Posted on 12/05/2012 3:06:24 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
I think that thoughtless comment about Ike probably cost them their respectability and gave the Communists a really nice soft lob to hammer back at them.
Someone once hypothecated a little bit about how things would be different today, if Lee Harvey Oswald had been on the mark in his attempt to kill General Walker (who was a Bicher, which was LHO's reason for going after Walker). He'd have been in prison or on the run, instead of nested on the fifth floor of the Texas Book Depository .... no presidency for LBJ, no War on Poverty. Think about it.
Murray Rothbard, paleocon of fragrant memory, once accused Buckley of being totalitarian for having supported the idea of a large and powerful defense establishment (in preference, Buckley insisted, to learning Russian at gunpoint). So Buckley was d'accord with the Neocons on that policy, anticipating them by several years.
But he was also a conservative more in the colors of Burke and Hobbes, than of Thomas Jefferson. He dreamed of a civilized, Catholic world in which gentle people could all get along in their fortress of moneyed solitude, and not be roiled by the anxieties of nationalism that the French Revolution and Napoleon's wars had stirred up in Europe, dividing the upper classes of the great powers and placing them in competition, and limiting their social intercourse.
Holding the Panama Canal was a PR disaster, especially after after our actions during the Suez crisis in 1956. I don't remember Buckley being pro UN, pro new world order, etc. unless it advanced American interests.
Well, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen that Panama Canal debate but I remember being solidly on Reagan’s side (though I saw it on cable years later and the issue was long settled). I’d stand shoulder to shoulder on most things with Buckley, but on the international stuff and the free trade stuff like Nafta and GATT and the WTO and the UN, I part company with republican orthodoxy. None of our policies should be dictated to us by foreign bodies, our tax policies are our own business, and treaties should be between individual nations, not these regional treaties and international conventions. In my view, the UN, WTO and ICC should be disbanded. A confederacy of republics, along the lines of NATO would be preferable.
Buckley never said that there weren’t communists in the government. He was a supporter of McCarthy. Come back when you have an argument.
PS. I’m a former Bircher.
You must be posting in response to someone else. Let's let it go at that.
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