I don't think he was mean-spirited at all, at least through the mid-90s, but he didn't really start to lose the plot until he became a CATO fellow/left Rolling

I don't think he was mean-spirited at all, at least through the mid-90s, but he didn't really start to lose the plot until he became a CATO fellow/left Rolling Stone in the early 2000s. He was terse, and spoke things out loud about the American subconscious that was often uncomfortable (much like Mencken) across the political spectrum. To plagiarize a BBC article: PJ O'Rourke memorably said that the American public viewed the Bosnian war as pitting the "unspellables" against the "unpronounceables". You can view that as heartless detachment, or you can see it as an unvarnished observation of the total disconnect the American people had with what happened in the Balkans at the time. I suspect PJ left those kinds of statements open-ended for the exact purpose of having to make people think about them...were they capable of mustering the electricity between the ears (knowing that some likely wouldn't).