Posted on 10/19/2010 12:20:02 AM PDT by Ronbo1948
It's easy to use the deceased to claim support for one's positions. The dead aren't around to deny, rebut, and refute false or misleading statements.
William F. Buckley, Jr., intellectual giant and "maker" of the conservative movement, has of late become a crutch for statists and ruling-class elites to denigrate the Tea Parties and the surge of the constitutional, small-government conservative movement.
Liberals trying to smear the Tea Party cause and constitutional, small-government conservative candidates by referring to Buckley are, however, attempting to rewrite history to suit their own agendas and ideology.
For example, E.J. Dionne writes in Monday's Washington Post, "[W]hereas responsible conservatives such as William F. Buckley Jr. denounced the [John] Birchers and the rest of the lunatic fringe back then, Republicans this time are riding the radical wave."
Steve Benen of the liberal Washington Monthly recently shed crocodile tears in a post entitled, "Where have you gone, William F. Buckley, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you," claiming that "the conservative movement appears to have gone berserk." Benen laid charges of "an unprecedented mainstreaming of once fringe far-right ideas."
In my appearance on CNN's Parker Spitzer show last week, co-host Kathleen Parker tried that gambit with me. Here's a part from the exchange reported by Newsbusters of the Media Research Center:
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
The neat thing about Bill was that it was utterly impossible for the media to portray him as stupid or ignorant. Anybody who tried promptly had his head detached and handed to him.
While I like Sarah, it’s too bad the most visible person in the conservative movement today isn’t similarly articulate and erudite.
OTOH, Buckleys don’t come along every day, so that’s perhaps too much to expect.
What these gentlemen ignore is the simple fact that, after having moved your own goalpost 500 yards to the left, it should come as no suprise to everyone else on the field seems to be a frothing right-wing radical. I am forever impressed by the willful obtuseness on the part of the left.
The libs invoke Bill Buckley as a paragon of courtly, soft-spoken conservatism, unlike those “rabble-rousers” such as Sarah Palin.
But the fact was WFB on his “Firing Line” show would quietly and unobtrusively nibble the flesh clean off of his liberal guests without ever raising his voice. They exited his show as denuded skeletons, never having felt a thing.
E.J. Dionne is just a bow-tied little twerp with a bad case of Buckley envy.
I once saw Buckley tell Gore Vidal that he was going to sock him in his g—d face. It was during election coverage and on live TV.
Famous battle. Vidal called Buckley a crypto-fascist and Buckley responded: shut up, you fag!
How I loved the 60s!
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