Tick, Tock, Tacky, Tock
While I’m waiting waiting waiting for Trevino’s reply (which I’m sure, if his character — and hypocritical stance on Online Integrity — holds true, will come, if at all, with heavy insinuations about my identity), I thought I’d take the opportunity in the next few days to explore the various utterings and writings of William F. Buckley, Tacky’s ideal of decent rightism, whom Tacky regards as a hero and whose measured and nuanced and anti-paranoid stances Tacky implores the netroots to emulate on the ideological flipside.
Here, more or less at random, is a bit of Hofstadter’s thesis-defying non-paranoia from Tacky’s Ideal Centrist (From 1970):
PLAYBOY: To many liberals, Agnew’s attacks on the media late last fall brought to mind the Chinese emperors who executed messengers bringing bad news. Do you think the press is as objective as it professes to be?
BUCKLEY:When Mr. Nixon in November said that North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States, only Americans can do that, he meant that if the American people refuse to back an enterprise that — in the judgement of the men they elected to write their foriegn policies — is essential to the good health of this country and of this century, then one must face two alternative explanations for their failure to do so. One is that they’ve run out of stamina. The other is that they have been constantly hectored into taking an erroneous position because they are insufficiently aware of the dimensions of the problem. He would obviously prefer the latter explanation to the former, as would I. He tends to feel that the majority of morally alert people in America have, for the most part, heard only a single side on the Vietnam issue — in the universites as well as the press. He is absolutely correct. It is almost impossible, you know, to work through Yale or Harvard or Princeton and hear a pro-Vietnam speech. This is a pure caricature of academic freedom.
Ring any bells? It’s the traitor press and those liberal professors who’ve poisoned Americans against the great crusade!
Buckley’s croaking here anticipates the Horowitz-Pipes war on Academe, as well as Nixon’s, and now Bush’s, war of attrition on the press. Apparently even “centrist” wingnuts cannot accept the fact that the American people, with regard to Vietnam and now Iraq, consider(ed) the enterprise doomed and pointless and a collossal mistake — no, they cannot be given credit for thinking for themselves. So who to blame? Certainly not those whose incompetent execution and terrible judgement allowed the wars to get out of hand. Certainly not the True Believer crusaders among the Right who exploited the fears of the populace (which they demagogued to, and helped inculcate all along). No! So blame the press and the professors, a bunch of demented sickos who live to thwart the ambitions Noble Wingnut Presidents!
Ah yes, WFB: not as paranoid or extreme as Kos. Ask Tacky.
There sure is a lot of back available for the stabbin’.
I can’t believe DocAmazing beat Tacky to this post.
It’s really worth emphasizing how totally untrue Buckley’s comment about “Yale or Harvard or Princeton” was. In the 1970s, the Princeton history department was deeply divided over the Vietnam War. Two professors actually had (fairly open) CIA connections, and had been actively involved in (the early stages I think) of the Vietnam conflict. When I was in grad school at Princeton some years later, people would still tell stories (possibly apocryphal) of these historians pouring over maps of Southeast Asia in the Annex bar.
In any event, the Vietnam War was brought to us by Ivy League graduates, “the best and the brightest” (as David Halberstam entitled his book about the origins of that conflict). Though the architects of the Vietnam War were largely Cold War liberals, a big chunk of the rightwing elite have also always been produced by precisely the institutions that these same conservatives spend much of their time claiming are nothing but indoctrination factories for the left. Of course, Bill Buckley (Yale ’50) pioneered this trick with his scathing indictment of his alma mater, God and Man at Yale (1951). More recently, Ann Coulter (Cornell ’84) and Our Dear Leader (BA Yale ’68, MBA Harvard ’76) have been heirs to this legacy. Indeed, the right loves simultaneously to attack elite universities and claim that degrees from them prove that such hacks as our Attorney General (JD Harvard ’82) are deep thinkers.
Well, you know, America would have won the Vietnam War if the fucking press had just reported on how many Vietnamese schools were being painted.
Everything WFB ever wrote is at the website for Hillsdale College (www.hillsdale.edu). Go there an do a search for “academic freedom” and you’ll find his writings on the idea, which he clearly does not understand. The Right has never understood it because freedom is scary to them.
Well, you know, America would have won the Vietnam War if the fucking press had just reported on how many Vietnamese schools were being painted.
Right. And that we were greeted as liberators with flowers and candy thrown at us. There were also quite a few town squares named after Nixon, but you wouldn’t know that from the reports of the crackpot liberal media.
well, we WERE greeted with flowers and candy – if you define flowers and candy to mean ‘roadside bombs and snipers’.
and we never committed war crimes either! not if you define stuff like my-lai as ‘fraternity pranks’.
if you ask Pasty Goldstain, he would of course agree that the problem is the press and us leftist bloggers pointing out the elephants in the room, the elephants whose shit he eats and bathes in.
This is the key to Buckley’s mindset here: a false dichotomy that any college sophmore should cringe at.
BUCKLEY:When Mr. Nixon in November said that North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States, only Americans can do that, he meant that if the American people refuse to back an enterprise that — in the judgement of the men they elected to write their foriegn policies — is essential to the good health of this country and of this century, then one must face two alternative explanations for their failure to do so. One is blah blah. The other is yadda yadda.
What’s funny is that such a skilled rhetorician and debator as Buckley would expect such a glaring logic error to go unremarked. I suppose the eternal smugness of his spotless mind allows him to overlook his errors as trivial compared to the overarching Great Thoughts he deigns share with us lesser mortals.
Compare and contrast Buckley’s statements with declassified statements by Kissinger that I pulled together. Yes, there is a 1969 memo of Kissinger meeting with the French that admits that the US could not obtain victory in Vietnam by negotiations or military force.
Angry obsessives stay both!
….I’m waiting waiting waiting for Trevino’s reply….
If anything, your crime is loving too much. Don’t wait. This construct of me that you obsess over doesn’t reciprocate the fixation. Perhaps you have some enemies on the baseball boards that might enjoy a halfwit whack-a-mole with J.?
…..will come, if at all, with heavy insinuations about my identity….
Someone’s rattled. You have my sympathy. On several levels.
This construct of me that you obsess over doesn’t reciprocate the fixation
What are you, Josh, a disassociative deconstructionalist with dadaistic delusions? You should get that checked.
Just say “I don’t recriprocate your obsession.” Clarity is a virtue.
i just had the mental image that talking to trevino is like standing next to someone who has shit his pants, and he’s still glaring at you like _you’re_ the one who stinks.
and the best thing about coming back and finding this post and writing this here, two weeks after this thread is as dead as dogshit, is that trevino will probably come back here and read what i wrote.