Free Republic

Conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr. would approve of the tea party movement, says conservative historian Lee Edwards, who just finished a book about Buckley. “Bill Buckley embodied the idea of blending the main streams of conservatism – traditional conservatives, libertarian conservatives, social conservatives, neo-conservatives, national security conservatives and so forth,” Edwards told Newsmax.TV. “He always said politics is a matter of addition not subtraction. I think he would reach out with open arms to the tea party movement.” (VIDEO AT LINK) Edwards sees many similarities between the tea partyers and Buckley. They both are/were anti-establishment; they both support(ed) limited...

This is a half-hour archived show in which William F. Buckley discusses his position on legalizing drugs in America. The interviewer is Richard Heffner. http://www.archive.org/details/openmind_ep181

Many prominent young bloggers say its time conservatives altered their fortunes and cast off those intellectual dead weights who stir up irrational fear. Time to throw off those whose intellectual bankruptcy has left the conservative movement with no credibility in the eyes of the American people. No, they’re not calling for the removal of those writers and political leaders who told us that if we didn’t give the Treasury $700 billion to distribute to corporate America, the world as we know it would end, thus undermining free-market economics. Rather, the talk from young political guns Patrick Ruffini and Jon Henke...

Meacham: So how bad is it, really? Your title doesn't quite declare conservatism dead. Tanenhaus: Quite bad if you prize a mature, responsible conservatism that honors America's institutions, both governmental and societal. The first great 20th-century Republican president, Theo- dore Roosevelt, supported a strong central government that emphasized the shared values and ideals of the nation's millions of citizens. He denounced the harm done by "the trusts"—big corporations. He made it his mission to conserve vast tracts of wilderness and forest. The last successful one, Ronald Reagan, liked to remind people (especially the press) he was a lifelong New Dealer...

The editor of The New York Times Book Review and the paper's "Week in Review" section, Sam Tanenhaus is the biographer of Whittaker Chambers and is at work on the life of William F. Buckley Jr. In a new, short book, The Death of Conservatism, he argues that the right needs to find its footing for the good of the country. In an e-mail exchange with Jon Meacham, Tanenhaus reflected on the book's themes. Excerpts:

The most important lesson of his career is that there are limits to accommodation. In times of perplexity evangelical Christians ask themselves, "What would Jesus do?" Conservatives trying to regroup in the age of Obama might ask themselves, "What would William F. Buckley Jr. do?" ... The most important lesson of his career is that there are limits to accommodation. Buckley came to fame in the early 1950s after two decades of liberal Democratic dominance, the Fair Deal of Harry Truman having followed the New Deal of FDR. When Republicans finally recaptured Congress and the White House in 1952, it...

To the extent that this story has a dimension beyond the purely personal, I suppose it’s an account of becoming an orphan. My mother and father died within 11 months of each other in 2007 and 2008. I do realize that “orphan” sounds like an overdramatic term for becoming parentless at age 55, but I was struck by the number of times the word occurred in the 800 or more condolence letters I received after my father died. I hadn’t, until about the seventh or eighth reference, thought of myself as an “orphan.” Now you’re an orphan. . . ....

he story of the two-bedroom, one-bath shack on West Hopi Street, is the story of this year's financial panic, told in 576 square feet. It helps explain how a series of bad decisions can add up to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Less than two years ago, Integrity Funding LLC, a local lender, gave a $103,000 mortgage to the owner, Marvene Halterman, an unemployed woman with a long list of creditors and, by her own account, a long history of drug and alcohol abuse. For a $350 fee, an appraiser hired by Integrity, Michael T. Asher, valued...

Thought some might enjoy reading Mr. Buckley initial article on conservatism in NR. "The Magazines Credenda" at the end seems as topical today as in 1955. There is, we like to think, solid reason for rejoicing. Prodigious efforts, by many people, are responsible for NATIONAL REVIEW. But since it will be the policy of this magazine to reject the hypodermic approach to world affairs, we may as well start out at once, and admit that the joy is not unconfined. Let's face it: Unlike Vienna, it seems altogether possible that did NATIONAL REVIEW not exist, no one would have invented...

THE DEBATE absolutely disposed of the question, Can Dan Quayle speak and think in public? The moat built around him by the Bush people during tbe past two months was largely responsible for giving out the impression that he was a basket case of illiteracy, and one or two comments caught from him during that period did much to excite suspicion that that was the case. But for ninety minutes he spoke well, trenchantly, and with a mature sense of priorities. Oh, he did the irritating things-if he reminds us one more time that he wrote the Joint Training Partnership...

How are you holding up? I am heavily medicated. What are you taking? I’m teasing. It’s just a line from one of my favorite movies, “Spinal Tap.” I feel I should be heavily medicated. In the past few weeks you’ve been pilloried by the right for a column you contributed to a Web site, “Sorry, Dad, I’m Voting for Obama.” What I mounted in The Daily Beast was an argument. It was not an attitudinal riff — it was not “John McCain is an old snarly-pants.” I presented a thoughtful argument, and it was viewed as apostasy. As a result,...

After a lifetime of being his father’s son, and yet having achieved fame and success in his own right, suddenly, at age 56, the author is unbound. “There is something ironically liberating when the father figure dies,” he said, sitting in his study, surrounded by his books and family mementos, including the manual Royal typewriter on which, he believes, his father wrote the 1951 classic, “God and Man at Yale.” *** As to his own father, it was “a complicated relationship,” he said. Early on, the elder Mr. Buckley was enthusiastic about his son’s writing. But as the son racked...

Christopher Buckley ’75, co-founder of the Yale Daily News magazine and son of conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr. ’50, resigned Saturday from his position as a columnist at National Review, the influential magazine his father founded five years after graduating from Yale. The younger Buckley offered up his post to National Review editor Rich Lowry after Buckley’s Thursday endorsement of Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama in an online news magazine elicited a wave of outrage from National Review readers. “By Friday, I was Judas,” said Buckley in a telephone interview with the News on Tuesday night. “I thought...

The truth few wish to utter is that the GOP has abandoned many conservatives, who mostly nurse their angst in private. Those chickens we keep hearing about have indeed come home to roost. Years of pandering to the extreme wing — the “kooks” the senior Buckley tried to separate from the right — have created a party no longer attentive to its principles. Instead, as Christopher Buckley pointed out in a blog post on thedailybeast.com explaining his departure from National Review, eight years of “conservatism” have brought us “a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere,...

The son of conservative icon William F. Buckley has parted ways with the magazine his father founded for committing a heretical act by National Review magazine standards: endorsing Barack Obama. In a column today entitled “Sorry, Dad, I was Sacked”on www.TheDailyBeast.com, Christopher Buckley, a well-known author also who wrote the back page column for National Review magazine, writes that the uproar over his endorsement last week of Obama over Republican John McCain prompted so much backlash that he offered his resignation—and the magazine accepted. “This offer was accepted—rather briskly! —by Rich Lowry, NR’s editor, and its publisher, the superb and...

Christopher Buckley, the author and son of the late conservative mainstay William F. Buckley, said in a telephone interview that he has resigned from the National Review, the political journal his father founded in 1955. As a result, he wrote to Richard Lowry, the editor of the National Review, and its publisher, Jack Fowler, offering to resign, and “this offer was rather briskly accepted,” Mr. Buckley said.

Christopher Buckley, in an exclusive for The Daily Beast, explains why he left The National Review, the magazine his father founded. I seem to have picked an apt title for my Daily Beast column, or blog, or whatever it’s called: “What Fresh Hell.” My last posting (if that’s what it’s called) in which I endorsed Obama, has brought about a very heaping helping of fresh hell. In fact, I think it could accurately be called a tsunami. The mail (as we used to call it in pre-cyber times) at the Beast has been running I’d say at about 7-to-1 in...

A Word on Christopher Buckley [Rich Lowry] Chris is up with a post at The Daily Beast, "Sorry, Dad, I Was Fired." I’d like to clarify this “firing” business. Over the weekend, Chris wrote us a jaunty e-mail with the subject line "A Sincere Offer," in which he offered to resign his column on NR's back page and said that if we accepted, there "would be no hard feelings, only warmest regards and understanding." We took the offer sincerely. Chris had done us the favor of writing the column beginning seven issues ago on a "trial basis" (his words), while...

In either the last week of August or the first week of September, 1970, just before I arrived at college, I had the extraordinary experience of going to Sharon, Connecticut, to the home of William Buckley. With several hundred other young conservatives (I was 17), I gathered for a couple days to validate my totally-against-the-crowd perception of life, a perception inspired in large part by William Buckley, one of the giants of the 20th century. Buckley's inspiration was not a new or different perception of life. To the contrary, his perception was an explication of life, a logical and spiritual...

It always saddens me to disagree with a friend, especially when I hold the friend in high professional regard. I have great personal affection for Christopher Buckley, and I harbor unbounded admiration for his talents as a satirist. He is an immensely engaging chap–a draught of champagne (the real stuff, not some domestic sparkler) on legs–and a boon travel companion to boot. Someday, we may amaze the world with our co-authored travelogue/political thriller about our journeys in and around Nootka. But that is a saga for another occasion. At the moment, I am feeling glum because Christo has broadcast a...