A Despicable Article

Last year, Playboy released a list of ten conservative women that they wished to be raped.

Obama promised us the dream of post-partisanship—a cuckoo land where party affiliation and factional animosity were forgotten. Turn on cable news or open any newspaper, however, and you’ll quickly discover that the dream has yet to materialize. But there is a way to reach across the aisle without letting principles fall by the wayside. We speak, naturally, of the hate f**k*. We may despise everything these women represent, but goddammit they’re hot. Let the healing begin.* (Note: word editing mine)

When Tony Snow's cancer returned, many far left folks gleefully reveled in his turn for the worse.

I’m sorry to hear about this for Tony, I hope it is all good news for the guy. Tony may be a BushCo whore but nobody deserves to have cancer, it’s a terrible desease that has caused far too much misery to my family and many, many more.

Conservatives were rightfully up in arms and full of moral outrage. Now, conservative author PJ O'Rourke has turned the tables and he's wishing death upon famous liberals.

One bright idea isn’t going to solve the problems of the American newspaper industry, but it’s one bright idea more than the American newspaper industry has had in 40 years. What I propose is “Pre-Obituaries”—official notices that certain people aren’t dead yet accompanied by brief summaries of their lives indicating why we wish they were.

In this piece, O'Rourke satirically suggests that newspapers start something called a pre obituary in which people that are still alive are eulogized because he, O'Rourke, wishes they were dead. Thus, this pre obit would eulogize why they should be dead. O'Rourke even goes so far as post humously wishing he could write just such a pre obit to folks now dead, folks like JD Sallinger of Catcher in the Rye fame.

The main advantage of the Pre-Obit over the traditional obituary is the knowledge of reader and writer alike that the as-good-as-dead people are still around to have their feelings hurt. It was a travesty of literary justice that we waited until J. D. Salinger finally hit the delete key at 91 before admitting that Catcher in the Rye stinks. The book’s only virtue is that it captures, with annoying accuracy, the maunderings of a twerp. The book’s only pleasure is in slamming the cover shut—simpler than slamming the door shut on a real Holden Caulfield, if less satisfying. The rest of Salinger’s published oeuvre was precious or boring or both. But we felt constrained to delay saying so, perhaps because of an outdated Victorian hope for a death-bed flash of genius.

O'Rourke then goes on to list liberals like Gore Vidal, Jane Fonda, Ted Turner, and Norman Lear as prime candidates for a pre obit. We'll see if the same conservatives that were morally outraged when one of their own was attacked show the same kind of moral outrage to this article. No doubt that O'Rourke will claim that this was done in satire. He doesn't really want Ted Turner dead...he just says it in the article.

This was published in the Weekly Standard, a fairly well respected conservative news source. O'Rourke has been around for a while. It's unclear that anyone else will notice just how despicable this piece is.