O'Rourke on Iraq: Dubya's "Really Violent Bosnia;" and, the problem with Libertarians is that they are too logical.

AA said something about retreating from this crazy blog, and I commend him for it. He needs to focus on what matters. Anyhow, if AA or AI or JJ or Pepe were to read anything this month, this is the article you need to investigate. Unlike O'Rourke, I'd recommend reading Smith's, Wealth of Nations. I can appreciate his desire to bring it to the Modern Man. [note: this was an interview and review by Joseph Rago in The Wall Street Journal published on January 6-7, 2007, page A7.]

O'Rourke sums up what Libertarian Realists have been thinking for some time: "Except as a hard-right conservative myself," he continues, "Bush has been a pretty miserable failure on that front. It's called failure. Bush and the Republicans are offering a Newer Deal, a Greater Society. Where the hell did this come from? And there's no other word for it but failure: failure to control spending, failure domestically and failure in Iraq."

O'Rourke on what that fucking Bush idiot should have stuck with: "I was very much in favor of the Iraq invasion," he says. "What were the questions? Is Saddam Hussein a bad man? Is he doing bad things? Does he have the oil money to do more bad things? Is he likely to do more bad things? If these were the questions, was the answer more cooperation with France?"

After Gulf War One, "the Kuwaitis totally took control, and it was as though somebody had been chased out of, I don't know, Dayton. Everything was working again within days. Civil society came to the fore -- Hayekian social forces. It was amazing. We thought -- I know I thought, knowing a fair number of sophisticated, intelligent Iraqis -- that this would happen in Iraq. You remove the oppressor, and there would be these self-organizing forces. Well, nooo. Instead what you got was Yugoslavia. Triple Yugoslavia. You might call it the really violent Bosnia."

O'Rourke on Libertarians: It's a bit odd to hear P.J. O'Rourke -- who is always calling attention to the fraudulence of earnestness and its Siamese twin, sanctimony -- talk about morality. But his is almost no morality at all, a non-morality, in that it demands nothing: The only basic human right, he says, is "the right to do as you damn well please" and take the consequences. He is not, however, a true libertarian. They're "too logical," he says. "It's a failed but admirable mission. They keep making these suicide attacks on principle, Kamikaze raids on the aircraft carrier of government. . . . Libertarians suffer the same problem that Smith runs into in the last book of 'Wealth of Nations,' which was a pretty considerable failure. He tries to make proscriptions for government that fit his rationalist philosophical and moral logic. Everything comes apart. He's self-evidently wrong, wrong by his own reasoning. The problem with politics is that philosophy and morality are never really options.