Posted on 07/22/2006 8:45:38 PM PDT by West Coast Conservative
President Bush ran for office as a "compassionate conservative." And he continues to nurture his conservative base even issuing his first veto this week against embryonic stem cell research.
But lately his foreign policy has come under fire from some conservatives including the father of modern conservatism. CBS Evening News Saturday anchor Thalia Assuras sat down for an exclusive interview with William F. Buckley about his disagreements with President Bush.
William F. Buckley's Stamford, Conn., home is a tranquil place that allows Buckley to think and write, and spend time with his canine companion, Sebastian.
"He's practically always with me," Buckley says.
Buckley finds himself parting ways with President Bush, whom he praises as a decisive leader but admonishes for having strayed from true conservative principles in his foreign policy.
In particular, Buckley views the three-and-a-half-year Iraq War as a failure.
"If you had a European prime minister who experienced what we've experienced it would be expected that he would retire or resign," Buckley says.
Asked if the Bush administration has been distracted by Iraq, Buckley says "I think it has been engulfed by Iraq, by which I mean no other subject interests anybody other than Iraq. ... The continued tumult in Iraq has overwhelmed what perspectives one might otherwise have entertained with respect to, well, other parts of the Middle East with respect to Iran in particular."
Despite evidence that Iran is supplying weapons and expertise to Hezbollah in the conflict with Israel, Buckley rejects neo-conservatives who favor a more interventionist foreign policy than he does, including a pre-emptive air strike against Iran and its nuclear facilities.
"If we find there is a warhead there that is poised, the range of it is tested, then we have no alternative. But pending that, we have to ask ourselves, 'What would the Iranian population do?'"
Buckley does support the administration's approach to the North Korea's nuclear weapons threat, believing that working with Russia, China, Japan and South Korea is the best way to get Pyongyang back to the negotiating table. But that's about where the agreement ends.
"Has Mr. Bush found himself in any different circumstances than any of the other presidents you've known in terms of these crises?" Assuras asks.
"I think Mr. Bush faces a singular problem best defined, I think, as the absence of effective conservative ideology with the result that he ended up being very extravagant in domestic spending, extremely tolerant of excesses by Congress, and in respect of foreign policy, incapable of bringing together such forces as apparently were necessary to conclude the Iraq challenge," Buckley says.
Asked what President Bush's foreign policy legacy will be to his successor, Buckley says "There will be no legacy for Mr. Bush. I don't believe his successor would re-enunciate the words he used in his second inaugural address because they were too ambitious. So therefore I think his legacy is indecipherable"
At 81, Mr. Buckley still continues to contribute a regular column to the National Review, the magazine he started 51 years ago.
Sorry. My apologies. Guess I get a little prickly around 2:00 AM.
So that's you, did you see me make that distinction?
'Liberal elites' and 'media elites' and so on aren't usually the elites that populists--historically--have referred to.
Not the ones you acknowledge as such anyway.
"You can say any fool thing to a dog, and the dog will give you this look that says, `By God, you're RIGHT! I NEVER would've thought of that!"...Dave Barry, I believe.
How sad this guy ends up bitter in his old age. No one pays enough attention anymore, I guess. Must be tough.
I can understand that, don't worry about it. Anyway, if you will forgive me for being a little inane ;) , I think we are going to have to agree to disagree on this whole issue.
You wrote, "Not the ones you acknowledge as such anyway."
I have no idea what that sentence means. Are you saying that I don't recognize the existence of such elites because I lack the discernment to recognize them as such, or what?
It's not an issue of your "lack of discernment." More your fixation on professed ideology. I wish you would not jump to the most negative interpretation.
Anyway I was thinking more of the Populists themselves. You don't acknowledge populist rhetoric as such, unless it is classist. It often is classist, but it need not be. It could for example be cultural, or racist, or even meta-ideological (if you establish one ideology for the "common man" and one for say the "Washington elite").
Ping
On the one hand, in those years you could be as vocally anti-government or anti-modernity as you wanted to be. On the other hand, the demands of the Cold War meant that one would have to put up with a lot of government and a lot of modernity.
With the end of the Cold War, things have gotten more confused. Nowadays, the anti-government and the activist foreign policy communities and messages are split. One can't talk both languages at the same time.
Nixon could be a "big government conservative," because other conservatives agreed that he'd made all the right enemies. Bush is more or less a BGC as Nixon was, but you don't have that clear polarity of choices that existed in the Cold War years -- capitalism vs. communism, and free markets vs. socialism.
Instead, the "cut government at home" and the "spread freedom around the world" camps and messages are in conflict, so it's harder to place Bush as securely as Nixon as a conservative or honorary conservative.
I didn't, and don't, favor the "conservative" approach to Iraq. Just because something merits the label "conservative" and another thing doesn't, doesn't automatically make the former the better choice. In the case of Iraq, Democrats were conservative and Bush was not. So be it.
This is news? Not to anyone who has been awake for the last seven years.
General Douglas MacArthur: "In war, there is no substitute for victory."
Merely pointing out that even “credentialed” conservatives might disagree with Black Elk. Alas, Buckley is too old and I am too young. What is it like being the perfect age?
Dubya is hardly perfect. Bush the Elder was far worse being willing to substitute diployak for action and leaving the Iraq mes to be cleaned up definitively later. Ronaldus Maximus retired eighteen years ago and then died. Your point is????????????
Dubya is hardly perfect. Bush the Elder was far worse being willing to substitute diployak for action and leaving the Iraq mes to be cleaned up definitively later. Ronaldus Maximus retired eighteen years ago and then died. Your point is????????????
WFB is insulted by a lot of people here because, I’ll contend, he, like me, is Catholic and from CT/NYC. That, and perhaps he has not consumed, headily, too much of the new conservative movement.
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