Tuesday, March 1, 2022

P.J. O’Rourke: Greatest Satirist and Coolest Conservative

 From John Podhoretz at the New York Post:

P.J. O’Rourke, who has died at the age of 74, once hosted a small New Year’s party at his apartment in Washington. The year was 1990. He’d just returned from Germany, where he had covered the fall of the Berlin Wall. I expressed my sorrow that I hadn’t been there to see it. He went into his bedroom and returned with a small tin of mints. He’d emptied it — and he’d put a shard of the wall he’d pickaxed himself with his own hands inside it.

“Happy New Year,” he said.

That was P.J. Though he and I liked each other, we weren’t intimates. And yet he gave me something of inestimable value just because he could. P.J. O’Rourke was maybe the nicest person I’ve ever known, which is an interesting thing to say about a man who made his name and his reputation as a take-no-prisoners cynical wit and observer of political foibles. His passing after a short illness is devastating, not only because it robs us of his gimlet eye but because it reduces the store of kindness in the world, which is more precious than rubies. (Read more.)


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