Free Republic

Welcome to the weekend. He got the harshest prison sentence in connection with the 1972 burglary of the Watergate headquarters of the Democratic Party. G. Gordon Liddy passed away at the age of 90 this week. In 1978 around a year after his sentence was commuted by President Jimmy Carter, Liddy spoke to William F. Buckley Jr. on "Firing Line". Liddy says the feds wanted him to be a snitch and he wasn't... Newsdump Easter Weekend Alert: British Government Admitting Blood Clot Deaths Following COVID Vaccination With Astra Zeneca Vaccine But Denying Link For Now... Is The FBI Trying To...

The harder the left goes after someone on the right, the more squishy people on the right desert that person. Instead of circling the wagons and supporting our own, RINOs and moderates leave some of our top shining stars high and dry. We’ve seen this pattern happen for years, it’s nothing new. The more successful a conservative leader is, the more likely they are to become a target, so this is a real ongoing problem. Unfortunately, there are a lot of self-righteous people in our party who care more about donations for reelection from powerful special interests than promoting real...

Today's Quotefall Puzzle features a quote by William F. Buckley Jr.. Click image (or click here) for full size rendition, then use your browser's print command to print puzzle. William F. Buckley was a public intellectual and conservative / libertarain author, and was the first author to combine traditionalist conservatism and classic liberalism, exemplified by Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. All hints, along with the answer, are provided in the first reply comment below, using filtered font to prevent accidential spoilers. Please refrain from disclosing the full answer in comments to prevent spoilers.To solve the puzzle: Enter the letters in the top...

... Influential leaders with direct ties to the founding of modern conservatism are rallying behind Ted Cruz...

It could be due to the usual suspects: the dumbing down of culture. The partisanship of politics and cable television, which doesn’t make time for erudition and deep penetration into an issue. The dominance of secularism. Those are all probably to blame for the fact that there are no longer any real Catholic public intellectuals. Note: I did not say Catholic intellectuals. I said Catholic public intellectuals. William F. Buckley. Richard John Neuhaus. Fulton Sheen. These men were Catholic public intellectuals: they created popular magazines, hosted TV shows, wrote both fiction and nonfiction books. Their prose was literary, and they...

The denunciation of Palin took place 45 years after William F. Buckley, Jr., wrote: "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." From Richard Nixon's invoking the "silent majority" to Palin's campaigning as a devout, plain-spoken hockey mom, conservatives have claimed that they share the common sense of the common man. Liberals—from Adlai Stevenson to Barack Obama to innumerable writers, artists, and academics—have often been willing foils in this drama, unable to stop themselves from...

From 1969, but still very relavent today. (sic)

William F. Buckley’s ‘Conservative Movement’ Still-Born, Dead-On-Arrival, Decades Ago, Because it Was Godless, Against Christ, Ignored God’s Word Contact: John Lofton, 301-873-4612, 410-760-8885, JLof@aol.com MEDIA ADVISORY, March 3 /Christian Newswire/ — Recovering Republican John Lofton, Editor of TheAmericanView.com and co-host of “The American View” radio show with the Constitution Party’s 2004 Presidential candidate Michael Anthony Peroutka, has issued the following statement: “Except the LORD build the house, they labour in vain that build it: except the LORD keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.” – Psalm 127. The Lord Jesus Christ did not build the “conservative movement” house....

All of my adult life, William F. Buckley Jr. has been a player on the national stage. It is hard to believe that Buckley is no longer with us – that he has to be moved in our mental computers from an active folder to one labeled memory. Thousands of writers have claimed that Buckley was the father of modern conservatism. Maybe. What is certain is that Buckley has carried the conservative standard from the time he wrote his seminal book, God and Man at Yale. He followed this with the founding of the National Review in 1955. The National...

March 01, 2008, 9:00 a.m. ‘It’s the Epigoni, Stupid’William F. Buckley Jr. stood athwart history and changed its course. By Mark Steyn If you were running one of those Frank Luntz machine-wired focus groups to produce the ideal conservative leader for America, I doubt you’d come up with an urbane patrician harpsichordist semi-resident in Switzerland and partial to words like “eremitical” and “periphrastic.” “It’s the epigoni, stupid” is not a useful campaign slogan — although, in fact, a distressingly large number of political candidates are certainly epigoni (“a second-rate imitator”). But William F. Buckley Jr. was a first-rate original,...

"At his desk," wrote Christopher Buckley in his email to friends, "in Stamford this morning." Well, one had somehow known that it would have to be at his desk. The late William F. Buckley Jr. was a man of incessant labor and productivity, with a slight allowance made for that saving capacity for making it appear easy. But he was driven, all right, and restless, and never allowed himself much ease on his own account. There was never a moment, after taping some session at Firing Line, where mere recourse to some local joint was in prospect. He was always...

WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY: R.I.P., ENFANT TERRIBLEFebruary 27, 2008 William F. Buckley was the original enfant terrible. As with Ronald Reagan, everyone prefers to remember great men when they weren't being great, but later, when they were being admired. Having changed the world, there came a point when Buckley no longer needed to shock it. But to call Buckley an "enfant terrible" and then to recall only his days as a grandee is like calling a liberal actress "courageous." Back in the day, Buckley truly was courageous. I prefer to remember the Buckley who scandalized to the bien-pensant. Other tributes will...

Just breaking on NRO...

NEW YORK — Author and conservative commentator William F. Buckley Jr. has died at age 82. His assistant Linda Bridges says Buckley died Wednesday morning at his home in Stamford, Conn. Buckley became famous for his intellectual political writings in his magazine, the National Review.

How do you solve a problem like Bill Buckley? He has always been easy to caricature -- the eloquent eyebrows and the aristocratic drawl, with its lord-of-the-manor tone -- but difficult to analyze. Prolific writer, great editor, nonpareil debater, television celebrity, expert skier, gifted harpsichord player, ready wit (rapier or stiletto style, take your choice), popular lecturer, political guru, an ideological warrior who distrusts ideology: Just who, and what, is this guy? A brilliant dilettante with Attention Deficit Disorder or a Renaissance man overflowing with talent and ideas? His obvious delight in debate, his knack for writing entertaining escapist fiction,...

Amicus Brief A review of Friendship: An Exposé by Joseph Epstein By William F. Buckley, Jr.Posted November 13, 2006 Joseph Epstein remarks that there aren't many books written on the subject of friendship. Two hundred and seventy pages later, we might be tempted to think, Score one more for the marketplace! But of course you wouldn't be tempted to say any such thing after completing this book. Joe Epstein appears to have promised himself, 17 books back, that he would never be tedious, and this latest book is certainly a validation of that oath. In particular because a book...

Those of us who support the nomination of Harriet Miers (even reluctantly) were warned repeatedly that we would be devastated, blown away, and inundated by the Noahide deluge of Hurricane Gamma, George Will's unanswerable final whirlwind of rhetorical devastation of Harriet Miers. Instead, all we got was a spritz of seltzer down our pants. Will's meticulous retailing of yawn-inducing epithets ("perfect perversity," "discredits," "degrades," "justifications," "deficit of constitutional understanding," "gross misunderstanding of conservatism," and "persons masquerading as its defenders" -- all from the first paragraph!); his hand-waving dismissal of counterargument (his entire final paragraph -- see below); the by now...

Folks let me tell you a little bit about my evening last night -- and I'm here today, and I knew this was going to happen. I'm here today on about three hours, 2-1/2 hours sleep. So I'm in a giddy mood and we all know what happens when I'm in a giddy mood. The broadcast engineer's finger is poised over the deedle button at all times, as, you know, we get close to that line of pushing the envelope, as it were. Last night was the 50th anniversary of National Review magazine. Now, National Review magazine, of course, is...

William F. Buckley Jr. NRO Editor at Large Little Memories Remembering Ronald Reagan. Q: You knew him well, right? Even back when he was still a Democrat? A: Yes. It happened one night. It was his job to introduce me, as the evening's speaker, to a group of California doctors. He acted like a gymnast out of Barnum and Bailey. The control room for the loudspeakers had been left locked. Nobody could find the janitor. So he cat-walked above the traffic to the window of the control room and smashed it open with his elbow, turning on the juice, the...

The war against stable thought blazes on, the objective being to put the blame on the Bush administration for what happened in New Orleans. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times personalizes even further. The administration has a "tax policy . . . dominated by the toweringly selfish Grover Norquist -- who has been quoted as saying: 'I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.’" You would think that Mr. Friedman would leave a little place in life for...