1947–2022 · American satirist, journalist and libertarian humorist
Patrick Jake O’Rourke went from editing the National Lampoon in the 1970s to reporting from far-flung places as Rolling Stone’s foreign-affairs desk chief, and to writing twenty-two books, two of which — Parliament of Whores and Give War a Chance — reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list. He delivered The Liberty Manifesto at the opening of the Cato Institute’s Washington headquarters in May 1993. His register is the reason the misattribution works at all: the sentence has the cadence of a nineteenth-century moralist and the content of a very twentieth-century joke, and readers who notice the first often miss the second.