Honey, Goldwater divorced his wife, married one of the founders of Planned Parenthood, and became pro-abortion after 1964.
Conservatives didn't abandon Goldwater; he abandoned us.
Posted on 09/17/2006 3:22:21 PM PDT by Dane
Powell leads the right in a Bush-whack Andrew Sullivan In my first year in America, as a budding young conservative, my old friend, the writer John O’Sullivan, invited me out to dinner. The dinner, it turned out, was with none other than William F Buckley, a man who remains the undisputed titan of American conservatism.
Buckley became famous in America in the 1950s and 1960s for being a conservative intellectual when such a thing was regarded as axiomatically oxymoronic. He founded the National Review, the indispensable magazine for the burgeoning American conservative movement.
He was one of the inspirations for Barry Goldwater’s emergence as a conservative Republican nominee in 1964, and instrumental in Ronald Reagan’s long, steady intellectual march to power. I wasn’t having dinner with just anyone that night — but with a man for whom the phrase eminence grise seemed to have been invented.
I recall this because if Buckley has decided George W Bush is not a conservative, it cannot be easily dismissed. Some of us were so appalled by Bush’s profligate spending, abuse of power and recklessness in warfare that we reluctantly backed John Kerry in 2004 as the more authentically conservative candidate. Many Republicans scoffed. Now fewer do.
“I think Mr Bush faces a singular problem, best defined, I think, as the absence of effective conservative ideology,” Buckley recently explained. “[The president] 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 . . . 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.”
His legacy, I’d argue, is actually quite decipherable. It includes two bungled wars, a doubling of the national debt, a ruination of America’s moral high ground in the war against Islamist terror, the worst US intelligence fiasco since the Bay of Pigs, and the emergence of Iran as a regional and potentially nuclear power with control of the West’s energy supplies.
But the damage to America itself — to its cultural balance and constitutional order — is just as profound. In a recent CNN story on Southern women and the Republicans, one voter explained: “There are some people, and I’m one of them, that believe George Bush was placed where he is by the Lord. I don’t care how he governs, I will support him. I’m a Republican through and through.”
American conservatism has gone from being a political philosophy rooted in scepticism of power, empirical judgment and limited government into an ideology based in born-again religious faith, immune to empirical reality and dedicated to the relentless expansion of presidential clout. It sanctions wiretapping without court warrants, indefinite detention without trial and the use of torture.
Last week saw perhaps the tipping point in the reawakening of the traditional conservative perspective. In the Senate, the president’s bid to legalise torture and ad hoc military tribunals was stopped not by the Democrats but by four key Republican senators: John McCain of Arizona, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination in 2008, John Warner of Virginia, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Susan Collins of Maine.
They were supported by the former secretary of state, Colin Powell, who penned a public letter to McCain opposing Bush’s detention policies. “The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism,” Powell observed. “To redefine common article 3 [of the Geneva convention] would add to those doubts. Furthermore, it would put our own troops at risk.”
It is hard to dismiss McCain and Powell as men who do not know a thing about war or torture. One was tortured by the Vietcong; another actually won a war in Iraq. The contrast with the current White House is almost painful to observe.
Two weeks ago, word leaked that the president’s political guru, Karl Rove, was hoping to use the issue of who was tough enough on military prisoners against the Democrats in the November congressional elections. He was going to tar them as wimps again for not waterboarding terror suspects. But that strategy was stopped in its tracks by Senator Graham.
“This is not about November 2006. It is not about your election,” Graham declared with passion. “It is about those who take risks to defend America.”
Graham is also a former military lawyer and, along with the entire legal leadership in the US military, opposes Bush’s military kangaroo courts. “It would be unacceptable legally in my opinion to give someone the death penalty in a trial where they never heard the evidence against them,” he said of the White House proposal. “‘Trust us, you’re guilty, we’re going to execute you, but we can’t tell you why’? That’s not going to pass muster; that’s not necessary.” It’s also, well, not American.
To add to the revolt, last week six leading conservative writers penned separate essays on why the Republicans deserve to lose the November congressional elections. Here’s a stunning quote from one of them: “The United States has seen political swings and produced its share of extremists, but its political character, whether liberals or conservatives have been in charge, has always remained fundamentally Burkean. The constitution itself is a Burkean document, one that slows down decisions to allow for ‘deliberate sense’ and checks and balances.
“President Bush has nearly upended that tradition, abandoning traditional realism in favour of a warped and incoherent brand of idealism. At this dangerous point in history, we must depend on the decisions of an astonishingly feckless chief executive: an empty vessel filled with equal parts Rove and Rousseau.”
That passage was written by Jeffrey Hart, a speechwriter for Nixon and Reagan and another pillar of the conservative movement. It’s a sign of a brewing conservative revolt against Bush’s policies that may crest at November’s elections.
Bush has allies in the House of Representatives — but what appears to be a unified and stalwart resistance in the Republican-controlled Senate. It turns out that the US does have a functioning opposition party after all. It’s called the authentically conservative wing of the Republicans.
Well, Goldwater hasn't done much lately, so I don't know much about him. What I want to know is: Which "Reagan" are we talking about:
1. The low tax Reagan
2. The freedom-Lovin'/ Evil Empire Fightin'/ Cold Warrior Reagan
3. The Iran Contra/ "forget Congress, it's not their job anyway, and we're gonna help those people, no matter what" Reagan
or
4. the Dead Reagan .... the Reagan that even Libs can mold into any useful shape desirable.
And when did Sullivan get to be a conservative? Just because he agrees with Buckley, who has been absent from the conservative cause for quite a while now, is he now supposed to be a conservative??
All of Sullivans criticisms of Bush could be leveled against Reagan as well, although I doubt that either Buckley or Sullivan would regard Reagan as a non-conservative. (Reagan, as charged by his critics, doubled the federal debt - involved us in losing wars - did not restrain Congressional spending and his legacy was 'indecipherable' when he left office)
Sullivan must think he has some kind of moral high ground from which to criticize. I'll skip the obvious quip about Sullivans higher ground being on top of some other guys behind.
Funny, the DBM and their sycophantic politicians are not in the least bit interested in what today's military personnel in Iraq think.
I'm with ya. North Vietnam signed the Geneva Convention and they STILL tore McCain apart.
Now, I'm all for us trying to claim "the high Moral Ground" and all that, but only IF there're any practical benefits to it.
McCain has not proven to me that our NOT "clarifying the Geneva Conventions" will prevent other nations from doing the same. LOL ... "History" kinda indicates that other nations do it all of the time, anyway. .....and John McCain should know it better than most.
And anybody who calls himself a conservative and votes for John Kerry is not only not a conservative, they are mentally ill.
I've begun to worry about Buckley the last year or so...seems to be drifting left.
Lindsay Graham still needs to be tucked in at night, John Warner would never have been a US Senator if an airplane crash had not wiped out a great Virginian, Webb owes his fame to Reagan, who he deserted, and Powell owes his meteoric rise to his race and the Republicans mad race to dispel the notion that they were racists.
cries - crimes
"status quo is not conservative. Status quo would leave us with public union controlled schools, activist courts, abortion on demand and billions and billions in earmarks. Conservatism isn't a dictionary definition of 'conservative' any more than liberalism is about being liberal with things."
You're right, of course. Poor choice of words. I should have said "Traditional Anglo-American Values" instead of "Status Quo". Guess I'm old enough to remember when those values were the status quo.
That is not to say my point was not valid. New World Order, free trade, open borders, and multiculuralism are not conservative values. They are all radical.
Who cares about Sullivan. It is Powell who has now proven what a weasel he is. He sat on the knowledge that Armitage was the Plame leaker and let the administration, during a war, blow in the wind and take abuse from the press and the Democrats. Dishonorable. Now he trots himself out with statements about how we are losing the moral high ground in the WOT. He has lost all credibility to speak about the country's morality after his craven display described above.
What part of the right is Powell leading? The right trusts him less and less every day.
Bush is no Reagan/Goldwater conservative. He is a tool of the religious right and diehard Bushbots trying to pass themnselves off as conservatives. And does anyone really think that Bush trying to see how much he can legally get away with in the name of fighting terrorism or allowing money to be spent like a sailor on leave is conservatism?
Maybe Powell was behind the Armitage/Plame leak.
Honey, Goldwater divorced his wife, married one of the founders of Planned Parenthood, and became pro-abortion after 1964.
Conservatives didn't abandon Goldwater; he abandoned us.
Did you see this article about Powell sitting back quietly, all the while knowing the scoop?
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