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Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski have obviously been stung by criticism of their over-the-top, TDS meltdowns, such as the one we noted last week in which Scarborough's screaming literally overwhelmed the studio's sound system. And so the pair decided to defend themselves on today's Morning Joe, denouncing their critics as "despicable" and "disgusting." Scarborough twice suggested that conservatives are betraying the legacy of William F. Buckley, Jr., going so far as to claim that WFB is "rolling over in his grave." Get the rest of the story and view the video here.

National Review, one of the country’s leading conservative magazines, will endorse Ted Cruz on Friday in a blow to Marco Rubio after its top editors and publisher decided that the Texas senator is the only candidate left who can defeat Donald Trump, POLITICO has learned. “Ted’s the only one with a plausible path to stopping Trump,” National Review editor Rich Lowry told POLITICO, “either by getting a majority himself or denying Trump a majority and finishing close behind and getting it to convention.”

The Obama administration is declining to inform Congress about the number of American citizens and troops killed by Iran and its terror proxies, according to a document provided to Congress and obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. The administration was repeatedly asked by Congress to release figures describing how many Americans and Israelis have been killed by Iran’s military and terror activities since the country’s 1979 revolution. In a series of on-the-record responses obtained exclusively by the Free Beacon, and provided in written form to Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), Kerry sidestepped the questions on all of the three separate...

Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei may be urging the Jewish state’s extinction and anticipating its demise, but Iranian President Hassan Rouhani still took time Sunday to wish the Jewish people a happy new year, just in time for the Rosh Hashanah holiday. ...

Reuters this evening published photos taken earlier today showing “Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif… lay[ing] a wreath at the grave of assassinated Hezbollah military commander” Imad Mughniyeh, a terrorist who was killed in 2008 after having spent literally decades killing Americans and others on behalf of his paymasters in Tehran. Celebrating a mass-murdering terrorist is a bad choice for any Foreign Minister, but the decision by Tehran’s top diplomat to so brazenly honor a terrorist like Mughniyeh, who killed hundreds of Americans, within hours of inking an agreement with the US and members of the P5+1 sends a very...

Conservative students opting out of campus battles in favor of national ones may want to refocus their efforts. To be sure, the local campaigns can be hazardous. Just ask Ruth Malhotra, who needed a police escort when she waged one at Georgia Tech. Nevertheless, they give students the opportunity to expound on that which they know best. Moreover, it gives them a chance to follow in a noble tradition, namely that of William F. Buckley, Jr. when at Yale. “For his valedictory in 1950 he convened a dinner to honor the retiring Yale president,” Rick Perlstein writes in Before The...

A friend from the Hill writes: For the life of me I cannot understand the Corner these days. I keep wondering where the call to “Stand up and Yell Stop” that Mr. Buckley spoke of has gone. I keep reading about the irresponsibility of House Republicans, but how is it irresponsible to stand up and say that you think a bill is bad for America? It is the height of irresponsibility for the Bush administration – and all those doing their bidding – to be screaming “crisis” and scaring the hell out of the American people, holding a shotgun to...

Section Multimedia Posted on Wed Mar 05, 2008 at 02:38:47 PM EST It's been a week since the passing of one of the last lions of the conservative movement, its greatest pamphleteer and the great unifier of the conservative coalition, William F. Buckley. Maybe in the past week you've spent a little time watching old Firing Line Youtube vids of him debating Gore Vidal or Noam Chomsky. If you haven't, you should. What I'd like to offer is something deeper. Last Wednesday when he passed, The Conservative Institute was fortuned by hearing a lecture from one of this nation's greatest...

When the news came over the transom yesterday that William F. Buckley, Jr. had passed, I turned to pick up a 14-year-old framed photograph on the desk in my office that I had not looked at for some time. The picture is of a strapping young man that used to be me shaking hands with the godfather of modern American conservatism as we posed for the snapshot at the base of the stairway leading from the lobby at the Omni Orrington Hotel in Evanston, Illinois. Through a conservative student group I had run at Northwestern University, we brought Bill Buckley...

It looks like Time magazine has dispensed with the quaint custom of showing at least a little respect for the recently deceased. This story by Richard Corliss begins a long sneer in the direction of William F. Buckley, Jr. starting with its very title, "William F. Buckley: Mandarin of Right-Wing TV." From that low point, Corliss continues his descent into his ill-mannered septic tank as he blames Buckley for inspiring what Corliss describes as "partisan political harangue as infotainment" following an appearance on the Jack Paar show in 1962: Few viewers realized that those two evenings 46 years ago would birth a durable...

USALC and CIA Station Chief, William Francis Buckley, 57, was kidnapped from Beirut, Lebanon on March 16, 1984 before being taken to Iran where he was brutally tortured and killed. He was held captive for 15 months before dying from the torture he had received. In 1991 his body, wrapped in blankets was dumped on a road near the Beirut airport. Mr. Buckley, we have not forgotten you. To those who keep harping that our military response into Iraq (and even Afghanistan) was a mistake or immoral or an attempt by George Bush to grab their oil, please note that...

Excuse me but I'm rather angry this morning. The pictures from the Middle East are deeply disturbing. The children of Qana, Lebanon, look very much like my own children - beautiful deep brown eyes and brown curls, smiling for the cameras. Now, several dozen of those children are dead. We have failed the children of the Middle East. We've failed them because we could have stopped this two decades ago. We didn't have to forget. It's not just the children of Qana who have died as a result of Hezbullah's crimes. Plenty of Americans have died too over the past...

I disagree with the president on immigration, education and McCain-Finegold, but I remain one of his biggest supporters. Having said that, I must say that I worry most of all about the safety and security of my children and my grandchildren if a Democrat succeeds to the presidency in 2008. I have this worry because, although President Bush has been immense in protecting us from Islamic terrorists and in standing up to the vituperation heaped on him for so doing, he has NOT succeeded in convincing enough of the country that a global terrorist war is ongoing against us, and...

Yesterday President George W. Bush and and his wife Laura visited Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington DC. Yesterday Laura Bush met with a group of Afghan teachers who are training at the University of Nebraska in Omaha on an educational exchange sponsored by the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and the U.S.-Afghan Women's Council Yesterday The Justice Department said that it is expanding its investigation into whether a naturalized U.S. citizen from the Philippines stole classified documents while he worked in the office of Vice President Dick Cheney Today the President made remarks...

The title quote is from Le Monde a year ago. It has been updated over the decades, as France has grown. It is false. That many Frenchmen (or Englishmen, or Americans) can be wrong. The French proved that this week in voting down the proposed Constitution of the European Union. Oh, they were quite right to vote it down, as was the Netherlands, later in the week. The error was in their reasons for voting it down. Unlike most who’ve written on this story, I read that 28-page constitutional monstrosity. Here are a few examples why this is a mishmash...

Early on the morning of March 16th, 1984, William Buckley left for work at the American embassy in Beirut, Lebanon. Officially, Mr. Buckley, a decorated veteran of the Special Forces, served as the political officer at the embassy. In reality, however, Mr. Buckley was the embassy’s CIA station chief. On his way to the compound, Buckley’s car was stopped by a group of masked men, who forced him from his car at gunpoint. His assailants would later be identified as terrorists from the group Islamic Jihad, which served as an alias for the real perpetrators, Hezbollah. The circumstances surrounding the...

Teresa Heinz Kerry’s reference to “greed for oil” can be passed over, and is being passed over, as routine political hyperbole. But maybe the time has come to examine the words and their meaning. This is so because “oil” is widely used as the great engine of human avarice. In years — and centuries — gone by, the devil word was “gold.” It was gold that brought out the reserves of evil in men. It ranked with and even exceeded love and sex. Oil could not, of course, go through hobgoblinization until its uses were discovered. But now it is...

On Roe and partial-birth abortion. Here are as some useful givens in the matter of the partial-birth litigation. In 1973, in Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court promulgated (vouchsafed?) a right to abortion. Although the decision was qualified (abortions were not automatically approved for the second and third trimesters), it was quickly interpreted by both sides as being pretty much categorical in its interpretation. The advocates of Roe read into the language, and quite reasonably so, that the health of the mother was the critical consideration. If her health were invoked as a reason to proceed with abortion, then that...

It is being claimed, ever more widely, that neoconservative policies are determined by the advantages they bring, manifest or putative, to the state of Israel. Patrick Buchanan, in the current issue of American Conservative, believes this ardently, while the most quoted advocates of neocon militancy, Richard Perle and David Frum, go further than merely to deny that neoconservatism is an Israel First worldview. They insist that criticism of neocon policies is, at heart, anti-Semitic. Richard Perle, co-author with Frum of The End of Evil, old acquaintances remember as being for many years on the public scene as an adamant opponent...

At the end of the year we have much to be grateful for, and a fair amount to wonder about. For instance, the tenacity of some British critics of our whole undertaking in the Mideast, nicely identified in an essay by Mark Steyn in the Daily Telegraph. (Mr. Steyn writes widely, including for National Review.) Looking back on British pessimism, he cites Simon Jenkins of the Times, whose column on March 28 was headed, "Baghdad Will Prove Impossible to Conquer." ("The coalition forces confront a city apparently determined on resistance. They should remember Napoleon in Moscow, Hitler in Stalingrad, the...