O’Rourke

Grove Press UK

First published in the United States of America in 2017 by Grove/Atlantic Inc.

First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Grove Press UK, an imprint of Grove/Atlantic Inc.

This paperback edition published in 2018

Copyright © P.J. O’Rourke, 2017

The moral right of P.J. O’Rourke to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

Caricatures created by DonkeyHotey (donkeyhotey.com) were adapted from these Creative Commons and public domain images: Donald Trump, Gage Skidmore/Flickr; Bernie Sanders, Nick Solari/Flickr; Melania Trump, U.S. State Department/Flickr photostream and IIP Photo Archive/Flickr; Ivanka Trump, Pattie/Flickr; Steve Bannon, Michael Vadon/Flickr; Vladimir Putin, Press Service of the President of Russia and Press Service of the President of Russia/Wikimedia; Jeff Sessions, Gage Skidmore/Flickr; Ben Carson, Michael Vadon/Flickr; Hillary Clinton, East Asia and Pacific Media/Flickr and Department of State; Ted Cruz, Michael Vadon/Flickr; Marco Rubio, Gage Skidmore/Flickr.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN 978 1 61185 511 1

E-book ISBN 978 1 61185 951 5

Printed in Great Britain

Grove Press, UK

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.groveatlantic.com

To Morgan Entrekin

My editor, my publisher, and, best of all, my friend

“A pity they both can’t lose.”

—comment on the Iran-Iraq War attributed to Henry Kissinger

CONTENTS

Author’s Note

Preamble

1 The Campaign Begins

2 The Abominable Showman

3 The Horror! The Horror!

4 A Huck So Unlike Finn

5 Always Look on the Bright Side of Life

6 So Much for That

7 The Last Damn Republican Presidential Candidate Debate I’ll Ever Watch

8 Say It Ain’t So, Joe

9 A Better Way to Choose a President, Part I

10 The Walking Dead

11 Time to Pull the Plug on Ben Carson’s Campaign

12 In Memoriam

13 Our Higgledy-Piggledy Primary System and How It Higgles Our Pigs

14 A Halfhearted Case for Marco Rubio

15 The Case Against Marco Rubio

16 Cruz Control

17 Fashion Notes

18 What They Stand for, and Can We Stand It? Part I

19 What They Stand for, and Can We Stand It? Part II

20 Paying for What We Can’t Stand

21 Another Attempt at Paying for What We Can’t Stand

22 What They Stand for, and Can We Stand It? Part III

23 Letter to Myself in 1968

24 A Better Way to Choose a President, Part II

25 The Last Damn National Political Convention I’ll Ever Watch

26 The Democratic National Political Convention

27 I Endorse Hillary

28 The Nowhere Leadership Is Headed To

29 The Campaign Trail of Sneers

30 The Revolt Against the Elites

Epilogue

Glossary

Acknowledgments

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I knew that the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election would be interesting times. I had no idea they would rise to the level of an ancient Chinese curse.

There isn’t, incidentally, any such thing as an ancient Chinese curse saying, “May you live in interesting times.” The phrase seems to be a piece of invented Orientalist folklore coined in the 1930s by First Lord of the Admiralty Sir Austen Chamberlain, half-brother of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain who went off to Munich to appease Hitler. And let’s not be silly and forget that the Chamberlain brothers lived in much more accursedly interesting times than our own.

What I thought was going on in the 2016 election cycle was a mere fight to the death between two fundamental American political ideologies.

The inevitable, inexorable, predestined Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, was an embodiment of liberal orthodoxy as it has been handed down from on high for eighty-four years, since FDR’s election in 1932.

Clinton was an ancient monument of liberalism. If Washington were Pharaonic Egypt—and sometimes it is—Hillary would be the Sphinx. With the exception that she never shuts up. And she’s hardly immobile. For the past quarter of a century she’s been everywhere we looked.

So there was the monumental Hillary out in the American electoral desert surrounded by a Republican horde of . . . of whatever small, feckless, puny fauna Egypt has. I’ve Googled the matter. Yes, there it is exactly—“Giza gerbils.”

These were the forces of the resurgent American conservatism that began its rise with the election of Ronald Reagan and then quit rising and started to droop into simplistic Tea Party obstructionism.

However, the outcome of the battle was not a foregone conclusion. Even a gerbil might be able to outsmart something with a head full of rocks.

And the Obama Administration, which was supposed to be the Great Pyramid of Cheops, had turned out to be a somewhat aimless enterprise. Not that it didn’t take aim at a lot of things, letting feeble, sanctimonious darts fly in every direction that right-minded people could think of. But only one arrow sank home—a perhaps well-meaning but ridiculously complex and dubiously viable healthcare reform. And the president had just barely managed to avoid standing fully in the way of an overdue economic recovery.

If Hillary won, liberalism would become a permanent feature of the American landscape, like the Rocky Mountains but more expensive to ascend.

If a Republican won, conservatism would flow freely again, a mighty Mississippi of entrepreneurial initiative and individual responsibility with a lot of muddy corruption at the bottom.

Meanwhile, the American public wasn’t holding either political party in much esteem. What the American public was holding was its nose.

Therefore I was prepared for some surprises during the 2016 campaign, which leaves me with no excuse for how surprised I was by what the surprises were.

Most of the chapters in this book were written while the events described were taking place. Reading the manuscript I notice there’s a lack of continuity between the chapters. One thing doesn’t lead to another. This is because, in the 2016 presidential campaign, as far as I can tell, one thing didn’t lead to another.

The campaign was a series of singularities. Little universes kept expanding out of nothing and disappearing into space. It was as if God were letting some of the junior angels, Cherubim perhaps, take practice shots with the Big Bang. I would have preferred to write a book about the course of actions taken during this election campaign and how that course of actions led to certain results. But there was no discernable course. The course might as well have been at Trump University. And the results might as well have been determined by a pair of twelve-sided dice used by stoned Bernie Sanders supporters in a game of Dungeons & Dragons. (Dungeons & Dragons being a not-bad alternative title for what you hold in your hands.) Anyway, if my book lacks a coherent narrative it’s because I couldn’t find one.

We also don’t yet know what the outcome of this election means. We may not know for years. If the outcome of the election means the end of the world, as my liberal friends seem to think, we’ll never know. In that case we’d better have fun while we can. And, despite the random nature of the campaign and the opaque nature of its consequences, the thing was undeniably fun to write about.

It is my hope that it will be fun to read about too, and, maybe, produce the corner of a smile with which to catch a teardrop. Furthermore, now’s the time to do the writing and the reading, before we forget all about the minor characters who provided such splendid comic relief in this drama, such as Governor John . . . John . . . Begins with a K . . . It’s on the tip of my tongue . . . Oops, too late.

P. J. O’Rourke

Christmas, 2016

March Hare Farm

New Hampshire

PREAMBLE

We the people of the United States, in order to dissolve what unity we have, establish injustice, insure domestic idiocy, provide for the common offence, promote the general despair, and secure enmity toward ourselves by our posterity, do ordain and establish this obnoxious political spectacle, the election of 2016.

1 The Campaign Begins

Ready, Set, Go to Hell

Who are these jacklegs, highbinders, wire-pullers, mounte­banks, swellheads, buncombe spigots, boodle artists, four-flushers, and animated spittoons offering themselves as worthy of the nation’s highest office?

Do they take us voters for fools?

Of course they do. But are they also deluded? Are they also insane? Are they receiving radio broadcasts on their dental fillings telling them they have what it takes to be a good president?

Perry, Santorum, Walker, Webb, Chafee, Pataki, Huckabee, Jindal, Graham, O’Malley, Paul, Fiorina, Biden, Bush, Christie, Carson, Rubio, Cruz, Kasich, Sanders, Clinton, and Trump.

That’s not a list of presidential candidates. That’s the worst law firm in the world. That’s a law firm that couldn’t get Caitlyn Jenner off on a charge of Bruce Jenner identity theft.

These people don’t even have what it takes to be a bad president.

Show me one candidate who, like Millard Fillmore in 1856, has the honest decency to come right out and admit being a “Know-Nothing.”

At least the members of the Know-Nothing Party knew they knew nothing.

Or show me one candidate who says nothing. Calvin Coolidge had nothing to say and, in his outspoken manner, said it.

Failing that, show me one candidate who can be counted on to keel over dead thirty-two days after inauguration the way William Henry Harrison did.

The 2016 candidates do not possess William Henry Harrison’s kind of gravitas. (Although Chris Christie does possess William Howard Taft’s kind of gravity.)

And the candidates aren’t lighthearted. None has grown sideburns as amusing as Chester A. Arthur’s. Nor—so far as we know—spends evenings in frolic with as plump and giddy an intern as Monica Lewinsky.

Even the nuts among the 2016 candidates do not rise to the level of the nuts of yore.

Progressive Republican senator from Wisconsin Robert M. La Follette stood almost alone in his crusade to keep America out of World War I, pointing out that the issue of unrestricted German U-boat warfare had been resolved peacefully in Lake Michigan.

Presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan thundered to the Democratic National Convention of 1896, “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” (One can hardly disagree. Although it sounds like an expensive idea and not very practical, and I don’t believe anyone had actually proposed it.)

The array of 2016 presidential candidates raises two questions. Has the office of the presidency diminished in stature until it attracts only the leprechauns of public life? Or have our politicians shrunk until none of them can pass the carnival test “You Must Be Taller Than the Clown to Run for President”?

At the start of the 2016 presidential campaign (less than a minute after the finish of the 2012 presidential campaign) the outcome was foretold. The opinion was universally held, by the sort of people who universally hold opinions, that Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush would be the inevitable winners of their parties’ nominations.

And I trembled for my country.

Members of the electorate would go into the ballot booth, see the two names, “Clinton” and “Bush,” and think to themselves, “Gosh, I’m getting forgetful. I did this already.” They’d leave without marking the ballot. Voter turnout would be 6 percent.

The shuttle from the local old-age home would send a few senile Republicans to the polls. A Democratic National Committee bus would collect some derelicts from skid row. And we would have the first president of the United States elected by a franchise limited to sufferers from Alzheimer’s disease and drunken bums.

What happened to Jeb Bush? He had everything. He’s young (for a Republican), a Phi Beta Kappa, and a successful businessman. And he’d been a two-term governor of Florida, where balloting incompetence and corruption are vital to the GOP.

Jeb is fluent in Spanish. His wife is Hispanic. He’s got a bunch of kids and they’re Hispanic too. Maybe he’d choose Marco Rubio as his running mate. Kiss the Latino vote good-bye, Democrats.

Plus Jeb was rolling like a dirty dog in campaign contributions.

Yes, Jeb Bush did have one problem. We political pundits were slow to grasp it. Political pundits are under professional obligation to regard the obvious as being too obvious. If it were the job of political pundits to state the obvious, there—­obviously—wouldn’t be any need for political pundits. However, even we pundits were able to take a “Bush-league” guess at what Jeb Bush’s problem was.

Yet we continued to believe Jeb would get the nomination right up until he placed fourth in a three-man race in the New Hampshire primary and shortly thereafter suspended his campaign with a total of four pledged delegates.

Even then I kept predicting he would win. I said, “Don’t worry, Jeb is all set to legally change his name to ‘George Herbert Walker Bush.’ Everybody likes him. And he served only one term so he’s constitutionally eligible to run again.”

Meanwhile, Hillary Rodham Clinton maintained her position as the person the Democrats most wanted to nominate for president. Unless someone—anyone—could be found to ­replace her.

Hillary had an iron grip on second place. Whoever was ahead of her was so far ahead nobody knew who it was yet.

It is to be remembered that at this point in the 2008 election cycle, Barack Hussein Obama was about as likely to be nominated for president as some small-time ­community-organizing junior senator from Illi-wherever with a name like a man who tried to sabotage an airplane with an underpants bomb.

Speaking of airplanes, Hillary carries more baggage than the Boeing she used as secretary of state visiting every country in the world that later blew up in her face in her quest to fulfill the mission of the U.S. secretary of state, which is to accumulate frequent-flier miles.

She had Julian Assange set up her State Department e-mail server. She put the Dalai Lama on security duty at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. The geopolitical conflicts of interest at the Clinton Foundation were so large they had to be weighed on Chris Christie’s bathroom scale. And at any moment her horn-dog husband might slip his leash and get up to old tricks chasing nubile squirrels.

On the upside, Hillary is familiar with the White House—knows where the extra toilet paper is stored and where the spare key to the nuke missile launch briefcase is hidden (Truman Balcony, second pillar from the right).

Maybe the candidate who was ahead of Hillary was Joe Biden. Biden is a savvy guy. Biden once gave what is probably the most insightful and accurate assessment ever of Hillary’s talents and abilities. He told a September 2008 Democratic campaign rally in Nashua, New Hampshire, “Hillary Clinton is as qualified or more qualified than I am to be vice president of the United States of America.”

In 2016, however, we already had a vice president and, unfortunately for Joe, he was Joe. Thus Joe lost his edge facing someone who was as qualified as or more qualified than he was to be him.

Maybe the candidate ahead of Hillary was Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

Warren has Native American ancestry.

How.

As well you may ask. But it would be a fund-raising plus—if she got her own casino.

Warren is an expert in bankruptcy law; this gives her a vision for our nation’s future.

She masterminded the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It’s working. You can tell it’s working by the 7 million student loans that are currently in default. Students would probably be making some loan payments if they didn’t feel so well protected by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

And Elizabeth Warren turned left—the only direction that GPS units give in the hybrid cars that vegan aroma therapist Democratic primary voters drive.

But, in fact, the candidate who was so far ahead of Hillary that we didn’t know who it was yet was the screwy-kablooey commander of the Vermont-Cong, Senator Bernie Sanders.

Bernie says he wants to make America more like Europe.

Great idea! Europe has had a swell track record for a hundred years now—ever since Archduke Ferdinand’s car got a flat in Sarajevo in 1914.

Make America more like Europe? Where do you even go to get all the Nazis and Commies and 90 million dead people it would take to make America more like Europe?

Bernie is a socialist. He says so himself. He thinks the Eighth Commandment, “Thou shalt not steal,” doesn’t apply to him, at least not when he’s in public office. Bernie thinks our society should “share.” He wants to take your flat-screen TV and give it to a family of pill addicts in the backwoods of Vermont.

Perhaps Bernie feels the same about the other nine Commandments. He and his supporters certainly don’t have much use for the Tenth, “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass . . .” Especially if the ass in question is a Democratic Convention Hillary Super Delegate.

2 The Abominable Showman

June 16, 2015

But then—from the bottom of the campaign barrel with the lees, dross, and dregs—came Donald Trump.

I have a campaign slogan for Trump; maybe it’s a slogan for the entire 2016 presidential race, perhaps a slogan for all of America right now. It’s a quotation from the English essayist and poet Charles Lamb.

Trump will need to Google “Charles Lamb.” Trump has written eighteen books, leaving himself with little time to read any.

Charles Lamb said:

If dirt was Trumps, what hands you would hold!

The American government is of the people, by the people, for the people. And these days America is peopled by 320 million Donald Trumps. Donald Trump is representative of all that we hold dear: money. Or, rather, he is representative of greed for money. We common folk may not be able to match Trump’s piggy bank, but even the most high-minded and charitable among us can match his piggishness.

The Clinton Foundation accepted a $500,000 donation from the government of Algeria.