by Damozel | Well, well. Well done, Christopher Buckley. Or rather, well done Rich "Little Starbursts" Lowry for "rather briskly" accepting Buckley's resignation (following Buckley's announcement that he is voting for Obama), thus freeing Buckley from the increasingly ignominious label "Republican." To which Buckley rejoins:
[T]o paraphrase a real conservative, Ronald Reagan: I haven’t left the Republican Party. It left me..(Daily Beast)
Though not before letting him---more in anger than in sorrow--- know that diverse opinions are not welcome at National Review.
"One editor at National Review—a friend of 30 years—emailed me that he thought my opinions “cretinous.” One thoughtful correspondent, who feels that I have “betrayed”—the b-word has been much used in all this—my father and the conservative movement generally, said he plans to devote the rest of his life to getting people to cancel their subscriptions to National Review. But there was one bright spot: To those who wrote me to demand, “Cancel my subscription,” I was able to quote the title of my father’s last book, a delicious compendium of his NR “Notes and Asides”: Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription....
"The GOP likes to say it’s a big-tent. Looks more like a yurt to me...." (Daily Beast)
Buckley points out that his father never marched in lock-step with the party.
My father in his day endorsed a number of liberal Democrats for high office, including Allard K. Lowenstein and Joe Lieberman. One of his closest friends on earth was John Kenneth Galbraith. In 1969, Pup wrote a widely-remarked upon column saying that it was time America had a black president. (I hasten to aver here that I did not endorse Senator Obama because he is black. Surely voting for someone on that basis is as racist as not voting for him for the same reason.)
My point, simply, is that William F. Buckley held to rigorous standards, and if those were met by members of the other side rather than by his own camp, he said as much. My father was also unpredictable, which tends to keep things fresh and lively and on-their-feet. He came out for legalization of drugs once he decided that the war on drugs was largely counterproductive. Hardly a conservative position. Finally, and hardly least, he was fun. God, he was fun. He liked to mix it up. (Daily Beast)
I infer from this that Buckley has noticed that the conservatives today are decidedly un-fun. Being in a constant state of rage/panicky fear does tend to make the sort of light-hearted irony with which the very few conservatives who are funny and fun---Buckley and P.J. O'Rourke, say---treat their subjects.
[Where, in parentheses, have all the Republican Party Reptiles gone? Irritating as they were, at least you could laugh with them as well as at them. Imagine: back in the Eighties it was much cooler to be a conservative rather than a liberal before the GOP became the party of what one of my colleagues calls "the fake Republican Jesus, Son of Cheney and Rove." There aren't many of them around these days.]
You can read Lowry's response here.
Buckley says he's not in mourning for having lost his card-carrying Republican status.
I no longer have any clear idea what, exactly, the modern conservative movement stands for. Eight years of “conservative” government has brought us a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance. As a sideshow, it brought us a truly obscene attempt at federal intervention in the Terry Schiavo case.(Daily Beast)
As Daniel Larison says, it's possible to be a conservative without being a Republican. To DFH's like me, quite a few Democrats are that and almost all independents. Our tendency is to view them as reasonable-seeming, though wrong (like Sullivan and Buckley himself these days). The fact is, different people have different points of view about what our country's mission is and ought to be, and about its appropriate relationship to its citizens. I disagree, for example, with certain conservatives (as opposed to Republicans), but I don't believe that they are evil; I just think their premises are mistaken and/or misguided.
I feel very differently about the sort of Republican---including, regrettably, John McCain--- who spreads smears about Obama's character in a pathetic attempt to incite public opinion against him or who still thinks there's something to be said for McCain's VP pick. These belong to the class of Republican who send hate mail to so-called "turncoats."
The Liberal Journal says:
We liberals have been talking about the knuckle dragging set for a while and have been admonished for it. What leg do the admonishers have left to stand on?
Larison comments.
It is always interesting to me how the people who write these sorts of letters are moved to anger when this or that pundit voices a dissenting view because they are so concerned about treachery, but when the President or other leaders of their preferred party enact plainly anti-conservative policies they are not seen as having betrayed anything. Even if there is some consistency in the responses, it is almost as if the so-called betrayal of the pundit or writer is considered to be just as bad as that of the politician, when the failures of the latter are usually far more consequential and more deserving of scorn than anything any one writer has to say. I suppose the point is really this: on the day when Mr. Bush hands in his resignation letter and apologizes for his myriad failures, perhaps then people can talk seriously about Chris Buckley’s “betrayal” of the movement that helped empower Mr. Bush.
Wonkette says it differently:
After Christopher Buckley insulted his dead father’s National Review magazine by endorsing a liberal black Maoist over the Crazyfarts McBombs and Sideshow Moosetits ticket, every editor at the National Review and every wingnut with an AOL account called him a traitor to his own family, Jesus, and The Cause. And so Buckley has now quit his columnist position at the magazine and written a rather brutal excoriation of Modern Conservatism on Tina Brown’s new Huffington Post, The British Space Cyclops.
And here are a couple of choice comments from the Wonkette part-time pundits gallery:
GOP = the party of William Jennings Bryan
Bryan was a vulgar and common man, a cad undiluted. He was ignorant, bigoted, self-seeking, blatant and dishonest. His career brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses. It was hard to believe, watching him at Dayton, that he had traveled, that he had been received in civilized societies, that he had been a high officer of state. He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the dung-pile. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not. - HL Mencken (Woodwards friend)
Growing up as a “Hee-Haw-right-wing-nut-Jesus-freak,” I believed that compromise was a useless and empty tool when compared to the power of an allmighty.... It’s a shame that the people who want the government to dictate all things “moral” have wound up in the “states’ rights” small government party. (Jaded Dissonance)
It's nice to see the current crop of so-called "small government" so-called "conservatives" called out for fraudulence by one of their own.
Memeorandum has more on Buckley's Bowing Out.
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