Posted on 06/28/2018 8:55:32 AM PDT by servo1969
WASHINGTON -- I have in my office a framed note from President Donald Trump. It says, "Bob, Now We Really Did It. Thanks For All Of Your Help!" The note is dated Jan. 13, 2017. He was responding to my congratulatory email to him earlier acknowledging that indeed he "did it." He won the election and was then gearing up for his inauguration and what would follow. Today he has been president for almost a year and a half. What has he done? He has realized more of his conservative campaign promises than anyone since President Ronald Reagan. Perhaps he has even outdone the Old Cowboy. Trump is more conservative than he let on! Usually it is the other way around; a presidential candidate is more liberal than he lets on. Trump's iconoclasm is refreshing.
I thought of that this weekend when George Will, the columnist who long ago won a Pulitzer Prize, finally went to pieces and ordered his readers to vote Democrat this fall. Will was not ordering his readers to vote for the Democratic Party of Adlai Stevenson, or former Sen. Bob Kennedy and former President John Kennedy, or even former Vice President Hubert Humphrey. He was ordering them to vote for the party that looks to the sore loser, Hillary Clinton, and the socialist, Sen. Bernie Sanders. Reportedly, Sanders is the socialist who, for the second year in a row, hauled in 1 million big ones and owns three spacious houses. Clinton ... well, you know how much swag she and her husband have amassed from a life spent in what they call "public service."
I say Will finally went to pieces. There have been signs of his impending crackup before: the time he gave himself over to a diatribe against former President George H. W. Bush. Will called this courtly gent a "lap dog." Bush went on to become president after an illustrious public life. For that matter, between Will's famous lunches with former first lady Nancy Reagan (and former Washington Post publisher Kay Graham and former Washington Post editor Meg Greenfield -- he has been renowned for downing comestibles with powerful women), he denounced her husband for his tax cuts and all the while accepted the president's hospitality. He even denounced former Rep. Jack Kemp, again for tax cuts, the same kind of tax cuts that are energizing our economy today. Tax cuts and smaller government bring out the worst in Will.
I have, through the years, speculated that Will suffers from what I call "writer's hysteria," wherein the patient temporarily "loses control of his literary tools and of his mind." This happens to Will increasingly. He suffered it during the 2016 election when he left the Republican Party and doubtless was surprised that others did not follow. Then, last weekend, he ordered his readers to follow him en masse to wherever he plans to go. Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard is undoubtedly with him, and, of course, David Frum(p) of the Atlantic. As to where they are going he presumably mentioned it later in his column, but his turgid prose defeated me. As I say, when a writer suffers writer's hysteria, he at least temporarily loses his literary tools.
My colleague Dan Flynn, writing in the Spectator A.M. Bulletin on Monday, pithily summed up why serious conservatives and most independents will vote for Trump's Republicans in the fall: "Trump cut taxes, appoints good judges, presides over a golden age of deregulation, shows far more restraint with regard to the military adventurism embraced by recent Republicans, and takes a strong stand against the invasion at the Southern border. Why should Republicans vote against that?"
Finally, there is another reason conservatives and independents will vote for Trump in the fall. He has the energy, the voice, the character and the smarts of a winner. In Yiddish it is called "sechel." Indeed, he is the greatest campaigner since Bob Kennedy in 1968. He relishes the campaign, and he is still on the campaign trail today.
When I flew with him in his campaign plane in October of the election year, it was about the campaign's darkest hour. The "Access Hollywood" tapes had been made public on October 7, and he was pronounced dead. All the major polls had Clinton ahead. For three days I was on the plane with him, starting on October 11. I was prepared for the worst. Yet he was always upbeat at stop after stop. He relished the Purple Heart a Vietnam War veteran gave him and other gifts along the way. His energy was astounding, and he maintained his cool and his friendliness. If he thought he was going to lose, he never betrayed it. Perhaps that is why I stuck to my prophecy, repeated regularly in this column. I said, "Donald, you are going to win." He did, and now George Will has gone to pieces. I have known him for 50 years. He is down and almost out.
George Will agonizes over every little malaprop Trump utters, going straight to the smelling salts to revive himself over minor errors like Trump saying a Federal judge “signed a law” rather than “rendered a ruling.”
He’s fixated on form over function, a not uncommon ailment of many an elitist. What gets done is not as important as a leader’s appearance while doing it. Trump has revealed a real shortcoming in Will’s personality, and therefore, in his reliability as a political analyst.
If he had surgically removed the wooden rod up his rectum years ago, things might have been different.
The average American does not even know who George Will is.
Hope so
That is sometimes partially so, for some. However, there are many fundamental, bedrock principles that conservatism is built upon. These principles (liberty, natural law, self-reliance, religious freedom, etc.) don't change; even though policies based on them change as circumstances warrant.
WOMP WOMP!
Dunno that George Will hated Reagan, but he sure didn’t back him in the 1980 primary. He backed Howard Baker and GHW Bush.
Krauthammer wasn’t pretending to be a conservative yet, in 1984 he was still a Democrat liberal writing speeches for Walter Mondale in the attempt to deny Reagan a second term.
Buckley and the whole NR crew were early and eager backers of Reagan (back when National Review was a great magazine and not the worthless farce that it is today). I don’t recall any harsh criticism of Reagan by Buckley .
Today especially, “ ‘conserve the status quo’, including worship of the current Establishment” is in direct conflict with “liberty, natural law, and self-reliance.”
Many so-called “conservatives” and “conservative stalwarts” including George Will and the late Charles Krauthammer, seem willing to forgo the latter in favor of the former.
Tyrell’s TAS was at its best when it was still based in the Midwest. It morphed into a neocon rag when he took it to DC.
Good to see him mocking Frum(p). But it was Tyrell himself who gave Frum a major platform for trashing Buchanan (and that early populist/nationalist blend that prefigured Trump)
“Anybody who makes his trade taking simple things and making them complex is ultimately going to be left looking for work.”
That’s mostly true in the private sector, although cars and computer software are going the other way. (two areas that truly need “disrupting” IMO)
Where it is not true is in academia and “consulting”. Taking simple things and creating an impenetrable jargon to camouflage the pedestrian origins of their “work” is what they do.
+1
I think Buckley was puzzled by Reagan who went outside the box so to speak. Buckley didn’t seem to get that the problem was the unconstitutional 80% portion of the federal government which Reagan declared was the PROBLEM, not the solution.
So called conservatives seem to have a hard time with the Reagans and Trumps of the world who step outside the box and rather Drain the Swamp (the Establishment) to which many of theses “conservatives” have annealed.
“ordered his readers to vote Democrat this fall.”
A link to Will’s piece. TLDR: Congressional Pubs haven’t opposed President Trump strongly enough.
I used to devour NR back in the Reagan years and I just don’t remember anything along that line.
Buckley wasn’t unrealistic... he was a political realist when it came to Reagan’s ability to deliver- Reagan had to deal with a Democratic House and the usual band of GOP princes in the Senate. Most NR writers were of that sort, not expecting the impossible.
One complaint that I do recall was Reagan not closing down Carter’s Department of Education, one of his campaign goals. I don’t remember why he didn’t pull that off but it may have been because some GOP Senators wanted to keep it. Or it may have been a trade-off with Tip O’Neill for some goal Reagan knew was more important.
In the Reagan years we didn’t yet suffer from the plague of Celebrity Media Conservatives who have no real jobs other than promoting themselves. Most of the writers back then were doing it as a sideline. Will might have been a sign of things to come.
Agreed. “So-called” is the key qualifier.
Yeah , I remember seeing pictures of Reagan and Buckley together.
But Buckley fell short of hitting the bullseye about America’s problems and solutions IMO. I liked Buckley and thought he was intelligent and witty. But sometimes I felt like he got a bit tangled up in his own witty verbosity.
What really shined the light on that for me was Buckley’s discussions with Milton Friedman. IMO, Milton Friedman, who self-admittedly made mistakes himself along the way, had his finger on the pulse of the real issues facing America: the value of individual freedom and the threat of way too much government interference and coercion. Buckley seemed a bit flummoxed by all of that. For instance, Buckley, as so many “conservatives” seem to, seemed to have a hard time in his discussions with Friedman embracing the concepts and value of the market economy free from government interference (ie. NO socialism).
it is time for this Washington insider to fade away forever.
I met Buckley in the late 80s at a fundraiser where he gave a speech. I don’t remember how I managed to get in but evidently they didn’t have good door security.
Unlike some speakers, a Trump say, Buckley read his speech rather than speaking extemporaneously. While meeting people afterwards it was apparent that he greatly enjoyed being treated as a celebrity.
I met some other NR people around that time. William Rusher was one. I brought up illegal immigration, already a huge problem here in California. Their eyes glazed over. I might has well have been talking about the troubles penguins were having with seals in Antarctica. This NR crew wasn’t venturing beyond Newport Beach, one of the wealthiest strips of land in SoCal. They didn’t have any clue about what was happening ten miles inland, and worse they didn’t care. It didn’t come as a big surprise when NR went full Bush and embraced wide open borders .
It’s hard to imagine George Will ever taking an uncompromising stand. It seems to me that he was always doing intellectual acrobatics to find some way to avoid taking a hard stand, and to find some way to compromise with the left, or to qualify the conservative position in such a way to satiate the left.
Great story. I would have liked to have met Buckley. A really fascinating, knowledgeable, and down-to-earth guy. The kind of guy that I’m sure would enliven a party with great stories, true or otherwise.
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