The Statist, Ruling Class's New Hero -- Bill Buckley?

American Thinker ^ | October 19, 2010 | Richard A. Viguerie

[neverdem]

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:

PARKER: First of all, you started in 1961, here in New York City, with William F. Buckley, and I'm wondering if you think that today's Republican Party is William F. Buckley's party?

VIGUERIE: The Republican Party is not the party that Bill Buckley would want today, but it's moving in that direction.

What was left on CNN's editing room floor was my longer explanation of how Bill Buckley spent the better part of sixty years working against the Kathleen Parkers in the Republican Party.

From his book, God and Man at Yale, through opposing Dwight Eisenhower and Nelson Rockefeller, reluctantly supporting Richard Nixon, and helping co-found the Conservative Party of New York because the NY GOP had been captured by liberal Republicans to running for New York City mayor against big-government Republican John Lindsay, Buckley was tirelessly consistent in his opposition to big-government Republicans.

Buckley was for freedom over statism, and he often found members of the Republican Party offering no real alternative to statism. Buckley even was a sometime critic of Ronald Reagan.

Buckley was many things, but two of his most underappreciated qualities were that he was a populist and a constitutionalist. He once famously said, "I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University."

Any large movement has its share of miscreants, and Buckley did spend about one or two percent of his time ostracizing certain people on the right whose outrageous comments distracted from the mission of the conservative movement.

If the liberal intelligentsia were honest brokers, they could spend most of their time berating the extremists, kooks, and flakes on the left, beginning within the Democratic Congressional Caucus or the Obama White House and working outward to many of the left-wing coalitions, organizations, and even media members who are their support network.

Why, for example, are E.J. Dionne and other liberals silent about House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers' October 2010 appearance before a meeting of the Democratic Socialists of America, a Marxist organization, or the Communist Party's participation in and support for the October 2 One Nation rally, including this post at Barack Obama's Organizing for America website by the National Chairman of the Communist Party USA?

And where were the so-called "reasonable" liberals when other liberals protested Bill Buckley's speeches on college campuses, when liberal Gore Vidal called him a "crypto-Nazi," or when, more contemporarily, another liberal wrote, "Bill Buckley, sniveling racist, dies."

The maturing but still nascent, populist-driven Tea Party and the resurgence of the constitutional small-government conservative movement are very much consistent with Buckley's views. Marxists, Dionne, Benen, Parker, and other statist, ruling-class elites would prefer Republicans who offer little resistance to them. However, they cannot, try as they may, credibly paint the free-market, deficit-reduction, constitutional principles of the Tea Party or the everyday Americans rising in protest as radically fringe.

In my last conversation with Buckley twenty months before he died, he told me that George W. Bush was conservative, but not a conservative. Buckley would have assuredly been driven to his chastising and majestically acerbic pen by the revelation after his death that Bush himself denigrated the conservative movement while in the White House.

I wish he were around to see this movement, especially emerging out of the disastrous past decade of big-government Republicanism, and to refute the statists and ruling class members who have misused his name for their own ideological purposes.

And since they are engaging in speculative talk, allow me to do the same: If Bill Buckley were alive today, I wouldn't be surprised to see the Gadsden flag flying on his yacht.

For those who want to learn more about what Bill Buckley really thought and did, read Buckley himself, such as God and Man at Yale and Up from Liberalism. Also, I highly recommend Lee Edwards' new magnificent biography of Buckley, The Maker of the Movement.

This past weekend, Richard A. Viguerie received Young Americans for Freedom's highest honor, the Guardian of Freedom Award. YAF was founded in September 1960 at the Sharon, Connecticut estate of the Buckley family.

[neverdem]

A commie sympathizer, from the link above, posted this letter from the CPUSA boss on the Organizing for Ameerica blog:

October 2 and its significance... all out for October 2 By Alan L. Maki - Sep 20, 2010 12:03:18 AM ET

Comments | Mail to a Friend | Report to Admin October 2 and its significance One Nation rally

by: Sam Webb

Natiional Chair,

Communist Party USA

September 17 2010

"We now know the U.S. Senate will not pass climate-change legislation this year. Postmortems have pointed to a number of challenges: the lack of leadership from the White House, unified GOP opposition to the Senate cap-and-trade bill, the structure and rules of the Senate, and the complicated nature of cap-and-trade legislation.

"There has been one major omission in much of this analysis: the absence of pressure from Americans across the country demanding that serious action be taken to address climate change. Few Americans are currently engaged in this great societal challenge in a way that would generate the necessary political will to act. It is the absence of this public pressure, above all else [my italics], that has resulted in the current state of political inaction."

(From "Why did the climate bill die? Because we still don't have a real climate movement," by Kelsey Wirth, Larry Shapiro, Phillip Radford)

Other social justice leaders could make the same observation.

Not since the lead-up to the election of President Obama have the enemies of progress felt the weight and pressure of an aroused public.

The coalition that elected Obama didn't go into hiding, but its level of activity doesn't match the challenges the American people face, with none more important than a stagnant, jobless economy. Nor does its energy and organization compare well with the efforts of the right, and especially its most extreme elements - right-wing radio talk, Fox News, Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachman, the tea party, rich moneybags, and I could go on and on.

Both the protracted economic downturn (with no end in sight) and the comeback of the extreme right beg for a sustained mobilization of every democratic-minded person in our country. At the core of this mobilization should be the multi-racial working class (broadly defined) and its allies.

If there is any other way to keep right-wing extremism and its capitalist class supporters at bay - not to mention undertake large-scale political and economic transformations in a progressive and radical direction - I don't know what it is.

Initiatives and openings of a democratic and progressive character from above - say from the president - are certainly important (for example, a jobs and infrastructure bill), especially if they can be leveraged by the people's coalition to widen and deepen the process of change.

At the same time, initiatives and openings by themselves cannot substitute for mass organization, action and unity at the grassroots level. At every major turning point in our nation's history - the War of Independence, Civil War, New Deal, and the Civil Rights Revolution - a powerful surge of popular action became the material force to power, deepen, and extend out the process of change.

Which brings me to the One Nation rally on October 2 in our nation's capital. Here is an opportunity to reestablish, reenergize, and repower the coalition of people's organization that elected the first African American president in our nation's history.

Opportunities of this kind are rare. But when they arise, they have to be seized. No stone should be left unturned to bring people and their organizations to Washington. This event's success will be measured by its size. A huge turnout will change the political atmosphere and send a message to friend and foe.

Success will also be gauged by the degree to which it gives a new momentum to the struggle for jobs and to punish the Republican right in November.

And finally, it will be measured by the extent that the coalition that has been quiescent since 2008 regains its legs, turns into a sustained force, and powers the struggle for progressive and radical change in the near and longer term.

P.S. from yours truly, neverdem, this is a pretty good video of all the nonsense and crap that the rats have done. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLlF5YMf7Yc

[TigersEye]

Good! I look forward to Dems leading the way in putting Mr. Buckley’s policy ideas into action. Enough with the communism already!

[neverdem]

Ping!

[Lazlo in PA]

Dicks first problem is going on CNN with a nobody and a habitual whore customer.

Any one of those three things should have alerted him to a problem.

[lentulusgracchus]

Did you want the letter from Big Commie Daddy-Bear to be the subject of a new thread?

I thought you were inviting us to read Viguerie's pointed comments about the mendacity of MSM RiNO's and 'Rats?

Anent the CPUSA letter, I appreciated the focus on "What you drones need to keep your eyes on" and the absolute absence of any sort of reflection on what leadership (Obama) is not bringing to the table at their end.

Very totalitarian letter.

[Still Thinking]

"the conservative movement appears to have gone berserk."

berzerk = no longer willing to compromise (compromise = liberals only get to destroy half the stuff they initially propose to) and act like a permanent minority, even when they're in the majority, i.e. have a principle

[neverdem]

Did you want the letter from Big Commie Daddy-Bear to be the subject of a new thread?

No, it was just to show as an exercise what sort of mental illness with which we're dealing.

[lentulusgracchus]

When I was reading that letter and its declamatory injunctions to the underlings, I caught myself thinking of a snatch of song from Les Mis, "Look Down". Remember that one? It seemed .... tunefully appropriate.

[Impy]

I hope he rises from the grave and finally socks Vidal in the G-damn face and I hope when that occurs Vidal will stay plastered.

[Optimus Maximus]

God, how I miss Buckley.

Old geezer alert. I first became interested in politics at the tender age of 14 listening to Buckley and Vidal debate during the Democratic and Republican conventions of 1968. Buckley quickly became my hero as he defended American patriotism and American goals in Vietnam against Vidal's slander of America's character. And yes, I also wanted him to punch out Vidal in that famous confrontation.

Too bad Vidal has never seen fit to offer a mea culpa for the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of SE Asian deaths that ensued after we abandoned Vietnam, as Vidal advocated, and as Buckley warned of these very consequences.

Buckley was always entertaining. I began reading Buckley's editorial columns which were carried by our local paper as I moved into high school. I moved on to checking out books of his collected columns from the library (this was in the 1970’s BI - Before Internet), but I believe I was at least in my twenties before I sat down to read anything of length by Buckley without an unabridged dictionary close to hand.

He was definitely Tea Party material, and I'm sure we all wish we had him with us today for inspiration and more of his humorous quips. One of my favorites, from the cold war years, was Buckley's statement on Red China. “The thing about capitulating to Red China” he said, “is that an hour later you want to do it all over again.”

Of course my very favorite quote is the one in RV’s article re his preference of being governed by the first 2,00 people in the Boston Telephone directory rather than Harvard's faculty. Quite a statement, considering Buckley extensive education, never more true than it is today, and this is a large part of the fuel driving the Tea Party movement.

I'm sure William F is entertaining the good Lord even as we speak as he humbly suggests a few monkey wrenches the Lord could throw in the progressive/libs plans.

RIP Bill Buckley

[hinckley buzzard]

Leftwingers prefer Buckley to the Tea Partiers because they perceived Buckley as having been urbane, elitist, interesting guest at dinner parties, and in the final analysis of moving the electorate, ineffectual.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks neverdem.

• Free Republic Smeared by NAACP Report (Freepers will not be intimidated)
• NAACP Issues Report on Links Between Tea Party Factions and "Racist Hate Groups"