National Review's Anathema Corner

'exonerated?'

Prince Buckley was wheeled out to damn him with faint praise, and Buckley then went on to trash his former protoge, Joe Sobran, which reveals something about Buckley the man.

From Murray Rothbard's (New York Urban Jew who lived around the block from the Trotskyite Kristol family in the 40s) classic '92 Strategy for the Right:

"Merely to try to summarize Buckley's essay is to give it far too much credit for clarity. But, taking that risk, here's the best I can do:

1. His long-time disciple and NR editor Joe Sobran is (a) certainly not an anti-Semite, but (b) is "obsessed with" and "cuckoo about" Israel, and (c) is therefore "contextually anti-Semitic," whatever that may mean, and yet, worst of all, (d) he remains "unrepentant";

2. Pat Buchanan is not an anti-Semite, but he has said unacceptably anti-Semitic things, "probably" from an "iconoclastic temperament," yet, curiously, Buchanan too remains unrepentant;

3. Gore Vidal is an anti-Semite, and the Nation, by presuming to publish Vidal's article (by the way, a hilarious one) critical of Norman Podhoretz has revealed the left's increasing proclivity for anti-Semitism;

4. Buckley's bully-boy disciples at Dartmouth Review are not anti-Semitic at all, but wonderful kids put upon by vicious leftists; and

5. Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol are wonderful, brilliant people, and it is "unclear" why anyone should ever want to criticize them, except possibly for reasons of anti-Semitism."

While I appreciate your quest for alliteration, none of those words fit the writers above.

That is a matter of opinion.

Francis and Buchanan, whatever you may say about the substance of their screeds, write beautifully.

So did Marx. Richard Cohen of the Washington Post writes beautifully also. I qualify their ramblings as incoherent, not the writing style.

If you find them "incoherent", I suggest it is you who may be deficient. Maybe a remedial class in reading and/or writing at the local community college might give you the boost you need.

You may suggest anything you like. I don't need another college class to know that Buchanan has gone from a social conservative to a left-leaning populist. However, if I feel the need to pretend I'm in a college class, I'll just chew down one of Raimondo's 4000-word nonsensical screeds.

Do you even know what insipid means?

Lacking qualities that excite, stimulate, or interest; dull. I stand by it. I can't make it through a Raimondo or Rockwell piece without feeling that they continually re-write the same article. It is dull, boring, lacking in any real-worl intellectual argument. It is argument for the sake of being contrary.

Incomplete?

Being as none of them seem to think out their positions to the logical conclusion, yes I will stand by that too.

Frum writes a diary and Goldberg often writes columns that are a series of non-sequiturs and you're calling polished writers such as Buchanan and Francis "incomplete". Mind-boggling.

I think Goldberg is amusing. Frum I can take or leave, but in his Buchanan piece I think he was right on the money. Apparently, you do not. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. Oh well, c'est la vive (I know what that means, too).

Again, congrats on being clever but you're really devoid of any accuracy here

I'll take the compliment for what it's worth. Look, Buchanan, Raimondo, et al are obviously big hits with you. Good for you. I don't agree with them and find their claim to be "conservatives" ludicrous. In your attempt to defend them you suggested I'm stupid-
I suggest it is you who may be deficient
Maybe a remedial class in reading and/or writing...

Questioned my command of the language - Do you even know what insipid means?

And re-iterated the "stupid" part - but you're really devoid of any accuracy here

I find the tone of your "argument" haughty and arrogant, with a tinge of intellectual superiority (and yes, I know what all those words mean). If I want to debate with someone whose entire argument is based on my not being intelligent enough to grasp the nuances of the discussion, I'll go find a liberal.

And since you also found the need to reply to my off-the-cuff remark about "unhinged/inhinged", I'll assume you were looking to pick an argument. I'll pass, thanks.

I do like one of Zmirak's points, some conservatives will never be happy until they can condemn another conservative for not being liberal enough.

ROFLMAO - We've had to listen to the crap from the ever shrinking whacko right - the name calling, the snide and smug self certainty of it all for years.

The most common statement out of you losers has been to call people RINO or CINO, or "not a real conservative".

We've finally figured out that your crowd is the same bunch of electoral failures that didn't think Reagan was conservative enough, and who routinely jump ship for 3rd party boneheads (but claim you were with us all along). As a result of that, you're out. Permanently. You don't get to sit at the policy table, and you don't get to pretend you were with us all along.

You know the old term "dance with the one who brung ya"? Your date finally noticed you making eyes with others, and you can ride home with them.

Frum is published in National Review, has a best-selling book on Dubya, and is being criticized by the ultra-eccentric Rockwell website crowd who include Raimondo who manages to be both red and lavender simultaneously. Some comeuppance! We should all suffer so! I am not normally a Frum enthusiast but when he is right, he is right!

I understand that Raimondo writes part-time for Pravda, that's the real Pravda, the one in Moscow, ummm not renowned for holding, ummm, conservative views or tolerating them. If you review his craven columns on his Antiwar.com website, it is pretty obvious that he is a phony if he claims to be part of the right. If Raimondo wants to reclaim any movement it would be one where his allies will be George McGovern and CPUSA and the Lambda Legal Defense Fund or perhaps the Rockford Institute and not anything cognizeably conservative.

War is a justifiable exercise of statecraft (even against Saddamites who steal your children to force you to shoot American soldiers by threatening to kill the kids if you don't), whether Justine likes it or not. If Zmirak (who was and probably still is a fine, principled and often misguided young man who is motivated by his idea of Catholicism) met Justine he would flee in terror.

Trent Lott is mixed up with "paleoconservatives" like the atheist Sam Francis, fired by the Washington Times for addressing Holocaust Denial groups favorably. Francis now earns his daily bread editing the monthly rag of the "Conservative Citizens' Council" in Missouri, the lineal descendant of the White Citizen's Council of Mississippi of which Lott's uncle is a leader. Lott contributed a monthly column. As many have noted here, Lott was also a spineless wimp as Majority Leader and good riddance to bad trash as Dr. Frist is far better regardless of any remarks by Lott, who is so dim that he could not remember who the other candidates were in 1948 whom Strom stood against.

Racism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, homosexuality, eccentricity, curmudgeonliness, utter obsolescence of views circa 1935, isolationist neo-ostrichism, a few snobby tastes shared with the culturati, terminal nerdiness and a willingness to associate with an antiwar neo-Americong that includes International A.N.S.W.E.R, the National Lawyers' Guild, Ramsey Clark, Michael Gun-grabbing Moore and the usual gang of anti-American suspects is not the description that first comes to mind when one hears the word "conservative." And, hopefully, it never will.

Frum is attacking the Rockford Institute in a city near me. Access their website: Chroniclesmagazine.com and read for yourself the looney tune ramblings offered in the column "Hard Right" by the eccentric in chief, Tom Fleming. Special prizes for anyone who can find two correct assertions in his scribblings on the outhouse wall.

Pro-Serbian instead of pro-American, he writes in a recent column that France ought not be criticized by mere Americans (yahoos that we are) because France is a far greater country than ever America will be (puts away full barf bag and returns to keyboard) and that it is a lie that we bailed them out in WWII (and I think he also said WWI, but check for yourself the column America's Flailing Francophiles).

Fleming also doubts the crimes of Milosevic (not that we should have intervened there but Milosevic's status as a second generation communist boss does not phase Fleming in the slightest since Milosevic is anti-American and therefore an ally unlike Bill Buckley or the late Frank Meyer or Norman Podhoretz or William Kristol or the late James Burnham or anyone associated with National Review. Also, Joe McCarthy, according to Fleming, was no more than a drunken lout who (read any leftist attack to fill in the rest) ruined people's reputations as sensitive intellectuals without scruple.

As Frum pointed out in his article, Fleming has brought his mini-magazine all the way from a readership of 20,000 in 1987 to a readership of 5,000 today as he advances ever deeper into Serbophilian inanity. Can anyone come up with a single reason why any-non-Serbian grownup cares a feather or a fig over Serbia? Serbia? He should get a life. At that rate, his dimwitted anti-American magazine and Institute will be gone in about five more years and not a moment too soon. Buh-bye!!!!

Robert Novak was a Protestant, recently converted to Roman Catholicism, has never been a Jew so far as I know and has been anti-Israel and wrong about the Middle East for years. So what! The GOP is not its Palestinian Sympathizer wing of former Congressmen Paul Findley and Pete McCloskey or former Senator Upchuck Percy.

Read the websites of these "paleoconservatives" and note their extreme allergy to Jewish people who are involved in making foreign policy and military policy. If the bad habit of ascribing all the decisions of those Jewish folks to some sort of dual loyalty problem is not anti-Semitism, neither is the seldom seen (nowadays) routine about Catholics not being fit for the Senate or the presidency because they might favor the Vatican anti-Catholicism.

When another "paleo", Joseph Sobran, who has devastated what might have been a brilliant career by not refraining from such stupidities as referring to conservative hawks (who happen to be Jewish) as "kosher conservatives" before Holocaust Denial groups, he is hailed in these circles of "paleos".

Those of us who have devoted decades to the authentic conservative movement that elected Ronald Reagan resent the "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?" handful of malicious malcontents and plain offensive characters who would ruin conservatism and our country by going where no decent person will go again into a sewer of racism and bigotry.

Paul Gottfried was also criticized in the Frum article but Frum has no reputation for bashing Jews, assuming that Gottfried ius a Jew which he may not be. He is a pal of the Rockford Institute crowd, however which is the only negative that I know about him.

I guess the alternative would be to accept any old kind of disreputable ideological trash just because it is self-labeled as "conservative?" Or should there be some internal order and coherence to the movement that calls itself conservative and has for fifty years and more and elected Ronald Reagan along the way?

Bill Buckley read the John Birch Society and Ayn Rand out of the movement many years ago. He simply delivered the anathemas through his magazine (where Whittaker Chambers did the honors on la Rand). Today, David Frum is doing similar honors in the same venue on the curious crew who call themselves "paleoconservatives" and live on attacking the actual conservative movement. Frum is right. To attack antisemitism or racism or xenophobia, much less to attack Justine's pantywaist "antiwar" efforts (worried as he/she/it is about all those lost romantic opportunities) is not to attack anyone for insufficient liberalism. Au contraire: just insufficient conservatism and, in most cases, insufficient manhood and insufficient patriotism.

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