RIP William F Buckley Jr

number-tattoo the cryptofascist's corpse.

ALVY
(Looking down at the magazine)
What is this? What are you, since when do you read the "National Review"? What are you turning in to?

ANNIE
(Turning to a nearby chair for some gum in her pocketbook)
Well, I like to try to get all points of view.

ALVY
It's wonderful. Then why don'tcha get William F. Buckley to kill the spider?

I'm more affected by Wally George's death for some reason.

RIP, weird crazy old intelligent guy

A hilarious John Boehner eulogy:

"America has lost a giant. William F. Buckley was, in large measure, the architect of the modern conservative movement. His intellect, wit, and dedication have inspired generations. In the 1950s, as many in America were moving toward a socialist future of ever-expanding government and ever-decreasing freedom, it took an act of courage and vision to stand athwart history and yell, ‘stop’ as Buckley wrote in the first issue of National Review. As long as America honors the ideals of our Founding Fathers – free speech, freedom of religion, and limited, Constitutional government - his legacy will be cherished."

RIP

A charming speaker and writer, he seemed anachronistic long before he passed away. I rarely agreed with him, but he was at least a civilized voice for the right, something in short supply now.

'god and man at yale' was one of the most eye-opening books i read in college, which set a context for the rise of conservatism at a time when i was really confused about how people could think that way.

On September 15, 1963 a bomb went off at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing 4 black girls and injuring many more children. (Those killed were Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair; McNair had been a classmate of the young Condoleezza Rice). The bomb was set by members of the Klu Klux Klan, as part of a wave of terror designed to intimidate the civil rights movement. Here is how National Review commented on the bombing in the October 1, 1963 issue of their biweekly Bulletin: “The fiend who set off the bomb does not have the sympathy of the white population in the South; in fact, he set back the cause of the white people there so dramatically as to raise the question whether in fact the explosion was the act of a provocateur - of a Communist, or of a crazed Negro. Some circumstantial evidence lends a hint of plausibility to that notion, especially the ten-minute fuse (surely a white man walking away from the church basement ten minutes earlier would have been noticed?). And let it be said that the convulsions that go on, and are bound to continue, have resulted from revolutionary assaults on the status quo, and a contempt for the law, which are traceable to the Supreme Court’s manifest contempt for the settled traditions of Constitutional practice.”

"at least a civilized voice for the right"

AIDS tattoos? Civilization is overrated, apparently (Nazis loved Wagner).

I'll have to find that AIDS column; I don't think it was THAT militant, if I'm remembering it correctly.

http://i47.photobucket.com/albums/f163/courtneykaehler/maracas.jpg

RIP

"stand athwart history"?

wtf that is some shitty writing

I can't say I admired him, because I didn't. He was staunch for the privileges of the priveleged, catty, self-important and was not above intellectual dishonesty when it suited his purposes.

OTOH, he had an arch sense of humor, which was a nice feature when it came into play, and he was capable of surprising one by actually stepping away from the dogma from time to time. Witness his eventual conversion to opposition to the War on Marijuana.

The story went that he sailed his luxury sailboat into international waters and smoked some marijuana. It convinced him that the stuff was essentially pretty harmless and not worth outlawing. Too bad that he exhibited such willingness to embrace facts over ideology all too rarely.

As for his vaunted vocabulary... nerts to him. It never could expunge the stain of his many apologia for the outrageous.

is no one going to decry ILX's satisfaction over the death of a certifiable asshole as ghoulish/inhuman/morbid/cruel etc? O THE HUMANITY

Wonkette's headline:

"Elegant, Witty Conservative Writer William F. Buckley Jr. Dies, Leaving No Intellectual Heirs"

OK this is vile.

Public heath officials are considering measures which, 20 years ago, would have been though fascistic interventions in human rights. There is thought of infiltrating gay sites, particularly those on the Internet. What, having identified such sites, will they then do? Interpose a message about the danger of unprotected sex? Collect names and email addresses, and send individual warnings to prospective victims? Such measures are not easily composed: “Dear Sir: You have recently kept company with Tony Venenum. Tony has a new and dangerous strain of AIDS and you may have contracted it. You should report to a doctor and you must not engage in unprotected sex because in doing so you may be committing murder.” The boundaries of the new campaign, let alone the niceties, haven’t been resolved upon, but not much thought is being given to concerns of privacy. Murderers need to be stopped, and if this means opening their mail, well — such things happen and you can take comfort that you may be saving a life.

The objective is to identify the carrier, and to warn his victim. Someone, 20 years ago, suggested a discreet tattoo the site of which would alert the prospective partner to the danger of proceeding as had been planned. But the author of the idea was treated as though he had been schooled in Buchenwald, and the idea was not widely considered, but maybe it is up now for reconsideration.

The smirking tone is just awful.

Buckley went against The Corner on Iraq and/or torture dinnt he?

I never understood how his celebration of the legislative branch jibed with the Republican, or at least the Nixon and post-Nixon love of the executive.

The New Republic sneaked a reporter on board The Corner's annual cruise (someone post the link?). All the young neocons were shaking their heads sadly and making crazy-guy hand gestures when Buckley decried the war.

Okay, this bit from the NYT obit is repulsive:

The merits of the argument aside, Mr. Buckley irrevocably proved that his brand of candor did not lend itself to public life when an Op-Ed article he wrote for The New York Times offered a partial cure for the AIDS epidemic: "Everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm to prevent common needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of homosexuals," he wrote.

"Merits of the argument aside" -- WTF

He also became infamous for wandering around in Harvard Square in a bathrobe

huh, when i lived in boston that would be a good way to become anonymous. blend in with the crowd.

Most of the people wandering Harvard Sq in a bathrobe weren't on a phone excitedly saying, "Can you still hear me? I'm in Store 24 now!"

i won't miss him. for all the nonsense about what a great old-time conservative he was (""he opposed the war in iraq," etc.), WFB effectively ruined conservatism in america. his constant bleating for all-out war with the soviet union, his pitiful apologies for mccarthy, his snooty, moralistic tone - apart from being a slightly better writer, there was precious little to distinguish him from today's liberal-baiting hacks. a genuine conservative might have opposed the truman administration for actual conservative reasons - the national security act, the loyalty oaths, the trumped-up war in korea - but WFB contained his criticisms to pretending that truman was a "socialist."

that said, it's hard not to at least kind of respect a man who developed the most ridiculous public persona imaginable and took it so dead seriously.

you're right, most of the bathrobed people saying that in store 24 were not on the phone.

xpost.

guys you should be paying more attention to Myron Cope, not this fuck.

My eccentric acquaintance wasn't a fuck!

J.D. – do you know Buckley's relationship with Robert Taft, Vandenburg, and the isolationist wing of the GOP?

Yeah, and he didn't come up with anything as enduring as the "Terrible Towel", which is just about the only thing I like about the Steelers.

James Wolcott's fine obit -- fantastic actor, average writer, wrong side of history.

I like him. Right now we need a liberal/left version of this guy.

gore vidal wins again?

I just checked NRO--the Joe Lieberman piece on Buckley seems seriously to have been written by someone with Downs' Syndrome. Of course, I applaud Joe if he hires such people for his staff.

as with Mailer, Gore Vidal wins again.

-- Dr Morbius, Wednesday, February 27, 2008 8:42 AM

gore vidal wins again?

-- BIG HOOS aka the linesbiter Wednesday, February 27, 2008 4:37 PM

vidal ftw

alfred: i admit i haven't heard much about WFB being associated with that crowd. i think there's a great deal to admire in the "old right" GOP - and there were plenty of isolationist progressive liberals, like charles beard - and i find it hard to see WFB's full-on support of the cold war as anything but a betrayal of that. admittedly, he wasn't alone, but i find it ridiculous to see people like wolcott try to distinguish him from "the right-wing lunatics who destroyed conservatism."

btw have you read garry wills's "confessions of a conservative"? it's a memoir of wills's days working at national review, and has some hilarious WFB stories. wills was a little freaked out when he got to the office and discovered that everyone there talked just like buckley!

Who will write awesome mystery novels?

didn't WFB write a novel about elvis? i could forgive a lot for that.

alfred: i admit i haven't heard much about WFB being associated with that crowd. i think there's a great deal to admire in the "old right" GOP - and there were plenty of isolationist progressive liberals, like charles beard - and i find it hard to see WFB's full-on support of the cold war as anything but a betrayal of that. admittedly, he wasn't alone, but i find it ridiculous to see people like wolcott try to distinguish him from "the right-wing lunatics who destroyed conservatism."

Like a lot of intellectuals on the left and right, he was infatuated with power and those who used it -- the same fallacy that Orwell, analyzing the writings of James Burnham, deplored. But Wolcott's responding to Buckley's manner; the man, by all accounts, didn't call you a traitor for disagreeing with him, and probably respected you all the more for it.

is no one going to decry ILX's satisfaction over the death of a certifiable asshole as ghoulish/inhuman/morbid/cruel etc? O THE HUMANITY

Eh, it takes a turn for the amusing when you contrast it with the death of, er...let's say Norman Mailer.

It's like when you compare the Castro v. Pinochet threads. One man's "brutal tyrant who ruled with an iron fist" becomes "[name of country] leader who dared to defy [name of powerful countries who wanted him ousted] and survive numerous attempts at overthrow finally calls it quits..."

http://www.alternet.org/story/57001

NYT obit headline: "Sesquipedalian Spark of Right"

So nice the haw-haw humor made the move to their new Blade Runner HQ.

"The Beatles are not merely awful. They are so unbelievably horrible, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art, that they qualify as crowned heads of antimusic."

rec.music.beatles
Beatle Hater William F. Buckley Dead At 82
Messages 1 - 25 of 30

OK, I laughed at "crowned heads of anti-music," which is a spot-on Geirism.

WFB was a reactionary that elite liberals loved. The New York Times' multimedia tribute to him is not surprising, glossing over Buckley's less attractive stances in his long public career. But that was Buckley's true talent: making reprehensible opinions palatable to liberal tastes. He was much smoother than Ann Coulter, but not that different in ideological outlook. Coulter crashes into rooms, yelling, spitting bile in all directions. WFB slid in almost silently, his bouncing eyebrows the sole evidence of his presence -- until he spoke, that is -- and even then, bullshit oozed from his mouth in polysyllabic strips, with liberals like John Kenneth Galbraith and Murray Kempton eagerly lapping up his crap.

For all of Buckley's social charms, augmented by his harpsichord playing, let's recall that he and his money-losing magazine National Review opposed civil rights for African-Americans while backing white Southern statist repression in the 1950s and early '60s. Buckley himself openly questioned the logic of giving blacks the vote at all, hinting that "chaos" might ensue if the darker hordes voted in a bloc.

http://dennisperrin.blogspot.com/2008/02/socked-in-god-damned-face.html

This bears repeating.

William F. Buckley was, in large measure, the architect of the modern conservative movement.

Have some quiet time and think on what that means.

I mean, Morbs is dead on this time, you guys. The man was a fucking horror show.

xp haven't seen the doc but scott s linked this piece in another thread:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-04-17-an-implausible-mr-buckley/

That piece is excellent, as so much of Perlstein's work is

Really good piece by Jensen on the biography.

https://defector.com/william-f-buckleys-bill-never-came-due

I have it on hold at the library.

There is one fantasy about Buckley that goes like this: America was better off when men like him were famous, and that we are lacking proper right-wing intellectuals. Of course, the right wing itself doesn’t believe this; they think they have plenty. It is liberals, and sometimes even leftists, who dream of a modern Firing Line. I sympathize with this fantasy but do not particularly share it. My wish, which is maybe equally childish, is that men like Buckley would be burdened by the fact of themselves. I would love to believe that people like him are conflicted, tortured, haunted in some way when, as they survey their lives, they confront what they have wrought.

Tanenhaus offers no comfort in this regard. A priest, looking to reassure the devout Buckley, once suggested to him that “everyone at some point has doubts.” Buckley responds, “I never did.” The book gives me the sense that this is true of matters both spiritual and profane. Buckley never doubted, never wavered, merely laid down his head after a long, untroubled life. He lied as well as he did, and so prolifically and for so long, because it really came that easily to him.

i read tanenhaus’ whittaker chambers bio earlier this year. incredibly good book

Yup. It's prime Sotobait.

someone really ought to make a movie about the hiss case. nixon is like the crooked detective in a film noir with all the shoe leather investigating. and his cussing is amazing

this does sound like a great book but holy shit 1,040 pages! I've already read Lonesome Dove this year, ain't no way I'm reading something even longer.

lol I will probably just listen to the inevitable Know Your Enemy episodes on it. They had him on to talk about Hiss, too.

They’ve already done an episode on it

Well I guess I need to catch up!

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:2kfemzpsbyfpzkp4op6dopoj/bafkreia6s6o6i2svzdppuonlhikjp6kgsfw34oylqozynsj3epxdlizwvq@jpeg

no way

They couldn't get a better photo? then again

first AI stamp?

They should issue a special Buckley-Vidal stamp.

"Stop calling me a crypto Nazi or I'll sock you in your goddam face" still an all-time sentence

and you'll stay plastered (to an envelope)

From crypto Nazis to crypto-bro Nazis, the long journey of the American right.