RIP Bill Buckley

Well, this is the best article I could find on this. Actually there's a NYT article by Douglas Martin that looks promising, but I'm not able to find it electronically.

http://thecurrent.theatlantic.com/archi ... uckley.php

For those of you who didn't have the pleasure of forging your political philosophy in the 1960s, you missed A LOT by not having William F. Buckley around. He basically created the Conservative movement, and he did so by appealing to intellect, reason, justice, and equity. I'm afraid that we'll not see his kind again.

Here's a man who criticized elite eastern Universities and who actually attended one. Here's a man who, on his television show Firing Line invited the finest minds of the liberal set and talked reasonably with them. He was arrogant, but he had reason to be arrogant. When he acted as if he were the smartest man in the room, it was because he WAS the smartest man in the room. When he was lecturing in the early 1960s at Columbia, I believe, he would invite his students to accompany him on his show and encouraged them to introduce questions. His liberal "targets" were often surprised to discover that his students were not clones of the master -- often, they were more liberal than his guests. Something he said on one of these shows became my personal mantra. It went along the lines of "I already know what I know. I can only guage how correct I am and how lasting my opinions are if they're constantly challenged by people as thoughtful and intellectual as I." [note: after almost 50 years, that memory isn't all that accurate in terms of detail, but that's pretty much what he said].

As the smug, self-righteous, undereducated, oversimplifying, divisive, anti-intellectual, and increasingly anti-Constitutional neo-Conservatives came to power and are considered to be THE conservative movement -- big government and big spenders though they might be -- I for one will miss Bill Buckley, who trashed everything I believe in over and over for most of my life. Why? Because all we've got left to speak for conservatism today is Anne Coulter, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Bill O'Reilly, as well as scores of wannabees all across the nation.

In the mid-1950s, William F. Buckley looked around and saw that the mantle of conservatism had to be wrested away from bigots, fascists, anti-semites, scorched-earth industrialists, and namby-pamby politicians. What it needed was a soul and an intellectual center. He was that soul and center. With his passing, we're back to we were in the mid-1950s again, and I haven't seen anyone out there who could shine his shoes.

RIP Bill Buckley.

 

Thanks, Steve. I meant to mention God and Man at Yale his first major publication as a good primer to what HE believed was wrong with higher education. I'd mention others of his books, but he wrote more than 80 of them, two of which are coming out after his death -- memoirs on Goldwater and Reagan. Unless he lost his lip in his latter years [and I seriously doubt it], both liberals and conservatives will find much to smile about and get angry over.

 

Fog, it was Limbaugh who said that the was NOT a political commentator, that he was an entertainer and he shouldn't be taken seriously. He's not the scourge of liberals; he's just a sad joke he hasn't gotten the point of. On his worst day, Buckley wouldn't have equated the election of a Democrat to the attack on the American Embassy in Iran and subsequent toture of Americans therein, nor would he ever refer to a shy little girl as "the presidential dog."

If you have nobody better than Limbaugh to put up as a successor to Buckley, you've made my argument for me.