Free Republic

Long before the rest of us were talking about blue and red America, Tom Wolfe not only recognized the cultural divide; he bridged it. When he began his career in the 1960s, the liberal establishment was more dominant and even smugger than it is today. There were no pesky voices on cable television or the web to challenge the Eastern elites’ hold on the national media. Then along came Wolfe, a lone voice celebrating the hinterland’s culture, mercilessly skewering the pretensions and dogmas of New York’s intelligentsia—and somehow triumphing. How did he get away with it? The most entertaining analysis...

As readers of The Washington Post and his syndicated column know, Dana Milbank covers politics with snap and crackle. His gift, and his dogged reporting, serve him well in his new book, “The Destructionists” (good title), on the quarter-century-long crackup of the Republican Party. While reading it, a line by the late P.J. O’Rourke came to mind: “The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it.” Another line kept coming...

You all remember Christopher Buckley, don't you? From 2008: Sorry, Dad, I'm Voting for Obama http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2008/10/10/the-conservative-case-for-obama.html Haven't heard much from him lately. I wonder whatever happened to him?

If It Is a Fight These Jacobins Want, Then It Is a Fight They Shall Have T. Coddington Van Voorhees VIIConservative Intellectual At-LargeSuch are the vicissitudes of our current political zeitgeist that Homo Republicanus is each day forced to endure a fresh assault on his intelligence somehow more insulting than the last. Doubly insulting, as you no doubt imagine, when the Homo in question is me. Contrary to what you may assume, the gift of intellectual acuity and foresight can in times like these prove to be an almost unbearable cross; I shall not use this space to recount the...

I'm Beginning to Believe This Obama Fellow Is Unequal to the Task by T. Coddington Van Voorhees VIIIntellectual Conservative At-LargeContinued

Share on Facebook | printer-friendly Eighteen months ago, Christopher Buckley made headlines with his endorsement of Barack Obama, becoming the conservative darling at MS-NBC after penning “The Conservative Case for Barack Obama.” At the time, Buckley wrote of Obama’s “first-class temperament” and top-drawer intellect. Buckley convinced himself that Obama would govern as a post-partisan centrist, rising above the progressive agenda that had carried him from the Chicago Machine to the threshold of the White House: But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren’t going to get us...

....I have emerged, in the assessment of many, as the leading chronicler of the many ills that afflict conservatism. For more than a year I have warned that absent a rapprochement with the telegenic and wildly popular President, the conservative movement risked abandonment by its few remaining serious intellectuals and being overrun by the unsightly hordes of Wal-Mart untermenschen typified by the loathesome "Tea Party" rabble. As is now obvious, events have proven me right. Yet I take no delight in this vindication; no more than Cassandra in her presaging the fall of Troy. Those who have followed my missives...

Iowahawk Guest State of the Union Reviewby T. Coddington Van Voorhees VII It seems now scarcely possible that 15 months have transpired since I proclaimed my endorsement of Barack Obama on the pages of The National Topsider. continued

Obama didn’t deliver a speech so much as a symphony, calling for nukes and zapping the Supremes; thanks for the performance, Mr. President. It is hard, indeed almost impossible, not to like Mr. Obama. In recent weeks, I’ve tried—tried my best. But Wednesday night he made it virtually impossible. Even discounting the perhaps 40 percent of the speech that consisted of the usual bromides and platitudes, even the most hardened skeptic must admit—the son of gun gives one hell of a speech. My personal takeaway was his endorsement of nuclear power. So many of our problems—specifically, our 70 percent importation...

Daily Beast columnist Christopher Buckley has clearly inherited his late, great father’s razor-sharp wit and gift for eloquence, but his political sensibilities fell considerably farther from the tree—so much so that he voted for Barack Obama, based on personal disappointment with John McCain, animosity towards Sarah Palin, and the certainty that Obama was too smart to actually believe all the left-wing baloney he espoused. Well, after a year of Hope n’ Change, we all know how that turned out. And it’s been enough to make Buckley redirect his pen in The One’s direction, penning a satirical early draft of this...

T. Coddington Van Voorhees VIIEditor at Large, the National TopsiderContinued

My Visit To Auschwitz More Articles By Christopher Buckley Christopher Buckley Posted Feb 11 2009   Editor's Note: Several years ago, the bestselling novelist Christopher Buckley, accompanied by his late father, the writer and iconic conservative intellectual William F. Buckley Jr., visited Auschwitz. He had never published his haunting account of that experience, but the current furor over Bishop Richard Williamson's claim that the Holocaust is largely a myth and "not one" Jew was gassed at Auschwitz compelled him to do so on The Daily Beast website, where he is a regular contributor. February 19, 2001 You go through...

Christopher Buckley, son of William, takes a non-too-gentle look at Newt Gingrich’s pending change of religion in the Daily Beast: Brace yourselves for a tsunami of punditry this weekend, when the much-married Newt Gingrich is received into the Catholic Church. This would ordinarily be a private occasion, but Newt Gingrich is not ordinary. He is (I hedge) probably the most interesting putative candidate person on the Right at this point. Google “Gingrich” and “2012” your hard drive will melt under a trillion hits. So attention to this event must and will be paid. Buckley goes into some unkind detail about...

My old and dear friend Peter Robinson (we single-handedly won the Cold War together as Bush I speechwriters at the White House in the early 1980s) takes me to task Friday on Forbes.com for having recognized--finally, after all these weeks--that President Obama is a hard-left ideologue big-spender. He also congratulates David Gergen and David Brooks for similarly having come to their senses. Robinson was much gentler on Brooks and me than Rush Limbaugh was. This week on his radio show he blasted the two of us in an Oscar Wilde mode, quipping, "Duh!" Let's take a quick look at the...

[ed. note: a number of you have written requesting I invite T. Coddington Van Voorhees VII back for another analysis of the sad state of the conservative movement. After some cajoling and a bottle of VSOP, he agreed.]Continued

If the caricature of Republicans as heartless capitalists with cash registers instead of souls is accurate then they should gleefully accept prodigals Peggy Noonan and Christopher Buckley back into the fold. Because I absolutely believe that their personal attacks on Sarah Palin were nothing personal. It was nothing more than a money grab. I'd imagine the pressure to sell books is enormous. The top book publishers have a lot riding on each title. And if your book doesn't sell you don't get to write books for the top publishers anymore. It's capitalism in its purest form. And that's why I...

When my late father T. Coddington Van Voorhees VI founded the iconoclastic conservative journal National Topsider in 1948, he famously declared that "Now is the time for all good conservative helmsmen to hoist the mizzen, pour the cocktails, and steer this damned schooner hard starboard." In the 60 years since he first uttered it after one-too-many Cosmopolitans at one of Pamela Harriman's notorious foreign policy black tie balls, father's pithy bon mot has served as a rallying cry for conservatives from Greenwich to Chevy Chase. Today, I say it's time for we conservatives to once again grab the rigging and...

By T. Coddington Van Voorhees VIIColumnist, The National Topsider Membership Chairman, The Newport ClubWhen my late father T. Coddington Van Voorhees VI founded the iconoclastic conservative journal National Topsider in 1948, he famously declared that “Now is the time for all good conservative helmsmen to hoist the mizzen, pour the cocktails, and steer this damned schooner hard starboard.” In the 60 years since he first uttered it after one-too-many Cosmopolitans at one of Pamela Harriman’s notorious foreign policy black tie balls, father’s pithy bon mot has served as a rallying cry for conservatives from Greenwich to Chevy Chase. Today, I...

The truth few wish to utter is that the GOP has abandoned many conservatives, who mostly nurse their angst in private. Those chickens we keep hearing about have indeed come home to roost. Years of pandering to the extreme wing — the “kooks” the senior Buckley tried to separate from the right — have created a party no longer attentive to its principles. Instead, as Christopher Buckley pointed out in a blog post on thedailybeast.com explaining his departure from National Review, eight years of “conservatism” have brought us “a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere,...

Christopher Buckley’s endorsement of Barack Obama — followed by his abrupt departure from the back page of the magazine his father founded, National Review — has caused a ripple of contempt from the conservative Right. Nay, make that a tsunami of hostility. An avalanche of venom. A cataclysm of ... well, you get the idea. People are mad. Good riddance, they say, and don’t let the door hit you on the way out. Christopher Buckley’s endorsement of Barack Obama — followed by his abrupt departure from the back page of the magazine his father founded, National Review — has caused...