Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government

For those who are sick of left-wing comic/journalist types (Michael Moore, Al Franken etc etc) having the monopoly on political laughs, you'll find O'Rourke a great alternative. He's a conservative journalist who's also very funny. His views range from the comically/farcically cruel to the middle-of-the-road views so everyone will find something to both agree and disagree with.In this book, he disects the US government, with an essay addressing each aspect. It's amazing how he makes facts and statistics about things like fiscal policy fascinating, humorous reading. And you'll learn something too. He talks about things that are rarely explored in mainstream media. If you've never read anything by him, this is a great book to start.

While various reviewers have called O'Rourke a "fractured voice of rock'n roll Republicanism" and basically complained about this book's lack of redeeming social values (thank God) I'd have to say that this is right up there with some of his best--if you like political satire and you agree that the next time the AFL-CIO or GM gets a new tax loophole, grant, or federal protection, you just might be sick. So it doesn't give a blueprint for Utopia--it just says ..., get government away from us, and points out exactly why. The phrases are tight, funny, and scathingly written. The points are blatant, correct, and you'll disagree with them. I didn't, but I'm a radical. Liberals may hate this book, but if they keep an open mind and think for a bit, they might accidentally become a fractured voice of rock n' roll libertarianism themselves. And then I won't have anything to worry about.

(...)Among the current crop of humorists, P. J. O'Rourke is one of the very best. Though it must be acknowledged that he's operating in a target rich environment, his stories of government stupidity, overreach, waste, and arrogance are truly funny. He's pretty much a libertarian, though made uncomfortable by many of the social behaviors that it would allow and overly enamored of the armed forces, so he's just as likely to light out after stupid Republican ideas as he is to castigate Democrats. Parliament of Whores finds him in the perfect position to flail both, as he follows George Bush the elder to Washington in 1989, and sets out to examine the entire U. S. government. Unsuspecting readers may assume that O'Rourke is just going to snidely lambaste bureaucrats, politicians, institutions, and government generally, but that assumption really underestimates him. He's after much bigger game, as he reveals in the title of the book : Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us. The various government employees and elected officials actually come out looking pretty good. As portrayed by O'Rourke, they seem for the most part to be genuinely dedicated to their work and trying to do the best they can. It is the American people who come out of this looking pretty awful. Time and again, as he shows how useless, wasteful, and outrageously expensive the myriad government programs are, O'Rourke also makes it clear that they exist, and exist at such bloated sizes, because they have constituencies. And those constituencies are not the easily caricatured and vilified underclass, they are more often the regular work-a-day middle classes. You don't end up with a government as elephantine as ours unless those folks, we folks, in the broad middle have a huge appetite for government services. In what I think is the best chapter in the book, "Protectors of a Blameless Citizenry," O'Rourke tracks a terrific example of this : the demand for government investigation of sudden-acceleration incidents (SAIs). If you recall the hysteria, this was the allegation that some vehicles, when you were just parked innocently in your garage, would suddenly lurch forward into a garage wall. Any objective observer could have taken one look at these SAIs and figured out that they were merely episodes where people shifted into Drive without their foot on the brake, or stepped on the gas pedal instead of the brake. But to draw such a conclusion would have meant blaming people, blaming taxpayers, blaming voters, for their own carelessness and stupidity, and that would be intolerable. Instead, it has become the particular duty of government to absolve us of blame for such manifestations of our own ineptitude, recklessness, and stupidity. P.J. O'Rourke is a national treasure, if for no other reason than this willingness to hold us all up to well deserved ridicule. The troubling question that he raises in this book, one which

This is what I call a good use of humor - to kick the tail end of Big Government and all its Liberal fans. O'Rourke does take shots at Conservatives where they demonstrate their hypocrisy over calls for "smaller government." But, by and large, this book is a scathing denouncement of the Liberal Washington Establishment, which exists to employ and fancy the whims of intellectual élites who think they can run the United States from their bureaucratic central controls better than individual American citizens can run their own lives. O'Rourke is refreshingly irreverent and politically incorrect. It reminds me of years past when a person could speak their mind without worrying over self-appointed censors crying foul. O'Rourke hears the censors but he just doesn't care. Good for him! I hope to read more of his Establishment drubbing and I look forward to scoffing at more manufactured outrage from the Left.

This is a great read. As usual O'Rouke's witty humour does not let you down as he explains the government. He takes a dry mudane subject and injects it with humor and insight while making it once agian cool to be conservative.