Mother of All Affinity Vacations

"I never met a crowd,” said the bellhop “that drank more and screwed less than this one.”

It’s a convention joke. Catch is, I think I’ve heard it about every convention I ever intended. Too much of anything is funny: a convention of undertakers is wackily quiet, a convention of law professors is wackily loud, so they are different but the same, both wacky.

So there is nothing uniquely hilarious about the idea of a boatload of Natinal Review readers in the middle of the ocean—Johann Hari’s sendup in TNR is good fun but the sendup itself is part of a genre; P. J. O’Rourke apparently created the form back in 1984.

[Hari’s piece is here; it’s paywalled, but chunks of it are popping up like mushrooms around the blogosphere. O’Rourke’s original doesn’t seem to be on line but a crisp summary can be found here.]

But if the conservatives really want to achieve some product differentiation, I offer a proposal: skip the tried-and-true venues like the Mediterranean or the Northern Pacific Coast: next year, do an affinity vacation at Guantanamo. Tony Snow has been telling us for years that it is a kind of paradise, and surely folks have been dying to try out those skateboardy looking thingies next to the dunk tank that promise a thrill ride better than anything at Disney World (I know, poor choice of verb). One indisputable advantage: if you are cooped up in solitary, you won’t have to get yammered at by John Bolton.

They could follow it up with an optional add-on health walk through the streets of Baghdad. Does wonders for the adrenaline when you never know which moment will be your last.