The McCain Campaing Buckleyed Where It Should Have Swashed 0
With apologies to Samuel Goldwyn.
I was always a fan of William F. Buckley, Jr. Even when I reached 10th grade and realized that his politics were, basically, a crock, I admired his striving for intellectual rigor (he never found it, because, sadly, it is incompatible with Republican conservatism), his drive to find some kind of justification for conservatism (he never really succeeded, but he made a valiant effort), and his love and enjoyment of the English language used well. Somewhere I still have a copy of God and Man at Yale.
Christopher Buckley, his son, endorses Senator Obama:
(snip)
Dear Pup once said to me sighfully after a right-winger who fancied himself a WFB protégé had said something transcendently and provocatively cretinous, “You know, I’ve spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks.” Well, the dear man did his best.
(snip)
A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget “by the end of my first term.” Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?
I’ve read Obama’s books, and they are first-rate. He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books. Imagine. He is also a lefty. I am not. I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets. On abortion, gay marriage, et al, I’m libertarian. I believe with my sage and epigrammatic friend P.J. O’Rourke that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.
By the way, follow this link and you will see another example of what I described here: A “conservative” who, faced with the failure of conservativism, tries to claim that the author of the failed polices is “not a true conservative.”
And the sad thing is, they will never wake up and smell the coffee.
Via Balloon Juice.
