Re: Bill Buckley is dead

On Feb 28, 11:25 am, whistler <whistler...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

It seems likely that THE pie was a boost to his notariety.  No doubt
he realized it would be, but also he wellcomed the contrary
arguement.  (he did decline prosecution)  He led with his chin and
dared the opposition.  If his arguement was flawed he wanted to hear
it, not that that would change his mind.






The "father of modern conservatism," dead at 82

William F. Buckley declared war on the political left during Vietnam
and the civil rights era. But even he rejected the extremism of George
W. Bush.

By Glenn Greenwald

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/02/27/buckley/

..............s
The split between Buckley and the Bush-led right was perhaps most
vivid when it came to the war in Iraq, the defining belief of today's
conservative movement. In December 2005, Democratic National Committee
chairman Howard Dean generated intense outrage on the right when he
compared the Iraq war to Vietnam and said: the "idea that we're going
to win the war in Iraq is an idea which is just plain wrong." That
statement produced limitless recriminations from conservatives, with
Michael Reagan, son of the former president, actually calling for
Dean's hanging as a traitor as a result of Dean's statements: "Howard
Dean should be arrested and hung for treason or put in a hole until
the end of the Iraq war!"

But Buckley, a mere eight weeks later, echoed Dean's comments almost
verbatim while writing about the war in National Review: "One can't
doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed," Buckley
declared. "Our mission has failed because Iraqi animosities have
proved uncontainable by an invading army of 130,000 Americans." He
urged the Bush administration to consider "acknowledgment of defeat."
In an earlier November 2005 interview with the Wall Street Journal --
on almost the same exact day Dean made his comments -- Buckley went
even further, declaring that the invasion of Iraq was "anything but
conservative."

Buckley explicitly distinguished the conservatism he founded from what
it had become under the Bush-led Republican Party. In July 2006, he
told CBS Evening News that "Mr. Bush faces a singular problem best
defined, I think, as the absence of effective conservative ideology."
And he specifically identified the war in Iraq as a major cause of the
nation's problems, arguing that the war was such a failure that it had
single-handedly rendered the Bush presidency a failure: "If you had a
European prime minister who experienced what we've experienced it
would be expected that he would retire or resign."

On one key issue after the next, Buckley came to reject the defining
principles of today's conservative movement. In the same CBS
interview, he rejected the neoconservative approach of belligerence
toward Iran and, more generally, labeled as "too ambitious" the
sweeping vision of democracy promotion set out by Bush in his second
Inaugural Address. In a subsequent interview, Buckley warned: "The
neoconservative hubris, which sort of assigns to America some kind of
geo-strategic responsibility for maximizing democracy, overstretches
the resources of a free country.''
.........s
.

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