Iraq's invasion of Kuwait is a case of bad men doing wrong things for wicked reasons. This is the full-sized or standard purebred evil and is easily recognized even by moral neophytes. Other malignities-drugs in America, famine in Africa and everything in the Middle East-are more complex. When combating those evils people sometimes have trouble deciding whom to shoot.
P. J. O'RourkeMaybe it's understandable what a history of failures America's foreign policy has been. We are, after all, a country full of people who came to America to get away from foreigners. Any prolonged examination of the U.S. government reveals foreign policy to be America's miniature schnauzer -- a noisy but small and useless part of the national household.
P. J. O'RourkeThe complexity of economics can be calculated mathematically. Write out the algebraic equation that is the human heart and multiply each unknown by the population of the world.
P. J. O'RourkeThe Democrats planned to fiddle while Rome burned. The Republicans were going to burn Rome, then fiddle.
P. J. O'RourkeI don't watch much television. Yeah, that's pretty funny. I don't know where The Daily Show stand politically, do you?
P. J. O'RourkeWhere self-interest is violently suppressed, it is replaced by a burdensome system of bureaucratic control which dries up the wellsprings of initiative and creativity.
P. J. O'RourkeIt takes a lot of weapons to do good works (as Richard the Lionhearted could have told us). And this is not just a Somali problem. We have poverty and deprivation in our own country. Try standing unarmed on a street corner in Compton handing out twenty-dollar bills and see how long you last.
P. J. O'Rourke