The American Spectator's Enemies List

Book excerpt: Whatever happened to good old-fashioned red-baiting? The #1 New York Times–bestselling humorist rails against the silly people in our midst . . . In the midst of the Clinton years, political satirist P. J. O’Rourke, in conjunction with the conservative magazine The American Spectator, launched into a gleeful project: carrying on the grand tradition of McCarthyism by compiling a New Enemies List. Their goal: to reveal the utter silliness of politicians, celebrities, and “everyone to the left of Edmund Burke” (Booklist). From Noam Chomsky to Yoko Ono to all the people who think quartz crystals cure herpes, this list is the result—and the book also include O’Rourke’s treatises on why Jimmy Carter was a better president than Bill Clinton, and why the author of Parliament of Whores and Give War a Chance is a conservative in the first place.