Rightey Flighty, Lefty Loosey

I read most things a couple of decades late, and P.J. O'Rourke's Parliament of Whores is no exception.

I haven't read enough Orwell to understand his brand of socialism, but I suspect it is close to my own. He abhorred socialism and advocated it -- presumably referring to two very different socialisms -- and his concern for social justice seems tempered by a practical, not elitist, distaste for John and Jane Q. Masses. Not all leftism is the same.

A couple of lines from O'Rourke sum up why, while I'm in no wise a conservative and in fact regard myself as a radical, I do not call myself, in Western terms, a social liberal. Writing on the 1988 presidential election: "The conservatives among us refused to believe that the homeless were homeless because they didn't have homes. And liberals refused to believe that rent control, bad mores and civil rights for nutties were what turned the homeless out-of-doors."