O'Rourke drifts even further to the right

Don't Vote: It Just Encourages the Bastards by P. J. O'Rourke Atlantic Monthly Press HK$200

America's most savagely articulate ex-hippy is back on the warpath. Even by P. J. O'Rourke's sweeping standards, the terrain of his 16th stinging book - Don't Vote: It Just Encourages the Bastards - is broad. O'Rourke has a stab at subjects ranging from gun control to climate change by way of terrorism and obesity. As the title hints, his main target is the fakeness and futility of politics.

Especially liberal politics. O'Rourke skewers a selection of liberal bigwigs including old enemy and 42nd president Bill Clinton, who is likened to arch-schemer Niccolo Machiavelli. Bill Clinton's wife, US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, also comes under sharp if indirect attack. O'Rourke reports that she has been portrayed as 'a lying, power-hungry viper'. Her boss, President Barack Obama, is also cast in a harsh light: as a phoney barely in control of a gaggle of cronies who apparently have no virtues.

'This administration seems to be made up of whiny, wavering scolds; insecure, self-righteous bumblers; and pious frauds lecturing humanity on morals while possessing no whit of moral understanding themselves,' O'Rourke writes.

In contrast, Obama's Republican predecessor, George W. Bush, who led America into two disastrous wars that paved the way for a recession, gets off lightly. O'Rourke just alludes to Bush's widely lambasted handling of the 2005 Hurricane Katrina relief effort and calls the man said by many to be America's worst ever president 'no headliner'.

What a whitewash.