Free Republic

From 1969, but still very relavent today. (sic)

William F. Buckley’s ‘Conservative Movement’ Still-Born, Dead-On-Arrival, Decades Ago, Because it Was Godless, Against Christ, Ignored God’s Word Contact: John Lofton, 301-873-4612, 410-760-8885, JLof@aol.com MEDIA ADVISORY, March 3 /Christian Newswire/ — Recovering Republican John Lofton, Editor of TheAmericanView.com and co-host of “The American View” radio show with the Constitution Party’s 2004 Presidential candidate Michael Anthony Peroutka, has issued the following statement: “Except the LORD build the house, they labour in vain that build it: except the LORD keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.” – Psalm 127. The Lord Jesus Christ did not build the “conservative movement” house....

All of my adult life, William F. Buckley Jr. has been a player on the national stage. It is hard to believe that Buckley is no longer with us – that he has to be moved in our mental computers from an active folder to one labeled memory. Thousands of writers have claimed that Buckley was the father of modern conservatism. Maybe. What is certain is that Buckley has carried the conservative standard from the time he wrote his seminal book, God and Man at Yale. He followed this with the founding of the National Review in 1955. The National...

March 01, 2008, 9:00 a.m. ‘It’s the Epigoni, Stupid’William F. Buckley Jr. stood athwart history and changed its course. By Mark Steyn If you were running one of those Frank Luntz machine-wired focus groups to produce the ideal conservative leader for America, I doubt you’d come up with an urbane patrician harpsichordist semi-resident in Switzerland and partial to words like “eremitical� and “periphrastic.� “It’s the epigoni, stupid� is not a useful campaign slogan — although, in fact, a distressingly large number of political candidates are certainly epigoni (“a second-rate imitator�). But William F. Buckley Jr. was a first-rate original,...

"At his desk," wrote Christopher Buckley in his email to friends, "in Stamford this morning." Well, one had somehow known that it would have to be at his desk. The late William F. Buckley Jr. was a man of incessant labor and productivity, with a slight allowance made for that saving capacity for making it appear easy. But he was driven, all right, and restless, and never allowed himself much ease on his own account. There was never a moment, after taping some session at Firing Line, where mere recourse to some local joint was in prospect. He was always...

WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY: R.I.P., ENFANT TERRIBLEFebruary 27, 2008 William F. Buckley was the original enfant terrible. As with Ronald Reagan, everyone prefers to remember great men when they weren't being great, but later, when they were being admired. Having changed the world, there came a point when Buckley no longer needed to shock it. But to call Buckley an "enfant terrible" and then to recall only his days as a grandee is like calling a liberal actress "courageous." Back in the day, Buckley truly was courageous. I prefer to remember the Buckley who scandalized to the bien-pensant. Other tributes will...

Just breaking on NRO...

NEW YORK — Author and conservative commentator William F. Buckley Jr. has died at age 82. His assistant Linda Bridges says Buckley died Wednesday morning at his home in Stamford, Conn. Buckley became famous for his intellectual political writings in his magazine, the National Review.

How do you solve a problem like Bill Buckley? He has always been easy to caricature -- the eloquent eyebrows and the aristocratic drawl, with its lord-of-the-manor tone -- but difficult to analyze. Prolific writer, great editor, nonpareil debater, television celebrity, expert skier, gifted harpsichord player, ready wit (rapier or stiletto style, take your choice), popular lecturer, political guru, an ideological warrior who distrusts ideology: Just who, and what, is this guy? A brilliant dilettante with Attention Deficit Disorder or a Renaissance man overflowing with talent and ideas? His obvious delight in debate, his knack for writing entertaining escapist fiction,...

Amicus Brief A review of Friendship: An Exposé by Joseph Epstein By William F. Buckley, Jr.Posted November 13, 2006 Joseph Epstein remarks that there aren't many books written on the subject of friendship. Two hundred and seventy pages later, we might be tempted to think, Score one more for the marketplace! But of course you wouldn't be tempted to say any such thing after completing this book. Joe Epstein appears to have promised himself, 17 books back, that he would never be tedious, and this latest book is certainly a validation of that oath. In particular because a book...

Those of us who support the nomination of Harriet Miers (even reluctantly) were warned repeatedly that we would be devastated, blown away, and inundated by the Noahide deluge of Hurricane Gamma, George Will's unanswerable final whirlwind of rhetorical devastation of Harriet Miers. Instead, all we got was a spritz of seltzer down our pants. Will's meticulous retailing of yawn-inducing epithets ("perfect perversity," "discredits," "degrades," "justifications," "deficit of constitutional understanding," "gross misunderstanding of conservatism," and "persons masquerading as its defenders" -- all from the first paragraph!); his hand-waving dismissal of counterargument (his entire final paragraph -- see below); the by now...

Folks let me tell you a little bit about my evening last night -- and I'm here today, and I knew this was going to happen. I'm here today on about three hours, 2-1/2 hours sleep. So I'm in a giddy mood and we all know what happens when I'm in a giddy mood. The broadcast engineer's finger is poised over the deedle button at all times, as, you know, we get close to that line of pushing the envelope, as it were. Last night was the 50th anniversary of National Review magazine. Now, National Review magazine, of course, is...

William F. Buckley Jr. NRO Editor at Large Little Memories Remembering Ronald Reagan. Q: You knew him well, right? Even back when he was still a Democrat? A: Yes. It happened one night. It was his job to introduce me, as the evening's speaker, to a group of California doctors. He acted like a gymnast out of Barnum and Bailey. The control room for the loudspeakers had been left locked. Nobody could find the janitor. So he cat-walked above the traffic to the window of the control room and smashed it open with his elbow, turning on the juice, the...

The war against stable thought blazes on, the objective being to put the blame on the Bush administration for what happened in New Orleans. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times personalizes even further. The administration has a "tax policy . . . dominated by the toweringly selfish Grover Norquist -- who has been quoted as saying: 'I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.’" You would think that Mr. Friedman would leave a little place in life for...

THE WASHINGTON TIMES A wild thought passes through my mind, which is that maybe Benon Sevan is in fact innocent. Innocent of receiving money directly from his buddy Fakhry Abdelnour, the Egyptian whose company (AMEP — African Middle East Petroleum) wanted some Iraqi chits to permit oil purchases. Benon Sevan was certainly not innocent of using his influence in behalf of his friends and of failing to blow any whistles when suspect contractors were designated to oversee the oil-for-food program, a cover-up for easing the life and enhancing the fortunes of Saddam Hussein. Click to learn more... The U.N. had...

George W. Bush is the center of attention this week, and properly so. On Monday, the networks each showcased an exclusive interview with the president done in the White House Library. Flicking from ABC to CBS to NBC it seemed possible to catch them all, and not surprising that all pondered similar questions. They bore on the tactical question of Iraq (How are we doing?) and the strategic implications of Iraq (Where else are we likely to do the same thing?). One questioner was pretty blunt: Since Iraq was not in fact deploying weapons of mass destruction, what reason do...

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...

The final day in Boston was illustrative at several levels, principal of them that Senator Kerry's brilliantly planned launch proposes to focus on the simple matter of his relative desirability. There was no bill of indictment against George Bush, but the speeches rested on common assumptions. They are that Mr. Bush is a failed leader, a thoughtless strategist, a reckless general, and a careless custodian of the United States Constitution. All of thinking America knows that national conventions are substantially about political theater. They do not convene to discharge exegetical functions. Mr. Kerry was glib about his commitment as commander...

Conservatives pride themselves on resisting change, which is as it should be. But intelligent deference to tradition and stability can evolve into intellectual sloth and moral fanaticism, as when conservatives simply decline to look up from dogma because the effort to raise their heads and reconsider is too great. The laws aren't exactly indefensible, because practically nothing is, and the thunderers who tell us to stay the course can always find one man or woman who, having taken marijuana, moved on to severe mental disorder. But that argument, to quote myself, is on the order of saying that every...

In 1954, when Ronald Reagan was still a registered Democrat and host of "General Electric Theater," the 28-year-old William Frank Buckley Jr. decided to start a magazine as a standard-bearer for the fledgling conservative movement. In the 50-year ascent of the American right since then, his publication, National Review, has been its most influential journal and Mr. Buckley has been the magazine's guiding spirit and, until today, controlling shareholder. Tonight, however, Mr. Buckley, 78, is giving up control. In an interview, he said he planned to relinquish his shares today to a board of trustees he had selected. Among them...

Understanding our anger. There is an aspect of the Michael Jackson affair that has been insufficiently explored, namely, what exactly are we mad about? The general charge is that he has corrupted a young boy. The prosecutor's specific claims are that he had Angelo (we'll call him) to Neverland, talked him into the same bed used by Michael, perhaps even gave him a whiff of alcohol, and then off into sexual dreamland. Mr. Jackson's lawyer says the fantasy is that of the prosecution — that his client extended to his 12-year-old guest nothing more than the warmth and hospitality he...

There is a great flurry on the question, should competing presidential candidates speak about the weaknesses of other contenders? Howard Dean is at the center of the controversy because he chewed out Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic chairman. He told McAuliffe he should have used his good offices to get the other candidates to shut up about him and how he couldn’t win if nominated. Everybody is now mad at everybody else but mostly at Dean. One mostly gets mad at front runners. I contribute an experience: In July 1987, I brought together in Houston all the Democratic candidates for president,...

Everybody sell! was the slogan of William I. Nichols years ago when he headed up This Week, the largest-selling Sunday supplement of the day. The genial and learned Harvard-trained publisher had been greatly impressed on learning that 66 percent of the gross national product is generated by sales. If nobody bought, nobody would produce except for his own account, and there are only so many potatoes a consumer can eat, or skirts she can wear. So he must entice others, who themselves simultaneously entice other consumers. It is for this reason -- sales -- that inventive merchants devise not only...

Why they hate him. In a private forum the question arose, Why do they hate Bush so? And … what will they do with that hatred? How far can they carry it? How will it affect the next presidential election? The participants agreed that it is a singular hatred, greater by far than what was felt by dissenters against Ronald Reagan in 1984, and rivaling what was felt for Nixon in 1973-4. It supplies a useful context here to recall that hatred of Nixon was very much alive in 1972, but he carried 49 states in his reelection bid. The...

The F word and Drew LaMar. The incident took place back in May, but the thunder heightens, and on September 1 it occupied the attention of Bill O'Reilly and his million listeners. Did the administration of the Lawrence Central High School in Indianapolis go too far in punishing Drew LaMar?

<p>The conservative movement has scored historic gains but has yet to achieve several of its basic goals.</p> <p>That's the verdict of some of its founding fathers (and one important mother).</p> <p>"We won the battle against communism, but I guess we've largely lost the battle against big government," says Eagle Forum President Phyllis Schlafly, 79, who defied conventional wisdom by leading a women's crusade that defeated the Equal Rights Amendment in the mid-1970s.</p>

The program initiated by sundry evangelical Christian ministers to accost Islam by teaching the tenets of the Christian faith to those who seek to bring that faith to Muslims is very good stuff, overdue. There is, of paramount concern to them, the commanding message felt by these Protestant missionaries. One of them put it this way to a reporter from the New York Times: "If I had the answer for cancer, what sort of a human would I be not to share it?" That is the theological commandment and it is entirely honorable, especially when it tells of men and...

The story featuring the grandmother in New York City who at age 19 sported about with President Kennedy is attracting about as much attention as the proverbial "Small Earthquake in Chile." There is this difference: When small earthquakes are reported, they aren't met with smiles and half-giggles. — There goes Talcahuano again! is met with fatalistic acceptance of fractious acts of nature. What we got in the matter of the grandmother was Tee Hee time, led by Nora Ephron in the New York Times. The tone of her op-ed tells it all, the accepted view of presidential intern-sex by worldly...

The Big Story featuring the New York Times and Jayson Blair is grounds for twittery — look what happened to the Gray Lady! But the reproaches give satisfaction only because of the high standards of the newspaper, and the sense of it that slippages in such a fortress make for great waterfalls. Those who worked their way through the 4-page recitation of what Mr. Jayson Blair did came only, toward the end of the story, to the question that immediately came instantly to the inquirer's mind. It was: Did he get away with it because he is an African American?...

The question before the house (in Vienna) was what we hoped was achieved by the war, apart from the obvious gain to the people of Iraq. Perhaps future moral theorists will acknowledge that the price paid for victory in Baghdad was startlingly low. Every man's death certainly diminishes the family of the deceased, but cannot affect, in the numbers we experienced, the moral arithmetic that asks whether the cost was bearable. There is, we learned, one authority that claims that Iraq's civilian casualties were small, measured even in double digits. U.S. casualties were about what we lose between Monday and...

The question before the house (in Vienna) was what we hoped was achieved by the war, apart from the obvious gain to the people of Iraq. Perhaps future moral theorists will acknowledge that the price paid for victory in Baghdad was startlingly low. Every man's death certainly diminishes the family of the deceased, but cannot affect, in the numbers we experienced, the moral arithmetic that asks whether the cost was bearable. There is, we learned, one authority that claims that Iraq's civilian casualties were small, measured even in double digits. U.S. casualties were about what we lose between Monday and...

Let us pause in order to suppress any smile over the three Cuban hijackers executed by Castro, but go on to smile broadly over the terrible consequences of all of this for Oliver Stone. Here we were, April 2003, and Fidel Castro reaches into corners of his country to round up 75 conspirators against the socialist health of the Castro regime, giving some of them prison sentences as heavy as 28 years. The trials were done in very fast motion, so that there was no opportunity to reflect on what it was that the defendants pleaded. But reports confirmed that...

The finality of the long — seemingly endless — period of indecision, fractured alliances, ambivalent allies, and fruitless diplomacy had an unusual touch. The president flew two thirds of the way across the Atlantic to meet with the leaders of the diminished ranks of our allies. The trip doesn't take much more air time than a flight to Denver, but there was operatic grace in seeking out a remote island, one of an archipelago as beautiful as any on earth, and touching down with the prime ministers of Great Britain, Spain, and Portugal, where the language spoken is foreign, and...

The key sentence in the speech of Vice President Cheney in Nashville was, "The risks of inaction are far greater than the risks of action." In this intense address, in which words and sentences carry huge freight, we are asked to attend scrupulously to what Mr. Cheney is saying, and of course the very first question becomes: Risks to whom? Is it possible to distinguish between the threat Iraq poses in the Mideast and the threat it poses to the United States? Cheney answers that questions as follows: "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons...

Catholics and Scandals What is happening to the clergy? March 15, 2002 2:40 p.m.   he sex scandals involving Roman Catholic clergy and boys come in every morning with the regularity of terrorist activity in the Mideast. The stories engender heuristic discussion of problems if not cognate, at least tangential. What is happening to the Catholic clergy? Is what is happening conceivably welcome? What are we learning about the homosexual subculture in the clergy? What is it teaching us about such public questions as homosexual scoutmasters? — There is a new book called Goodbye! Good Men, in which the...