Feb
29
29
Jonah vindicated
Thanks to the reader who sent me the following photo. If this isn’t central to Jonah’s point, I can’t imagine what is:
Feb
29
29
Confederate Yankee Tests Out His Dog-Whistle
Shorter Confederate Yankee:
Barack Obama and the Politics of Personal Distraction
- Fellow non-racist conservatives, I strongly believe that factors of personal origin, ethnicity, and wardrobe should be overlooked in weighing Barack Blacky-black Magumba-Ogopogo McTerror Obooga-booga-bama, the Rev. Farrakhan’s own personal Indonesian-Hawaiian towelhead, against the presumptive Republican nominee, John McCain. However, his close personal ties to the terrorist Weather Underground are unsettling.
‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard.
Feb
29
29
“Look, Lady, How Did You Get This Number?”
Hillary Ad: Who Do You Want Answering The White House Phone At 3 a.m.?
Hillary Clinton has a new ad in Texas, making what is perhaps her most forceful argument yet against Barack Obama on national security:
[phone ringing]
“It’s 3 a.m., and your children are safe and asleep,” the announcer says. “But there’s a phone in the White House, and it’s ringing — something’s happening in the world. Your vote will decide who answers that call.”
“Hello? No, ma’am, I’m not aware of a Hugh Jass on staff here. Listen, could you call
the switchboard in the morning? …Uh, yes, I assume the refrigerator is running.”
Feb
29
29
The case for Hillary
Barack Obama makes a good case for why Hillary Clinton would be a better president:
Obama said he less inclined to give in to partisanship.
“Her natural inclination is to draw a picture of Republicans as people who need to be crushed and defeated,” the U.S. senator from Illinois said in a separate telephone interview with the newspaper.
“It’s not entirely her fault. She’s been the target of some unfair attacks in the past.”
See, that’s part of the reason why I think a Hillary presidency would, at the very least, provide us with years of comedy. For if she ever got elected to the White House, the Republicans would suddenly realize that they’d spent the past eight years endowing the executive branch with the power to conduct warrantless wiretapping on Americans, to override laws against torture and prisoner abuse and to detain American citizens indefinitely without charge. And at that point, they will rightly begin to freak the hell out.
As the Editors noted recently:
I’m not Hillary’s number one fan, but I’m sure she’d be a perfectly adequate President. Secretly, I’ve always believed - and I have absolutely zero evidence to back this up, of course - that deep down Hillary has a strategic reserve of white-hot hatred for Republicans and all their works and pomps, and once elected, she would finally be free to shed the go-along-get-along act and take hilarious, schadenfreudious revenge, which would be horrible and undemocratic and everything, but also be just desserts, and so kind of awesome.
Alas, because I have motives other than single-minded bloodthirsty revenge, I voted for Obama. I guess I’m just not fascist enough to be a true liberal.
William F. Buckley adds:
UPDATE: This is what I imagine Hillary would sing upon first setting foot in the Oval Office:
Feb
29
29
I know I’ve said it before, but…
…Lost is the best show on tee-vee. If you’ve never seen it, get the first season on DVD in your Netflix queue. You’ll thank me for it.
William F. Buckley adds:
Feb
29
29
Uh-oh
Eep:
This should fit in well with Bush’s other confident statements-o’-fact:
- On the Democrats retaking Congress in ‘06: “That’s not going to happen.”
And of course…
Hold onto your wallets, friends. This economy’s headed straight down the dumper.
William F. Buckley adds:
Feb
29
29
I Stand Athwart Misguided Eulogies Yelling, ‘Stop’
Rick Perlstein is a widely-admired historian and a blogger of the first rank whose politics — and therefore, status as public figure — are beyond reproach. No one can accuse him of harboring reactionary sentiment, yet his eulogy of the dreadful William F. Buckley drives me to bugfucky distraction, because he confuses what is unimportant in the context of politics — sympathy toward X-figure’s personal and private comity, even generosity — with what is important — objective critique of X-figure’s public speech, actions, beliefs.
WFB was privately and professionally kind to Perlstein; in loyal reciprocation to this kindness, Perlstein forgets his duty by extolling the “good” private Buckley — who is, after all, an unimportant figure to the audience — while mostly ignoring the bad (no quotes because it is the gospel truth) public Buckley, who is of extreme importance as a leading figure of a destructive, demented political movement that has had a disastrous effect on the country. This, from a public intellectual like Perlstein, will not do. Everyone has their vices and virtues; no human’s character is thoroughly black or white. But in the context of public figures, private virtue can’t redeem public villainy (the reverse also mostly holds true: private depravity can’t blacken public goodness). I don’t give a shit if Ronnie was a good husband to Nancy; can’t care whether Nixon was affectionate to Checkers or truly loved Tricia and Julie and Pat; consider WFB’s private generosity and good manners toward his friends pretty irrelevant.
Feb
29
29
The Buckley Stops Here
Not a Bad Legacy [Kathryn Jean Lopez]
If you ask me, the Right thrives, and it, with all its thinking and pushback and debating, is Bill Buckley’s living legacy.
And it’s no bad thing that Jonah Goldberg’s important book, Liberal Fascism, will be #1 on the New York Times bestseller list next week.
Congrats to two friends. One on a life’s work remarkably well done and another on the work he does brilliantly well today and will continue to through many tomorrows.
Feb
28
28
Apparently He Didn’t Purge Them All
Above: LGF Minions
Charles “Bugsy” Johnson, the world-notorious racist and crackpot over at the sty of spite and villainy that is Little Green Footballs, is still doing that trick that he does:
William F. Buckley has passed away at the age of 82, at his home in Stamford, Connecticut. One of his greatest achievements was to purge the conservative movement of its far-right nut cases, the racists and crackpots who poisoned the well for too long. He’ll be greatly missed.
If you ever catch Johnson in your kitchen chugging your orange juice from the carton, just watch: His writings will soon feature charges of flagrant orange-juice-chugging by Muslims, by immigrants, indeed by the shockingly brazen carton-gulpers at the liberal Huffington Post:
UPDATE at 2/27/08 9:27:37 am:
They’ve turned off comments at the Huffington Post, because they know what will happen: William F. Buckley Dead At 82 - Politics on The Huffington Post.
Mr. Johnson is, of course, the most fabled comment micromanager in the world blogosphere, by some necessity. LGF even has special software that changes formerly rife terms such as ’sand nigger’ into neutral words like ‘Arab.’ There’s now a large satellite community of wackadoos and Nazi-sympathizers who’ve been exiled from LGF after falling afoul of Johnson’s zealous, often arbitrary, and apparently full-time comment-policing.
Just like Bill Buckley! — in someone’s mind, at least.
Above: Misha
Meanwhile, Misha, the chief racist and crackpot over at the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler, provides a nearly opposite take on Buckley:
I can’t express my sorrow at the passing of William F. Buckley in words, all I can say is that it is yet another proof of the times that we’re in that he should pass at the same time that the conservatism he fathered dies, raped to death by the likes of Juanita McVain and his RINO opportunist ass-lickers.
I suppose that you could call it a mercy that G-d called him home before he had to witness conservatism being stabbed between the ribs one more time by dickless RINO wonders telling us that if we only went back to our abusive husband one more time and kissed his ass, everything would be better THIS time and, besides, if we told the SOB to go fuck himself, we’d only have ourselves to blame for the repeated beatings we’d received.
I suppose you could, but I’m still going to miss him.
G-d knows that we need actual conservatives like him now more than ever, in a time where the only thing we seem to have no shortage of is milquetoast pissants eager to lick the hand that has slapped them in the face repeatedly.
…And here’s the post just below that one:
Can We Start Building the Gallows Already?
Will the Hollyweird liberals wear flag lapel pins to express their support for their country?
No.
Will they wear yellow ribbons to express their support for the troops?
No.
Will they wear orange ribbons to express their support for child-murdering terrorists captured in the field and now detained at Gitmo?
Rope, Crossbeam, Hollyweird Terrorist Sympathizer.
You know the drill.
Apropos Buckley and far-right nutcases, clearly one of these two gentlemen must be in error. On the other hand, they agree on so many other particulars.
Feb
28
28
Ugh
OK, it’s no secret that I’m an Obama guy and that the Clinton campaign has done some stuff lately that’s ticked me off.
But still. There is no excuse for this level of Richard Cohen wankery:
So it could be that Clinton would lose the Democratic nomination even if she were a gifted politician. But she has no such gift. Her smile is strained. She is contained. She seems unknowable, and there is that melancholy Billie Holiday air about her — all those songs about a suffering woman. Most of us would prefer Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow),” the upbeat theme of Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign.
Why does every Washington pundit think they’re qualified to psychoanalyze politicians? Can someone please tell me where Richard Cohen got his degree in therapy?
[Walks off mumbling and grunting.]
Feb
27
27
Uh-oh! They’re onto us!
Oh crap! The Tennessee Republican Party is onto Barry X’s plan to turn America into West Allahstan:
The Tennessee Republican Party today joins a growing chorus of Americans concerned about the future of the nation of Israel, the only stable democracy in the Middle East, if Sen. Barack Hussein Obama is elected president of the United States.
“It’s time to set the record straight about Barack Obama and where he really stands on vital issues such as national security and the security of Israel,” said Robin Smith, chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party. “Voters need to know about two items that surfaced today which strongly suggest that an Obama presidency will view Israel as a problem rather than a partner for peace in the Middle East.
Obama, (pictured dressed in Muslim attire in a 2006 visit to Africa) has on the campaign trail pledged to rapidly remove American soldiers from Iraq regardless of the resulting instability and the creation of opening that would be filled by Islamic extremists, like Al Qaeda, in Iraq’s government and military.
Obama has pledged to hold a Muslim Summit to determine Middle East policy with the very leaders that have as their goal to remove Israel from the map, referenced Jews to be “dogs” and “pigs,” among other vile references.
Well, there goes our plan to run a stealth candidate. Maybe Obama should just bust Mumia out of the clink now, so we can start the Revolution before they figure everything out.
Above: While scandalously refusing to wear a flag pin on the outside of his lapel,
Obama proudly wears this pin on the inside. No, it’s true, ask a black person.
[Via Yglesias.]
Feb
27
27
Bill Buckley, RIP
Above: Wrong finger, Bill
Bill Buckley, a giant of America’s political landscape, is dead. Rick Perlstein pays tribute:
William F. Buckley was my friend.
I’m hard on conservatives. I get harder on them just about every day. I call them “con men.” I do so without apology. And I cannot deny that William F. Buckley said and did many things over the course of his career that were disgusting as well. I’ve written about some of them. But this is not the time to go into all that. My friend just passed away at the age of 82. He was a good and decent man. He knew exactly what my politics were about—he knew I was an implacable ideological adversary—yet he offered his friendship to me nonetheless. He did the honor of respecting his ideological adversaries, without covering up the adversarial nature of the relationship in false bonhommie. A remarkable quality, all too rare in an era of the false fetishization of “post-partisanship” and Broderism and go-along-to-get-along. He was friends with those he fought. He fought with friends. These are the highest civic ideals to which an American patriot can aspire.
AllahPundit, meanwhile, feels the best way to mark Buckley’s passing is to show a video of him calling Gore Vidal a queer.
Different strokes, different folks.
Update: As numerous folks have pointed out in the comments, Bill Buckley was not a saint. My point here was not to lionize him, but rather to acknowledge his significance in the recent history of American discourse.
Gavin adds: I dunno; Buckley might not have been a force for good in the world, but his was a conservatism of principles — one far more substantial and measured than the one of stances and shibboleths that today’s young conservatives learn to swallow whole and regurgitate. Buckley came out against the War in Iraq awhile ago, for instance, even as the young goblins at the National Review were wrecking his legacy, spending down its credibility in trying to rationalize every new flagrancy, every new heart-dropping catastrophe as a ‘victory’ for Bush and for people-like-themselves.
On a similar tip, one of Ace’s identical Popeye-nephews posted the same video of Buckley and Gore Vidal.
This is hardly his most important moment, but I love the fact that he told Gore Vidal he’d punch him in his fucking prissy face.
That seems to be how they conceive of him: as a hyuk-hyuk dog-whistle conservative who once brashly said the word ‘queer’ on national TV — as something like a genteel Rush Limbaugh (or a less-dickified Ann Coulter) of the 1960s and ’70s. But Buckley usually had far more class than that, in more than one sense of the word. The guy at Ace continues:
Not nearly an adequate tribute, but I do love this so.
Because an adequate tribute would require, like, reading actual books and understanding the intellectual history of conservatism, and stuff. They don’t value that; they already know what they’re supposed to believe, to cheer for, and (mostly) to revile. They know what side they’re on, and all else is tactics.
If you ask me, all their virtues together wouldn’t make a Buckley. That’s my two cents on’t.
Clif adds: We should probably not praise Buckley too fulsomely before remembering some of the charming things he said in National Review back in the late 50s. Like this editorial from August 24, 1957, titled “Why the South Must Prevail.”
The central question that emerges . . . is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not prevail numerically? The sobering answer is Yes — the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists
The wingnut bloggers never cease to point out that, some 13 years before Buckley’s editorial, Sen. Robert Byrd was in the Klan. There is, however, one significant difference. Byrd renounced his Klan membership; Buckley never renounced the racist crap he wrote.
UPDATE: I see some of Buckley’s racist legacy was being kicked around in the comments, which I hadn’t read before I posted this. Still, I think it’s worth having this particularly odious quote from the old crypto-Nazi upfront and forward where it won’t be missed.
Leonard adds: I’ve said my piece about Buckley elsewhere, but I did want to add a couple of things:
First, it’s a howling irony that some right-wingers are using that Vidal clip as a memorial to Buckley, as if it were a proud moment in his life or something. In fact, it was a moment of complete embarrassment: the network yanked him off the air and it made him into a national joke for weeks. Buckley, a spineless patrician of the first water, was the least threatening human being on the planet; even Vidal is openly smirking at his pathetic threat, in which we can see the birth of the ridiculous phony tough-guy bluster of today’s conservative bloggers. The genesis of the whole argument between them was Buckley’s defense of the reprehensible brutality of the Chicago police, which pretty much turned off the entire country. And best of all, in an early chickenhawk moment, the clip ends with Buckley displaying calculated outrage that Vidal would call him a crypto-Nazi; why, after all, he, Buckley, fought in the war! (As a non-combatant in the US Army. Just like Gore Vidal.) The whole episode his nothing but a non-stop humiliation of Buckley, and the idea that some people would use it as a his-finest-hour memorial is stupefying.
Additionally, you don’t have to cast all the way back to the dark ’50s to find the old bastard saying intolerant things. Aside from his lifelong belief that it was perfectly acceptable to sacrifice thousands of American lives and kill millions of non-Americans if they showed the slightest sign of sympathy for, or even proximity to, any of the tenets of communism, he was arguing as recently as the 1980s that we should forcibly tattoo people with AIDS as a “warning” to the general public. He was also behind the YAF back when it really was a hippie-bashing bunch of crypto-fascist street brawlers, and he did plenty both directly and through advocacy to overthrow democratically elected regimes all over the world.
There’s no question that compared to his intellectual heirs, Buckley was a giant. There’s no doubt that the National Review, a respectable publication when he founded it, is now a shameful joke. But the fact that he seems decent by comparison is just a sign of how far the discourse has been allowed to degrade. Sure, he was sincere and consistent after his way, but I hope we haven’t fallen far enough that we think phoniness is the only crime; Buckley was sincere, but he was sincere in pursuit of some pretty ugly goals, and we can memorialize him to the extent that we don’t forget that.
Feb
27
27
Ah, memories
Remember this ad?
In reality, of course, Iraq today is less free than Egypt, the Palestinian territories, Kazakhstan, Cambodia, Rwanda and other havens of whiskey-sexy-time democracy.
Heckuva job!
Feb
27
27
Shorter Michelle Malkin
- The Washington Times’ unwillingness to dehumanize immigrants proves that they’re just another far-left Old Media rag.
‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard.
Gavin adds: If ol’ Malkin keeps positioning herself to the right of everything, her eyes are going to start migrating to the side of her head, like a flounder.
