How the Hell Did This Happen?: The Election of 2016

by P.J. O'Rourke

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it—good and hard.”

“What are the Iraqis fighting—or not fighting—for?” I asked. The senator thought the only way to get the Iraqis’ allegiance was to pay for it. Not that he thought the Iraqis could be bought. “They need to be re-rented,” he said.

Martin O’Malley is the ex-governor of Maryland, a state with no excuse for itself. If you lop off Maryland’s Washington suburbs you’re left with Appalachia in the west, the impoverished fishing villages of the Delmarva Peninsula (Corsica without the sunshine) in the east, and Baltimore, Afghanistan on the Patapsco.

Caucuses are coffee klatches for people who need to find a bingo game.

I said, “The secretary of state uses her personal e-mail to send top-secret State Department documents to her weird personal assistant who is married to Anthony Weiner who is so crazy that he’s destroyed his political career twice by sending lewd Tweets and Instagram photos to random women and who is now under investigation for sexting with an underage girl. And the top-secret State Department documents wind up on his computer. How much worse can things get?” Charles said, “What if the ‘underage girl’ speaks Russian?”