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Source: Tulsa World, Okla.迷你倉Sept. 08--P.J. O'Rourke's upcoming trip to Tulsa may turn into a race against time.Politics, both national and international, and the satirizing of same has been O'Rourke's stock in trade for the past 40 years, in a career as a foreign correspondent and author.He's coming to Tulsa to open the University of Tulsa's Presidential Lecture Series on Tuesday -- the day after the U.S. Congress reconvenes to consider President Barack Obama's call for military action against Syria."I've got a lot of material about Obama and Syria, and I'm hoping nobody does anything silly right when I'm getting on the plane," O'Rourke said, speaking by phone from his New Hampshire home last week."It doesn't look like it's going to happen -- basically because I haven't seen this much vacillating since the Carter administration," he said. "It's like, 'There's got to be some way to blame it all on the Republicans.' Or maybe 'It's the tea party's fault somehow.'"O'Rourke acknowledges that he's no fan of President Obama and said he has no strong feelings about the United States intervening in Syria."That place is pretty much a hornet's nest," he said. "So what do you do -- kick it? Poke it with a stick? The thing is, most of the world agrees Assad is a bad guy. And when you have a lot of bad guys in the world, maybe it's OK for you to appear vicious, but it's not OK to look weak and indecisive."I'll say this for (George W.) Bush," O'Rourke said. "Whether you think he was right or wrong, smart or foolish, at least when he decided to go to war with Iraq, he did it at high noon, in time to make the 6 o'clock news. He didn't futz around about it on a Labor Day weekend."O'Rourke's perspective on politics and politicians has been formed by several decades of covering conflicts around the world. He earned degrees from Miami University in Ohio and Johns Hopkins University and worked as a reporter for several small newspapers before joining the staff of the National Lampoon in 1973.He eventually became editor-in-chief and was one of the main writers of one of the magazine's most successful projects -- the National Lampoon Yearbook Parody, which influenced the movie "National Lampoon's Animal House."An assignment for Harper's Magazine that required him to go to the Soviet Union turned O'Rourke into a foreign correspondent. As the foreign affairs desk chief for Rolling Stone, then as a freelancer, O'Rourke reported on the crises happening in more than 50 different countries."I'm a reporter first and foremost, and politics is a good story to cover," O'Rourke said. "I started off covering international politics, then realized I didn't know all that much about the politics in my native country, which is certainly less violent but equally funny."If I have an overriding objective, it's not to take politicians too seriously," he said. "I've always thought you have to have a suspect personality to want to run for office. My idea is to assume anyone who gets into politics is mentally ill until proven otherwise."It's an attitude reflected in the titles of some of O'Rourke's books, which include "Don't Vote: It Just Encourages the Bastards," "Parliament of Whores" and "Eat the Rich."And儲存倉it's there in the quips and one-liners that have earned O'Rourke the title of "the funniest writer in America" by Time and the Wall Street Journal, as well as the most citations in "The Penguin Dictionary of Humorous Quotations" (one choice example: "Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenaged boys")."The way I see, my job as a reporter is to boil things down into something that will make people sit up and take notice," he said. "When you're talking about war, that's easy to do. Something like Obamacare, not so much. There you're taking a piece of legislation that would fill something like four filing cabinet drawers, that nobody -- certainly not the people who voted on it -- has ever read, and making it make sense."That is an approach he takes with his forthcoming book, "The Baby Boom: How It Got That Way (And It Wasn't My Fault) (And I'll Never Do It Again).""I try to talk about the overall effect the baby boom has had on society," O'Rourke said. "It's a kind of group memoir of my age cohorts. I take my own memories and those of my friends and follow them through the '50s, '60s and '70s."O'Rourke continued traveling abroad until a couple of years ago, after a trip to Afghanistan when he decided he was "too old to be sleeping on the ground.""I do kind of miss it -- not the adrenaline rush thing, which never was the allure for me, but for the camaraderie," he said. "There never was all that many of us, because only the major news organizations could afford having reporters overseas, so you kept running into each other at all these crappy places."You'd show up in Beirut and there were all the people you met covering the overthrow of Marcos in the Philippines," O'Rourke said. "It was kind of like a family reunion."O'Rourke has been on NPR quiz show as wellP.J. O'Rourke is known for his books and journalism, but to some he may be best known for his appearances as a panelist on the National Public Radio quiz show, "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me."Hosted by Peter Sagel, the hourlong show features three panelists -- journalists, comedians and pundits -- engaged in games that celebrate the more bizarre aspects of the week's news. (It is broadcast at 1 p.m. Saturdays and 6 p.m. Sundays on KWGS 89.5FM.)"That's really a lot of fun to do," O'Rourke said. "The thing of it is, it's all in the editing. We usually spend about two hours doing the show in front of an audience, and they boil that down to the hourlong show."The extra time is necessary because there are times, O'Rourke said, "when you get asked a question, and you've got nothing. 'Sorry, Peter, can't the find the funny in that topic.' "The editing also means that the panelists can indulge in more off-color humor than can be aired on public radio stations."Let's just say," O'Rourke said, "we have a whole lot of special Anthony Weiner jokes that will never make it on the air."P.J. O'ROURKEWhen: 7:30 p.m. TuesdayWhere: Donald W. Reynolds Center, 3308 E. Eighth St.Tickets: FreeJames D. Watts Jr. 918-581-8478james.watts@tulsaworld.comCopyright: ___ (c)2013 Tulsa World (Tulsa, Okla.) Visit Tulsa World (Tulsa, Okla.) at .tulsaworld.com Distributed by MCT Information Services迷你倉價錢