It always saddens me to disagree with a friend, especially when I hold the friend in high professional regard. I have great personal affection for Christopher Buckley, and I harbor unbounded admiration for his talents as a satirist. He is an immensely engaging chap–a draught of champagne (the real stuff, not some domestic sparkler) on legs–and a boon travel companion to boot. Someday, we may amaze the world with our co-authored travelogue/political thriller about our journeys in and around Nootka. But that is a saga for another occasion.
At the moment, I am feeling glum because Christo has broadcast a public endorsement of Barack Obama.
Why does this make me glum? Because Obama is the most left-wing, socialistically inclined presidential candidate (serious candidate) in the republic’s history. Nothing Christo says in his endorsement gainsays this description, and I suspect that, were he pressed, he would probably agree with it. Ponder that! His disenchantment with the status quo is so profound–a disenchantment that was bred in the policies of George W. Bush and metastasized to the candidacy of John McCain, for whom he once wrote speeches–that it issues in this apostasy from the Republican side of the ledger. This is serious stuff!
Now, I have plenty of reservations about John McCain–how do you spell McCain-Feingold, for example?–but has he really changed fundamentally, as Christo says: has he somehow mutated from being “authentic” to being “inauthentic” over the course of this election cycle? If so, in what way? Christo murmurs about his angry temperament, his having been changed by Washington, etc. But I have to wonder whether the real problem is that McCain refuses to play according to the Democratic “narrative” and accept that his appointed role as “maverick” is to lose gracefully and then disappear.
Several things surprised me about Christo’seloquent declaration. The central surprise, of course, was his support of Obama. Since I am adamantly anti-socialist, I regard the prospect of an Obama administration with the gravest misgiving. The more I find out about him–including the more I discover the extent of what we cannot find out about him–the more serious are my misgivings. Sure, I have plenty–well, I have some–friends who support Obama. And being a large-view, big-tent kind of guy I can, if I close my eyes and really concentrate, understand why they might think that a good thing to do. But Christopher Buckley!
Don’t get me wrong. Let me repeat what long-time readers know: I have plenty of criticisms of John McCain. But, like Gwendolen in The Importance of Being Earnest when asked whether she had any doubts that Jack came to London only to see her, although I “have the gravest doubts upon the subject,” “I intend to crush them”–at least until after the election. Why? Because whatever criticisms I have of McCain are dwarfed by my criticisms of Obama.
Because of his family, because of his continuing connection with the center of elite conservative opinion in this country, Christo’s endorsement is something special. I heard a rumor about it a week or so ago and wondered at first whether it might be one of those winking, tongue-in-cheek gambits satirists sometimes employ to get our attention. “Wow, Christopher Buckley, son of Wm. F. Buckley Jr., Republican speech writer, board member and regular contributor to National Review is supporting Obama! He’s not serious, is he?” And then it would turn out that, no, he wasn’t serious.
But inspecting his public declaration I conclude that he is very serious indeed.
There are several things about this document that engaged my attention. First, it is written with the effervescence and rhetorical brio we have come to associate with the work of C. Buckley. Quite apart from its political content, it’s a snappy piece of writing. Kudos for that.
Unfortunately, part of what makes it such an accomplished piece is what saddens me–at least, it is part of what saddens me. The text of the essay is a declaration of support of B. Obama: “a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect,” according to Christo. But the sub-text is an effort to assign those of us who decline to offer our support for The One We’ve Been Waiting For a place in the limbo of right-wing cloud-cuckoodom. At a strategic moment, Christo quotes his father: “I’ve spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks.” You don’t have to be a student of Quintilian to understand that sheep are being segregated from goats here, and those of us who have serious qualms about Obama are being mustered on the wrong side of that divide. A similar principle of exclusion is at work in his reference to “Rush Limbaugh and the others in the Right Wing Sanhedrin.” The Sanhedrin was the ancient court that tried Jesus and found him wanting. Who is on trial here? Obama? McCain? Or, Dear Reader, is it you?
I was also sorry to find Christo associating himself with the idea that Sarah Palin is “an embarrassment, and a dangerous one at that.” That was the line taken by Kathleen Parker on NRO recently, and it caused, as Christo notes, much wailing and gnashing of teeth among the conservative faithful. Christo seemed particularly moved by the rabidness of some of the responses. But I invite him to look at the sort of comments my posts here often generate–or, if I am too suspect a subject, at the sort of response that the work of the author of God and Man at Yale often generated. I do not know Ms Parker. I have no doubt Christo is right in describing her as “superb and very dishy.” But was her assessment of Governor Palin correct?
Opinion about Palin’s merits is sharply divided, even among conservatives. I acknowledge that she has performed poorly in some recent interviews. Nonetheless, I place myself firmly in the utterly besotted camp. In brief, I think she is the best thing to happen to conservatives since Ronald Reagan. I would feel far safer with her in the White House than I would were Joe Biden or Barack Obama presiding over the canapés at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Why? Well, I enumerated some reasons in a couple of posts last month (here and here.) As it happens, these pieces took off from Bill Buckley’s famous mot about preferring to be governed by the first 2000 names in the Boston telephone directory rather than the 2000 members of the Harvard faculty. Why would he have said that?
The usual response is “populism,” with the adjective “misplaced” silently inserted as a prefix. But WFB was no populist. He was, rather, opposed to the liberal consensus, that smug covenant of elites that presumed to define the perquisites of virtue for the rest of us. In the famous editorial with which he opened the first issue of National Review, Bill noted that the magazine was “out of place, in the sense that the United Nations and the League of Women Voters and the New York Times and Henry Steele Commager are in place.” No one on the contemporary political scene is more “in place” than Barack Obama.
By the same token, what major political figure is more “out of place” than Sarah Palin? She is regularly castigated for being “populist.” Her real offense, though, is a different pop: she is immensely, effortlessly, grandly popular–and that, among those “in place” is unforgivable.
The Left hates Sarah Palin partly because of what she stands for, partly for who she is. Those on the Right who dislike her tend to affirm what she stands for, but are at one with the Left in disdaining who she is. I put it this way in the second of the posts I just mentioned:
[H]er real offense–the thing that has precipitated such visceral hatred of her among the Left–lies not in her party affiliation or even her particular policy prescriptions. No, the Left hates her for what she is, and I do not mean only things like the fact that she is pro-life, pro-hunting, and in favor of off-shore drilling. Those are merely the external coefficients of a view of life and the world that the Times, that “Harvard,” can barely understand, but that to the extent that they do understand they regard with a mixture of contempt and loathing. “Harvard,” I noted in the post mentioned above, and the “progressive” consensus it represents
is sophisticated about everything except its own naïveté. It champions cultural relativism–absolutely. It is suspicious when someone shows up peddling “the truth,” especially about moral matters; but it embraces its perspective on the world as inarguable. According to the gospel of “Harvard,” all right-thinking (i.e., left-leaning) people agree with the various positions set forth in the catechism of liberalism. To champion the various dogmas set forth in that catechism, says “Harvard,” is simply to exhibit one’s contact with reality. To dissent from them is to exhibit one’s ignorance, bad faith, or malevolence.
And that, as we’ve seen this last week or so, is how “Harvard,” a.k.a., liberal elite opinion, regards Sarah Palin: partly parochial, partly malevolent. She is not part of the enlightened confraternity from which we draw our leaders: our political leaders, our newspapers editors, our college professors and presidents, our socialites and news readers.
But here’s a question: why is someone like Joe Biden better equipped to be Vice President than Sarah Palin?
No one has come up with an answer I consider satisfactory to that last question.
While you are pondering what would make for a better response, let me return to Christo’s declaration of support for Obama. As I mentioned, he discerns in Obama “a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect.” Evidence of those excellences? Exhibit A (in fact, it is the only item on the roster) is Obama’s literary talent, on view, as all the world knows, in his two memoirs. “I’ve read Obama’s books,” Christo writes, “and they are first-rate. He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books.”
I’ve read in those books–I hadn’t the stomach to finish them–and I find them a prime example of inspirational babytalk: vacuousness raised by exhoration to the illusion of substance. But let’s say I am wrong and Christo is correct in his literary assessment. What sort of qualification would this be for high political office? Not much, I’d say. But everyone has a tendency to overvalue his own speciality. There is no reason to suppose writers are less susceptible to this déformation professionelle than anyone else.
But here’s a question. Is Barack Obama the rara avis Christo supposes? Or is he that more familiar creature, the vulgaris avis who pawns off other people’s work as his own? Apparently, there is more than a little question about this. Does it matter? Politicians often sign their names to other people’s work. It is an open secret that Profiles in Courage was written not by John F. Kennedy, whose name is on the copyright page, but rather by Ted Sorensen. Most of us don’t think less of JFK for it. But since Christo singles out Obama’s literary intelligence, it is worth delving into the question. Obama had never distinguished himself as a writer. Indeed, in his tenure as editor of the Harvard Law Review he wrote–nothing. Not a single article.
As Jack Cashill observes in “Who Wrote Dreams From My Father?“,
Prior to 1990, when Barack Obama contracted to write Dreams From My Father, he had written very close to nothing. Then, five years later, this untested 33 year-old produced what Time Magazine has called — with a straight face — “the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician.”
The public is asked to believe Obama wrote Dreams From My Father on his own, almost as though he were some sort of literary idiot savant. I do not buy this canard for a minute, not at all. Writing is as much a craft as, say, golf. To put this in perspective, imagine if a friend played a few rounds in the high 90s and then a few years later, without further practice, made the PGA Tour. It doesn’t happen.
Cashill goes on to suggest that Dreams From My Father was ghostwritten and that the literary artist responsible was none other that Bill Ayers, the unrepentant sixties radical and enthusiast for Hugo Chavez who as late as September 11, 2001, lamented that, when it came to bombing things, he and his cronies “didn’t do enough.” (The idea that America is decent society, he said, “makes me want to puke.“)
Is Cashill one of those right-wing “kooks” WFB warned about or a credible witness? I do not know. Read the piece and decide for yourself. He has certainly assembled an impressive mound of circumstantial evidence. He acknowledges that, given what we know for certain now, he cannot prove his contention. (Though could we not subject Dreams From My Father to the same sort of analysis that was used to discover the author of Primary Colors?) Cashill argues that there are really only two live possibilities: “one is that Obama experienced a near miraculous turnaround in his literary abilities; the second is that he had major editorial help, up to and including a ghostwriter.” Cashill believes “The weight of the evidence overwhelmingly favors the latter conclusion.”
Obama has called Ayers “just a guy the neighborhood.” Stanley Kurtz and Andrew McCarthy have put paid to that fib (see, for example, here and here). And Andy has a thoughtful piece on the significance of Christo’s endorsement of Obama on the grounds of intelligence and literary talent:
Taking Christopher Buckley as a measure of what intelligent people who favor Obama are thinking, it’s fair to say there’s a lot riding on Obama’s writing. I’d like to feel more confident that he wrote it: If he wins, Obama will be my president, and as I’m not a MoveOn Democrat who’d rather tear down my country than see a president I opposed succeed, I’d like to feel some of Christopher’s hope for what that portends.
Me too, on all counts.
As I say, when it comes to passing off other people’s work as their own, politicians often–not always, but often–get a free pass. It’s OK to hire someone to write a speech for you and then pretend it’s your speech. It’s not, as Joe Biden discovered to his sorrow, OK to pilfer someone else’s speech (which was itself possbily written by a third party) and pretend it is yours. When Obama announced that Biden was to be his running mate, I wrote a piece called “The Neophyte and the Plagiarist.” Maybe it should have been titled “The Neophyte Plagiarist and the Experienced One”–if, that is, secretly employing a ghostwriter counts as plagiarism. Maybe it doesn’t. In many cases, it is A-OK for a politician to hire a ghostwriter to write a book to which the politician will sign his own name. Would it be OK in Obama’s case, when part of the point of Obama, was his honesty, his authenticity? And what if Cashill turns out to be correct and Dreams From My Father was written by Bill “the bomber” Ayers? What then? Would that tarnish his reputation as a man possessed of a “first-class temperament”? I’m looking forward to asking Christo on our next mission to Nootka.
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1. Fausta’s Blog » Blog Archive » A Palin roundup:[...] Roger Kimball writes about his disagreement with Christopher Buckley, Opinion about Palin’s merits is sharply divided, even among conservatives. I acknowledge that she has performed poorly in some recent interviews. Nonetheless, I place myself firmly in the utterly besotted camp. In brief, I think she is the best thing to happen to conservatives since Ronald Reagan. I would feel far safer with her in the White House than I would were Joe Biden or Barack Obama presiding over the canapés at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Why? Well, I enumerated some reasons in a couple of posts last month (here and here.) As it happens, these pieces took off from Bill Buckley’s famous mot about preferring to be governed by the first 2000 names in the Boston telephone directory rather than the 2000 members of the Harvard faculty. Why would he have said that? [...]
Oct 12, 2008 - 8:46 am 2. Pajamas Media » On Disagreeing With a Friend About Obama:[...] Read the entire post here. [...]
Oct 12, 2008 - 8:48 am 3. Jamie Irons:Roger,
When Obama first started to look (to me) like a serious candidate around the time of the California primary, I actually voted for him and even sent his campaign money. I believed that he really was something “different” (my idea of what that meant was quite inchoate and vague), but like most everyone else of a somewhat conservative temperament, I have since seen that illusion fade away.
At this point Mr. Obama frightens me. But I feel we are in the way of a kind of political tsunami, and for the time being, at least, conservatism is a spent force.
Could it be that Mr. Buckley recognizes this, and is, perhaps subconsciously, forearming himself to be in a position to satirically attack Mr. Obama when the latter has been elected and begins to fail? He will, after all, then be able to honestly claim he voted for the man.
Jamie Irons
Oct 12, 2008 - 9:07 am 4. fred:I am in the process of reading “Dreams From My Father.” I fail to see the things in it that Christopher Buckley finds so overflowing. Granted, I am no literary critic and am no stellar writer, but the alleged literary qualities in this perhaps ghost written autobiography are not really the point.
Obama’s policy preferences, his advisers, his voting record, and all of the things he is trying to bury and hide ARE really the point. And so one has to wonder if Christopher Buckley is curious about THOSE things?
I still do not see the brilliance that these other people see in Barack Obama. All I see is a man who, at 47 years of age, failed to do what I did at 32 years of age: leave revisionist Marxist thought. Plenty of people did what I did: dabble in it in our youth, and eventually find both the evidence of history and the myriad of problems with it intellectually one big stack of cognitive dissonance.
Oct 12, 2008 - 9:15 am 5. Daedalus:Face it, both Presidential candidates are unacceptable. I would love to have the option to vote NONE OF THE ABOVE, but the truth is that would be throwing away my vote. In addition, it would slow down the election and leave Bush and his incompetents in charge (removing North Korea’s terrorist status, and allowing more incompetent management of our financial crisis).
So what are the options….ask yourself one question….WHO AFTER 4 YEARS IN OFFICE WILL HAVE DONE LESS HARM TO THE REPUBLIC? The answer is clear….Obama and his Socialist agenda to disarm our military, and with his gigantic ego believes that he can talk the Iranians into giving up the Bomb, will do much more harm. The geriatric Senator from Arizona and his running mate, while equally incompetent (just in different areas), will more likely than not preserve the Republic, or at least slow down the policies of a far left congress.
The choice is not are we better off than we were 4 years ago, we are obviously not…….but who will do the least damage to our Republic………think about it and act appropriately.
Oct 12, 2008 - 9:22 am 6. ex-democrat:while undeniably better-educated, the intelligentisia is just not (necessarily) smarter than the rest of the polity. palin comes too close for their liking to proving that.
Oct 12, 2008 - 9:31 am 7. Peter Gee:obama, on the other hand, is a near-perfect false demonstration of the myth.
I think with endorsements like Buckley’s, the GOP is close to meltdown. McCain’s campaign have been utterly unable to articulate the very real opposition and warnings he gave over Fannie/Freddie and are too busy talking about things people seem to care less about ( Ayers, abortion etc).
In the face of the financial mega-crisis there really nothing McCain can do. But rather than go out snarling like attack dogs at Obama’s past, he and Palin might as well go out snarling and warning about the financial past of The Dems and Obama’s role in it and the future.
I know Obama is going to tax and spend etc. But I still really don;t know what McCain is going to do and it’s too late to tell me, I’ve been listening to Ayers and Rezko and whatever, but all that stuff should have come up months ago and have been followed by weeks of “1-2-3 what I am going to do in this crisis and how Obama and pals got us into it.”
As a deep republican I am in despair at the approaching Perfect Storm of a massive Congressional majority, a filibuster proof Senate and at least 4 years of leftism running total riot in the White House.
It’s obvious that the American poeople look to a sort of “new New Deal” as a bailout to what is frighteningly happening to them. Republicans could be pushing things like sunset clauses to legislation, profits return by direct cheue to all taxpayers, hammering at the huge weight Obama’s taxes and healthcare are going to add to their burdens and above all, swinging as hard at possible at the Dems behind the slush fund.
It’s all way too late.
Oct 12, 2008 - 9:31 am 8. vanderleun:Buckley’s statement strikes me as nothing less than false bravado. It seems bold but at bottom it risks nothing. In a way Buckley is like a latter-day Andrew Sullivan seeking to win both ways.
And like Sullivan he will win both ways. Why? Because in contemporary conservative circles there are never any real personal consequences to “going off the reservation.”
Friends such as Roger will criticize him “more in sorrow than in anger,” but he will still be welcome at dinner parties and other festivities. He will still be welcome in most meaningful conservative circles. He will not be thrust out into the howling winds as he would be if he had been long on the left and declared for McCain.
In short, his statement will be roundly discussed and disagreed with but life will go on much as it has for Chris lo these many decades. He risks nothing.
He also gains a lot from it from the left. Here he will be seen as a “convert” and as — to borrow a phrase which fits here — a useful idiot. His apostasy will be used to further the cause of the American left, it will be quoted widely — as it has been — as proof of the sanctity of Obama and the satanic nature of McCain. It will be bent out of shape and blown out of all proportion. But it and Chris will be used like a cheap tart in a park.
Better still, should Obama win Buckley will have a chip in that game and that social set as well. He could even count on invitations to inaugural balls and other high level ego-stroking Washington festivals and meetings. He could even hope to become a “house conservative” trotted out to show what a big, big tent the Obamatrons can pitch.
There will be no real consequences, only benefits. With this Chris outs himself as bi-political. As such he can get it both ways.
Oct 12, 2008 - 9:38 am 9. cfbleachers:In point of fact, Roger, I assume you do not disagree at all with what Christopher Buckley finds appealing in Sen. Obama, neither do I.
He displays a soft temperament, is at times inspiring with his delivery of ideas, soothing and calming in demeanor. Anyone who disputes this is unable to continue in the quest for principled disagreement.
We tend in this country, to overcompensate away the deficiencies of the last guy in office. Nixon was sort of brooding and had dark corners, Ford was affable and light. But Ford was portrayed as a clumsy oaf, so Carter was the nuclear engineer. But Carter was limp and cowardly, and Reagan was brave and heroic. But Reagan was sleepy, cowboyish and dim, Bush Sr. was erudite and gentler. But Bush, Sr. was a wimp married to his grandma, and Clinton was dashing and bold. But Clinton often ruled by polls and plebiscites and spent time chasing his tail literally and figuratively, (some of which he put on the payroll), so we closed the last chapter with the current President Bush, married to a sweet librarian and not leading by watching polls but rather, destroyed by them. Going it alone was a mantra, a badge of honor. Perhaps, most importantly, this President Bush, in a war of words…most often fought on a battlefield between his brain and his tongue.
So, the most eloquent speaker, who appeals to the “world court of opinion” and prodded on by a media in his pocket and not on his watch…will “cure” the ills that have befallen us.
What Christopher chooses to ignore, are all the signs of what we will have to cure in the next election. He glosses over them as if they are invisible. That is what surprises most, that is what deadens the heart and chips away at the soul.
Christopher is clearly brilliant enough to see and chooses instead to avert his gaze. The thuggery and mean-spririted henchmen who do the dirty work, keep clean the hands and the image of “first class” comportment. The abject slander heaped upon opponents, comes not from the mouth of the candidate…but from the bellowing rage of his campaign.
The crushing of dissent by teams of lawyers, calls to action and “in your face” aggression come not from written directive, but from the planning committee seeking to choke off relevant inquiry. Clearly, Christopher cannot be so mesmerized as to wash this grime away with a simple wave of the hand. He has fallen for the image and he has been distracted by the persona.
I love liberals, Roger…as I suspect you do. Many of them surround my daily life. But I despise leftists. A liberal is ruled by compassion, a leftist by deceit.
A liberal wants to try a different approach, a leftist wants to replace the system.
A liberal believes in fair play and honest disagreement, a leftist believes in hiding the truth and crushing dissent.
A liberal believes you may have a point, a leftist believes there are no points other than his.
A liberal says this country is great, but can be greater through dialogue. A leftist believes some other country is great and this country makes him puke.
A liberal wants equality for all persons regardless of gender, color or creed, a leftist wants class and racial warfare.
A liberal wants to take the poor and give them a chance to be rich, a leftist wants to take the rich and make them poor.
The liberals are gone, Roger. The leftists have consumed them. I love the liberals, I despise the leftists. What Christopher cannot see…is the lefitst magicians on stage, not with their trinkets hidden up their sleeves…but dangling from them in plain view…and daring us to shout out what we see….because, if we do…they will scream that we are racist and paranoid and not nuanced enough to appreciate the trick they are about to pull.
And if a brilliant and informed man like Christopher Buckley can be taken in by the sleight of hand, what possible chance does that leave for those who stand to vote the difference in this election? I’m afraid this magician’s show will make many of our fondest liberties disappear. For that, we will all pay the price of admission.
Oct 12, 2008 - 9:46 am 10. narciso:Isn’t the real point that in another era, Obama would have been the target of Buckley’s
Oct 12, 2008 - 9:48 am 11. Tina Trent:opprobrium, not support. One recalls that Buckley pere portrayed an almost exact copy of Obama; a white liberal Senator determined
to torpedo all covert operations as a foil to Blackford Oakes. An American academic and community organizer of Kenyan extraction; with a paucity of actual experience; and a line of questionable associations; leading back to “The Troubles” of the 60s. Comedy gold, in another era. Then again one recalls his soft pedalling of the conspiracy agitprop
“Bob Roberts” in the early 90s; his immature
spat with Tom Clancy, on a novel which turned out to be disturbingly prophetic. Why would one take a chance on someone who has been against everything conservatives have been for; in the last two generations, hope and change.
I followed a path quite similar to Obama’s, and what I found there was a coterie of people who celebrated the murder of policemen, empathized with the most unapologetically sadistic criminals they could find, and dedicated most of their energies and many tax dollars to implementing vast bureaucracies of racial accusation and bias.
But they also knew from whence their bread was buttered, and they directed their negative energies only at those who lacked the resources to fight back.
Christopher Buckley, I believe, has been sheltered from such realities by his position in society.
Oct 12, 2008 - 10:26 am 12. Sydney Weinberg:Mr. Gee is partially correct. The GOP pundit elite does appear to be in meltdown mode. However, I must caution that out here in flyover country, fiscal conservatives, cultural conservatives, defense first conservatives and other elements of our Grand Coalition remain eager to fight and engage the One.
Yes, we have a terribly flawed candidate in a career Senator who established his political credentials by attacking his own caucus. But in our coalition, as I suspect in our Democratic opposition, character counts. I have great faith in McCain’s character even if I lack faith in many of his political inclinations. Regarding Obama, how could any conservative familiar with this man’s own autobiographies trust in his character? Discussing Obama’s politics and policies? Why bother.
Unlike Mr. Gee, I do not believe the American people are looking for a “new New Deal.” I think most Americans are utterly confused at what is happening to our financial sector. I think most Americans are confused by the fluctuation in our gasoline prices. On the flip side, I do not think there is a working American alive who doesn’t understand the collapse in our housing market.
The American people will respond to a positive economic message centered in conservative principals. The fact that McCain cannot articulate those principals is symptomatic to the fact that he does not believe in them nor truly understand the character of fiscal laizze faire economics.
Consequently, it is the responsibility of the conservative punditry to pound away on our principals. The punditry must make the case for McCain over and over again – and he will follow.
So, why cannot conservatives market that case. Well, here is why being out here in fly over land makes a difference. I do not live in the Boston – DC corridor. Consequently, my universe does not revolve around investment bankers, hedge funds, other journalists, corporate attorneys and lobbyists although that is my business. If I had to rely solely on people working in these industries as my gauge and barometer for the future of the GOP, I would be very depressed too. Our financial sector is essentially insolvent. So all you folks in New York, Connecticut and DC are watching your world burn down. Kudlow, Lowry, Buckley, etc.
The punditry reaction to the GOP House vote against the Paulson Plan probably sealed the election for the Democrats. The US government is now moving to partially nationalize the Banks. Ugh, partial nationalization is there anything worse for a Republican – management stays in place and exercises control of the enterprise while taxpayers support existing managers efforts as unwitting and unrepresented minority shareholders. Are you kidding me! Heck, I will take that deal! I will happily sell 49% of my business to the taxpayers! Maybe I should hire a lobbyist.
Bush is done. His political capital spent. Paulson is now in charge. I would ask that one pundit explain to me how a “Republican” rises to the top of Goldman Sachs an organization that contributes 75% to Democrats and 25% to Republicans and maintains a firm grounding in any of the principals that define our Grand Coalition. (As an aside every Republican should visit http://www.opensecrets.org and review the largest political contributors to the two respective parties over the past 10 years and in this election cycle)
The proper reaction to any contagion is to isolate it – quarantine it. Let it die out and then start again with lessons learned. There is nothing in the current policy response to the financial crisis that employs this principal.
Corporate finance as exercised in New York is very important to our economy. Does anyone seriously believe at this point that the corporate finance industry in New York can solve this problem – heck they are fighting for their very survival.
They are terminally ill and must be quarantined before they take the rest of us down with them. We do need a “new New Deal” better than the old deal. The US Government should re-open the Bank of the United States and provide capital to real business with real balance sheets. Instead we are pumping cash into a broken industry that will use that cash to cover their ass – to save their privileges and honorariums – and subsidize their continued existence at my expense.
Oct 12, 2008 - 10:28 am 13. Marc Malone:Daedalus – Nice post. I see things the same way. I actually am leery of a McCain administration, because his best intentions tend to lead to bad things, but that’ll be nothing compared to the worst intentions of Obama.
For me, a vote for McCain is a way to tread water until such time as some of these young bucks of the Party come into their own. I think Rep. Kantor is gonna really BE something. Gov. Jindal and Gov. Palin are comers, too. Many others,too, but we have to await their maturation.
Oct 12, 2008 - 10:30 am 14. Sissy Willis:vanderleun: I don’t know nothin’ ’bout “meaningful conservative circles,” but I, for one, won’t be soon forgiving or forgetting the cravenness of young Buck and his fellow “Northeast Corridor Conservatives.”
Oct 12, 2008 - 10:44 am 15. Alo Kievalar:This is the first election I’ve ever watched and studied with any interest. Not that I’m going to vote…I never have and I doubt I ever will, although WHY I feel this way is not relevant here.
I hope McCain wins, but not because I think he’d make a better president than Obama, In so many categories, he clearly wouldn’t.
Rather, I’m rootin’ for McCain because if he doesn’t win, I fear what will happen in and to this country.
On this and other websites, the ferocity and viciousness of McCain supporters is something astonishing to behold. There is something almost sub-human and unnatural about it. It is totally appalling and frightening.
I go away feeling like I’ve been visiting a den of enraged vipers bent on total mayhem and destruction. Forget rationality or facts, let alone decency and decorum.
Think I’m exaggerating? Just read the comments section on any website dealing with this subject.
As I’ve said before, I don’t care who wins because it doesn’t matter who wins. Within a month or two of assuming office, our president will be embroiled in the “ Palestine ” issue, Iran , Iraq and the whole mess we are confronted with internationally. Either one will do pretty much what the other would have done. It’s inevitable. Modern events are larger than and beyond the power of any president or head of state. (Just look at the financial crash: all heads of state, including ours are basically walking around in a daze).
But being as impartial and uninterested as possible, I don’t see how anyone can possibly compare the two candidates. Obama clearly is in a category light-years ahead of and above McCain and Co.
There are so many examples of this.
Take the 2nd debate.
Poor McCain. What was he doing skulking and prowling behind Obama while Obama was speaking? He looked like a waiter walking around serving drinks to the guests. Give him a tray and a white napkin draped around his wrist and he would have made an excellent maitre d’. What misguided soul advised him to do this? It was pathetic and embarrassing. As I watched the debate in a public establishment, people were actually laughing at McCain and his antics.
Then take Palin. Did you see the interview she had with Karzai recently? You know, the leader of Afghanistan ?
Here was this Moslem head of state covered from head to toe in traditional garb and here was this what looked like a spoiled teenager wearing a tight skirt exposing her knees, said knees almost touching the nose of Karzai. She looked like a job candidate at an interview where showing up half-nude was a requirement for job consideration.
No class. No class at all from either McCain or Palin.
Still, I hope they win. They won’t, but I hope they do. If they don’t, I can see this country being torn asunder from within.
Oct 12, 2008 - 10:53 am 16. Sherman Halstead:Closing Hymn “. . . Faith of our Fathers, Living Still,
We Will Be True to Thee ‘Til Death”
Benediction “Go in Peace Now to Love & Serve the Lord”
“May the Peace of the Lord Be With You Also.”
“I thought Mass would never end this morning. I wish I’d never promised Dad I’d always make it to Mass every Sunday I was in town. And why is it always 11:00 AM service. Half the day’s gone by the time we’re done.”
“We’ll you’re never up early enough for an earlier service and you’ll never go to Saturday evenings. ‘Saturday evenings are for Saturday people and Saturday places and Saturday fun’ – Right? It’s drinks, or dinner parties, or cocktail parties, or openings, or you know.”
“I know, I know. But I couldn’t, I wouldn’t trade it. You know last night was peculiar, such a mixed, independent minded group of people, across the sprectrum philosophically, culturally and politically, but all first rate, best educations, good families, inquisitive minds, accomplished in the world. Not one would boost for McCain, everyone – even the closet bigots. Everyone who would speak up was for Obama, not merely for him, but swept up by him, as if they were joining one of their own, re-joining their flock.”
“Yes, I wonder what your Dad might have thought about that . . .
Dear, I was wondering something else, apropos of nothing really. In the hymn, what does the final line “we will be true to thee ’til death” really mean, physically and metaphysically?”
“Well, I never reflected on it. These hymns become part of the background noise of your life; you rarely contemplate their actual meaning. I suppose it means you follow closely in your father’s path until he dies.”
ANGELUS RINGS FROM BELFRY
Oct 12, 2008 - 10:54 am 17. Sandra M:When I googled Christopher Buckley Obama I found the Tina Brown dailybeast site but also a mention of child support? Was Buckley in a divorce and/or midlife crisis? I went back and checked and found that New York Magazine had written of Buckley’s ex-mistress (his publicist at Random House) and her 8 year-old son, fathered by Chris Buckley. The illegitimate son is specifically disowned in Buckley pere’s will.
The press would have gone to town on the Buckley, Jr. scandal. but now that he has joined with the Obamacists not so much.
After extolling Obama’s literary skill, Buckley is faced with Jack Cashill’s very detailed and persuasive comparisons between Dreams of My Father and Ayer’s memoir,i.e similar metaphors, an identical score on the Rudolph Flesch readership meter. Same number of words per sentence. Obama had famously frozen despite a large advance and then another advance. By the time of his second book, he could afford ghostwriting help and an editor.
So, Buckley has not had a good week. Buckley, to me has always had a souffle-like quality in his lightweight writing. Now, the souffle has fallen.
Buckley will now be invited to the best Ivy league parties where he can scorn a lady who, when asked, on either cnbc or bloomberg, I forget which (aired this past week) what he thought of Sarah Palin, he claimed to be besotted. What a quick turnaround. I think that tempermentally, Buckley has much in common with Obama.
Oct 12, 2008 - 10:58 am 18. Ditto:Thank you cfbleachers. I have been trying to articulate, even to myself, for so long what is wrong with this picture, and you’ve hit the nail squarely on the head.
My fiance and I are in agreement that, should the leftists win the day, we shall soon learn if our Constitution is strong enough to withstand the onslaught that will emerge from both the legislative and the Executive branches. We fervently pray no Justices need replacing in the near future.
Oct 12, 2008 - 10:58 am 19. Faze:I’m a professional ghostwriter, and I’m here to tell you that it’s all ghostwritten. No public figure writes his or her own books. People who succeed in politics, show business, or sports don’t have the patience to read a whole book, much less to write one. They don’t have the sitzfleisch. Becoming a writer takes time, practice, solitude and inborn aptitude. This suite of skills is incompatible with the extroversion and narcissism required for success in politics and show business. The only celebrity autobiography I’ve ever read that I believed was actually written by its putative author was the autobiography of Chuck Berry, which, despite many clever turns of phrase, was full of rookie errors and impossible to finish, even for a fan, such as myself. In short, then, we should accept it as a given that Mr. Obama did not write his memoirs himself. Therefore we should not judge him by his prose style, but by the content of the prose he must have approved before it went to press (unless, of course, Mr. Obama is like the famous basketball player, who, when confronted with a passage from his recently published autobiography at a press conference, replied, “I can’t comment about that. I never read it.”)
Oct 12, 2008 - 12:07 pm 20. ex-democrat:thankyou for not voting Alo Kievalar, yours is amongst the most superficial perspectives i’ve yet read.
Oct 12, 2008 - 12:20 pm 21. Marc Malone:Alo Kievalar – If you really believe Obama’s a danger, and you hope that McCain will win, then go vote, dang it!
Regarding the 2nd debate, McCain was wandering around, because the chair was too tall for him to sit in. It was also cold as heck in the auditorium, so he had to walk around to keep his old war wounds from aching so badly. He couldn’t just stand still.
Regarding Palin’s dress, she wore what she always does. She’s in her own country. It’s appropriate attire for any business meeting. Why did not Karzai wear western clothing? Why do you think that Palin should have worn something else and not Karzai? This is a red herring.
Oct 12, 2008 - 12:28 pm 22. DavidN:I must say I disagree profoundly with the idea that Obama couldn’t have written his book “Dreams from My Father”. There are numerous examples of people who’ve written just one book, which is considered a classic, whether they be memoirs, autobiographies, or other types of book. Neither William T. Sherman or Ulysses S. Grant ever wrote anything other than orders and letters to people, but their autobiographies are justly famous, regarded as classics of their sub-genre, and bestsellers of the Library of America’s line of American classical literature. Harper Lee only wrote one novel, but To Kill a Mockingbird is considered a classic. Ditto Margaret Mitchell and Gone with the Wind. T.E.Lawrence wrote two books (and translated the Odyssey to English) but Seven Pillars of Wisdom is one of the literary giants of the era. Heck, probably the greatest Spanish writer of all time, Cervantes, only wrote Don Quixote, as far as we know. Shall I go on?
The thing about Dreams is what it says, what it speaks about, and what it doesn’t. The edition I have (published after he made his speech to the DNC in 2004) has a forward written by him on publication, but is apparently unedited. The book isn’t a sophisticated memoir of a Hawaiian upbringing with an Indonesian interlude, it’s a life’s progress towards the fulfilling moment of the author’s life: the time when he visited Kenya and met with the African half of his family. The weird thing about the book is the lack of expected emotions that the author exhibits. The author is obsessed with racism, in all of its forms, but he’s strangely detached from pretty much everything else. His father abandons him at age 2, and returns only once to meet his American son before dying in a car accident when young Obama was 21. I can speak from personal experience here (my dad died when I was a little less than 4, also in a car accident). When your father leaves you at an early age, you feel (among other things) some anger at him for doing so. Young Obama (remember that his father was named Barack Obama too) doesn’t exhibit any of that, recounting his father’s abandonment of him with considerable detachment. *Everything* about the book is detached, except for his anger about racism, and oddly even that is seemingly baseless, as the young Obama wanders through America in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, outraged by things he reads in the newspapers, but never (apparently) experiencing much racism himself.
I suppose a reader, going over what’s above, would suggest that this is a sign the book *was* ghostwritten. I have another suggestion. I think this is the man’s personality. He’s detached, he observes, he doesn’t get emotionally engaged. He’s cool, he’s (he thinks) objective, he’s intelligent, he’s analytical. When he’s on Leno or someplace, where everything is scripted but seemingly spontaneous, he’s calm, he’s engaging, he’s mildly self-disparaging in a humorous fashion, he’s very charming. I think this explains, in a fairly comprehensive way, his more outrageous comments and associations, over the years. He was casual-acquaintance-level associated (according to him, anyway) with this Ayers fellow, and Rezko. I bet if you could hypnotize Obama you’d find that he thinks *he* used *them* and then discarded them when they weren’t useful any more. He makes disparaging remarks about voters in the country, clinging to their guns and their religion, and then goes to church every Sunday, supremely indifferent to the fact that he, at least apparently, was clinging to his religion too. He was saying what needed to be said to the liberals in Frisco, and didn’t expect what he said to be recorded and played for people in rural America.
So I don’t think anyone else wrote Obama’s book. Frankly, I am not enjoying the book that much, and am at times really annoyed by it. His father abandoned him, while his mother and her parents raised him, sent him to school, etc. He acknowledges in his new forward that the book is obsessed with his father, and almost ignores his mother, in spite of this, and it’s a relevant observation. One thing he almost doesn’t acknowledge, though, it the subject of racial identity. His mother was white, father black, and that makes him black. It’s as if his mother and her parents were strangers who took him in as a foundling, and his father was the source of all of his racial heritage. I find this weird, to say the least, and at least a bit disturbing.
Oct 12, 2008 - 12:34 pm 23. F.N.:I started out life as a political independent. I even was one of those who voted for Ross Perot in the first election in which I voted. I have since voted Republican because I found myself in the situation where the Republican party is the only party that makes sense part of the time and on social issues it is the only party that makes sense at all.
I was slow to warm to Bush when the media was first touting him as the inevitable candidate and needless to say I was slow to warm to McCain. I was a Fred Thompson supporter because he was one of very few candidates speaking to the founding principles I have come to hold dear and Obama is the antithesis of those founding principles as has the whole Democrat party become. I see the GOP as the only even though flawed hope.
I come from a long line of Coal mining Democrats and I can not imagine ever voting for one outside of harmless local offices. To date I have only voted for one Democrat and it was for Agricultural Commisioner. It is because I don’t trust them. I’ve spent time with their books, I’ve read their radicalism, and seen their socialist ideas and voting records. I don’t believe in their ideas of big government anymore than I believe in network marketing as a good business model.
It is only a good business model to keep them in power.
The ideas of individual sovereignty and freedom and belief in the strength and idealism of America seems lost on the modern Democrat party. They make it clear they see no limits to the reach of government. They see their priorities in social engineering people to like disgusting practices and behaviors like abortion, like homosexuality, like misantrophic environmentalism. They see the America dream as life long dependence and cradle to grave parental like government largess and that is something I can not accept or vote for.
This country was not founded with the battle cry “Give me Liberty or Give me a Government Check!”. This country was founded a the domain of free men who by grace of God and hard work could self determine their destiny.
Barack Obama is the anthesis to all this country was founded on. He is an example of one of the most liberal individuals ever to run for office in this country on both fiscal and social regards.
He has plans for huge new government programs, he supports the getting rid of secret ballots in unionizing, he supports a capital gains tax increase on the corporations and businesses that are needed now more than ever to generate jobs. Barack Obama also has alleigiance to organizations like the ACLU which continues its efforts to cleanse the public square of religious expression. He is on the side of radical judges who ruled in Massachussetts, California and now Connecticut to allow for gay marriage. He has supported some of the most radical sex education programs and pro-abortion platforms. Barack Obama is at any analysis of his history or record a liberal.
Any conservative who does not see this is an idiot. I always make my analysis of who I support by their record and never by what they say. Obama is trying to pretend he is not what he is. Christopher Buckley either has never been a conservative or he is deluded because an honest conservative fiscal or social or both could never support Barack Obama.
Oct 12, 2008 - 12:44 pm 24. ReleaseTheHounds:I think C. Buckley is giving into his basic prejudices. B. Obama is Ivy Educated (even Harvard Law!); Sarah Palin is from Podunk U. Obama can give a speech! McCain is about on par with W. B. Obama seems like he has a calm and cool temperament; we all know McCain can be hot.
W.F. Buckley would look through all of this and question: What did he do at Columbia? We don’t know. How did he get in to Harvard Law? Good question! What’s behind those wonderful speeches? An empty suit. What has that empty suit done in his 3+ years in the Senate, few years in the Illinois State Senate (voted “present” how many times?), accomplished WHAT as a community organizer (and what the heck does that position mean)???
Maybe C. Buckley just craves being on the popular side for once. Maybe he’ll be invited to those neat cocktail parties… maybe Charley Rose will want to interview him and discuss his next book… Maybe the hoi paloi in Hollywierd will put him on their cellphone dial-up.
After all, these are all very important reasons to give up any pretense to values and principles.
Oct 12, 2008 - 12:44 pm 25. R:He and Ron Regan Jr make me glad I don’t have kids.
Oct 12, 2008 - 12:55 pm 26. Snorri Godhi:Off the top of my head, here is a list of people I’d like to be governed by, in decreasing order, and based on personal experience:
Oct 12, 2008 - 1:01 pm 27. Harlan:1. a random selection from an Alaskan or Albertan telephone directory;
2. a random selection from a Dutch telephone directory;
3. a random selection from the Boston telephone directory;
4. a random selection of Italian fascists and/or Italian communists;
5. a random selection from the Ivy League.
What would such an endorsement be worth to the Obama campaign in dollars? Ten million? Twenty? Fifty?
That’s chump change to the George Soros’ of the world, and could be a portfolio-saving investment.
Given the lack of ethics that I’ve seen coming from the left side of the equation, I don’t think that a possible bribe would be out of the question.
Oct 12, 2008 - 1:28 pm 28. Brian in Idaho via Detroit:Victor David Hanson has written an excellent article articulating that wisdom/intelligence are not the property of the Ivy league. Buckley has shown that his highest allegiance is to the intelligentsia and not to conservative principals. I am amused by the visceral distaste that Palin stirs in the country club Republicans. It would seem our betters are offended by a citizen legislator. I see weaknesses in her as a candidate, as I also see gaping holes in the character and positions posited by the Obama camp. A fair reading of the situation would show a populist conservative against an elitist socialist. My choice is easy.
Oct 12, 2008 - 1:33 pm 29. ehunter:Excuse me…literary talent..? where? Who can read page after page of Oprah style confessional
prose without wincing? Only another egomaniac like Obama. Self engrossment is the national disease, the chief trait of the age, thats why
Obama is getting away with this con game. We WANT him to get away with it. Why? So that we can get away with it too.
Remember every con game works because the victim thinks he is the one getting away with something.
Oct 12, 2008 - 1:45 pm 30. Winston:Well then he is no conservative
Oct 12, 2008 - 1:48 pm 31. Aaron:Christopher Buckley’s endorsement was most likely one part cowardice, and one part rationalization.
Christopher Buckley’s cowardly endorsement of Obama is a means to avoid peer pressure. Many of Buckley’s peers are most likely intellectual liberals who have continually mocked John McCain and his supporters since Sarah Palin was selected. Consequently, rather than bear the “shame and stigma” of supporting a candidate who many of his “intellectual” friends mock for having chosen an “imbecile” as a running mate, Christopher Buckley succumbed to this peer pressure and cowardice and endorsed Obama.
Additionally, Christopher Buckley is endorsing Obama as a means to rationalize supporting something that he feels is a foregone conclusion. In his endorsement that he states “[i]f Obama raises taxes and throws up tariff walls and opens the coffers of the DNC to bribe-money from the special interest groups against whom he has (somewhat disingenuously) railed during the campaign trail, then he will almost certainly reap a whirlwind that will make Katrina look like a balmy summer zephyr”. Yet he endorsed him nonetheless. He rationalizes this support by saying “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 out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves”. Hence, Buckley is not endorsing Obama, but is instead endorsing the hope that Obama will govern like McCain (i.e., he is rationalizing his support for the inevitable outcome he dreads).
Oct 12, 2008 - 1:54 pm 32. mtraven:It’s pretty simple: Buckley is smart enough to jump off a sinking ship while there is still time to avoid being sucked into the gigantic sucking vortex of fail. Roger is not, so each post he writes serves only as an additiona weight, pulling his reputation as an intellectual further down into the drowning depths.
Oct 12, 2008 - 2:07 pm 33. Tom H:It seems all me life I have followed Bill Buckley, not so much Christopher – but endorsing the O goes against EVERYTHING that I ever understood WFB to represent – SUBSTANCE OVER STYLE. Even in the blog, nothing is said except the O is smooth, intelligent , and like the White witch in CS Lewis – the voice enchants – very sorry to hear that has happened to C. How about an analysis of what would Bill do?
Oct 12, 2008 - 2:09 pm 34. CBDenver:I tried to read through Buckley’s article explaining why he supported Obama. Couldn’t stomach all the fluffy repartee. Buckley sounds like a very unserious person who is enamoured of the superficial things of life — dinner parties with glitting people, catty gossip, “dishy” broads, vapid books, etc. Why should anyone care what a middle-aged playboy thinks about anything?
Oct 12, 2008 - 2:15 pm 35. Lynn:I just listened to Obama….again. I still don’t know what the hell he is talking about. The only thing I got out of it for sure is he will raise taxes on anyone making $250 thousand. Everything else was beyond stupid. The ONE says absolutely nothing!!! It’s driving me crazy. (Gnashing of teeth here is appropriate) I’m a Democrat and frankly I don’t “get it”! I think the Dems have lost their minds. It’s sooooo embarrassing.
Oct 12, 2008 - 2:28 pm 36. Charles:This election has nothing to do with socialism, though if you have an interest in the topic you might examine with care the recent work of Secretary Paulson (this is a joke).
As for Palin, shoe is not qualified to teach first grade, let alone serve as VP or president. Careful research into the facts of her service as mayor and governor leave no doubt whatsoever that she is manifestly unfit for office.
Perhaps these words will jog your memory: Pythons, witches, doing God’s will, banning books, abuse of power, rape kits, dinosaurs, age of the earth, global warming, creationism in public school, town left in debt, who built her house, 316 days, per diem, income taxes, Russia is visible, palling around with terrorists.
Senator McCain has insulted the American people in ways that make Quayle look like a tower of intellect.
Government by and for the deluded is not a reasonable response now or ever.
Oct 12, 2008 - 3:38 pm 37. vb:What kind of first class intellect could fall for the “theology” of Cone and Wright? David N nailed Obama when he talked about the absence of emotion. That first class temperment is not that of a man of character; it is a sign of a serious disconnect between a facile mind and life experience. A wise man would have realized that his church preached a soul-killing philosophy that could never help the blacks he wants to save. A man of character would have stood up for something at least once in his life. Obama has been running away from himself for much of his life, unable to face his own limitations. I worry about what will happen should the full weight of the American presidency fall on his shoulders.
Oct 12, 2008 - 3:56 pm 38. TeamPlayer:You mean that first class intellect that gets blessed by a witch hunter (Palin)? VB, I’m all for attacking each candidate, but you can’t condemn one person for listening to crazy religous people and then give your gal a pass. It’s intellectual dishonesty and frankly there are more obvious issues.
Oct 12, 2008 - 5:10 pm 39. cfbleachers:Thank you cfbleachers. I have been trying to articulate, even to myself, for so long what is wrong with this picture, and you’ve hit the nail squarely on the head.
My fiance and I are in agreement that, should the leftists win the day, we shall soon learn if our Constitution is strong enough to withstand the onslaught that will emerge from both the legislative and the Executive branches. We fervently pray no Justices need replacing in the near future.
You are quite welcome, Ditto. You know, I wonder from time to time, why in the world I comment in response to these articles. Does anyone really care what I think? Do the authors even have the time, the interest or the inclination to read my thoughts? Do they care, or is it impossible for them to meet their next deadline on their workaday issues, to evaluate these “add on thoughts” to theirs?
Who then, would be my audience…or would my words simply be hurled into hyperspace, just so much clutter, lost in the glut? And then you come along or Fred or some other nice poster, a commenter of substance, bearing kind words about one of my comments…and you can’t know how much that makes my day, in a fairly substantial way. So, thank you…for taking the time to write about my comments. I do read them, and I appreciate them…and the rest of what you write as well.
As for your concerns and that of your fiance…I completely understand the feeling. I currently feel as if I am a passenger on a plane who has been told to remain calm. The plane is turning…and I don’t recognize the terrain beneath me.
I hope the pilot is capable and honorable and filled with good intent. But I look up the aisle at Ayers and Dorhn, Jeremiah Wright and Michael Klonsky, Sam Graham-Felsen and Khalid al Mansour. I see Tony Rezco and Rashid Khalidi. I see Samantha Power and Robert Malley. I see ACORN thugs and Frank Marshall Davis. I see Nation of Islam staffers and Michael Pfleger. I see Carl Davidson and the New Party.
I see Sarah Bernhardt asking for Sarah Palin to be gang raped in a racially tinged rage. I see my countrymen being accused of being mean, slothful and “clinging” to their religion. I am told I need to sacrifice, that there needs to be “justice”…and I feel I’m about to be shown just how it will come to pass.
I am being told that the passengers will be allowed to speak, if there words fall into a “fairness” doctrine code of approved comments.
I am being told that I have no access to the pamphlets about the plane, they are “restricted” from my view…and when another passenger, Stanley asked to see them, he was told the same by the public library that holds them. In fact, there is precious little in the way of information about this flight. But I’m told that it will change everything. I wonder what that means, and I still don’t recognize the terrain beneath me.
The TV’s drop down and I am fed all happy news, that there is much to hope for in the future. But nobody answers any of the questions I have…in fact, they make a concerted effort to not answer them. And some smarmy comedian goes on about what a horrible country we are and slanders my country and my countrymen repeatedly. And I don’t recognize the terrain beneath me.
Who are these people who hate my countrymen so…and slander them and my country and Israel with impunity? They seem giddy with delight, as they spew venom on my screen. And I do not recognize the terrain beneath me.
I am told that all those passengers I see ahead of me…sons of Alinsky and Karl Marx are a “distraction” and that I am unduly paranoid for noticing them. I notice the sons of Cone and Louis Farrakhan, and I am told that I am a racist for noticing them. I notice the sons of Arafat and Edward Said, and I am told that I’m a bigot for noticing them. And I do not recognize the terrain beneath me.
I am told to stay calm and avert my gaze. To not “give in” to my racist, bigoted, small minded paranoia. To not cling to my religion…to let it go, because paradise will come to me through hope and change. This…is the change I have been waiting for, or so I’m told.
And I turn to my loved ones and say…May God keep you safe and warm in His embrace, and on any day He doesn’t…I will try. Strap yourself in…because the plane has turned…and I don’t recognize the terrain beneath me.
Oct 12, 2008 - 5:34 pm 40. 888:All of the above becomes moot if Obama doesn’t end the lawsuit against him in Berg vs. Obama. Watch the October Surprise o on: http://citizenwells.wordpress.com/2008/10/11/philip-j-berg-lawsuit-video-jeff-schreiber-berg-interview-youtube-video-molotov-mitchell-interview-obama-indonesian-obama-motion-to-dismiss-us-constitution-judge-surrick-ruling-philip-j-berg-e/
Oct 12, 2008 - 5:35 pm 41. Jeb:I love the smell of desperation on the right wing blogs.
Oct 12, 2008 - 5:37 pm 42. aloysiusmiller:Matther 24:24 For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect.
Oct 12, 2008 - 5:37 pm 43. Marc Malone:Charles – Thanks for joining us… troll. You bought into everything the MSM pushed as a meme. Good for you. Now go away, and let the adults talk.
Oct 12, 2008 - 5:44 pm 44. david foster:There seem to be a lot of people who are far more concerned about marketing their own (real or imagined) brilliance than about the fate of the country. To people whose very identity is tied up with their Ivy League degrees and their mastery of a certain form of verbiage, someone like Sarah Palin is a tremendous threat.
Oct 12, 2008 - 5:44 pm 45. Ed Graef:Those who leave us in this times of darkness should not be so easily be forgiven. Any conservative that votes for BO is not a Conservative, they are doing simply doing what is cool and en vogue.
If you are a professional pundit, you can’t have it both ways–be respected by the Conservatives and accepted by the left. They play hardball and are kicking our asses on every level this election. Why do we have to apologize for being conservatives and the liberal get a free pass to spit on us?
I am sooooo disappointed in the GOP. Conservatives needs to grow a sac.
Buckley is a traitor.
Oct 12, 2008 - 5:45 pm 46. TeamPlayer:Palin is a threat because she’s an idiot. Would you want a moron operating on you or designing your bridges? Why don’t you go with the “you betcha” cnadidate for engineers, doctors, lawyers, CEOs, etc. Keep on buying the crap that intellect is the biggest threat to this country.
Oct 12, 2008 - 5:53 pm 47. david levavi:If Tom Wolfe came out publicly for Barack Obama I’d fall out of my chair. Wolfe’s novels don’t rate in NYT “best-of-the-past-twenty-five-years ” surveys but Wolfe a more talented and far less pretentious writer than those whose novels do.
Wofe’s, The Right Stuff defined the character of American aviators like John McCain. Wolfe’s, Bonfire of the Vanities is the single work of fiction that could have predicted the success in American politics of a Barack Obama.
Christopher Buckley? Who’s he? And why should anybody but his homeboys at The National Review care what he thinks?
Victor Davis Hanson suggests that Christopher Buckley’s very public change of heart is craven. Not implausible. I liked WFB. More for his spine and spirit than for his famous intellect. This clever comic who bills himself a satirist is one acorn who fell far from the tree.
Oct 12, 2008 - 6:04 pm 48. TeamPlayer:Ed, it’s party first, not country first, huh? Please explain how a $300 billion direct mortgage buy-back is a core conservative policy.
Oct 12, 2008 - 6:13 pm 49. david foster:TP…an assertion is not an argument.
“Intellect” can be demonstrated in many ways. Your objection to “you betcha” is very reminiscent of the attitudes of the old English aristocracy to successful people who did not have the expected accent.
Oct 12, 2008 - 6:14 pm 50. Broadsword:No one who sat in an atmosphere such as the not so revered Wright’s church and expects us to believe he didn’t hear anything particularly quite not so nice has the temperment of a malevolent Jacobin and the intellect of a viper.
Oct 12, 2008 - 6:19 pm 51. TeamPlayer:David Foster you’re not being objective. Their intelligence without refinement and then there’s plain stupid…like advocating domestic driling as they key to energy independence. Her Couric interviews, 5 college-hop, complete lack of intellectual curiousity and frequent use of glittering generalities expose her stupidity. Even thoughtful conservatives have pointed out how dumb she is. Please please don’t let that be the backbone of your argument. I like McCain2000 and there was real merit to having a President McCain. I did think he would advocate fiscally conservative policies. The Palin pick is irresponsible, pandering and cynical. It’s bad on so many levels and his latest spasm of direct mortgage buyouts is such a grand bit of philosophical treason it makes you wonder who is in charge over there.
Oct 12, 2008 - 6:27 pm 52. linda:I can’t believe he did this publicly. You can vote for anyone you want but you don’t have to write an article about it especially when you have such an ancestry.
Oct 12, 2008 - 6:36 pm 53. Assistant Village Idiot:Few know who this guy is, but now they do. Maybe that was the point of the “coming out”. Whatever, it was low. He didn’t even give his NR friends a heads up and that is just asshatery time.
People have compared him to Ron Reagan and that is unfair especially when it comes to smarts but how smart was it really to write a public column. Not very, and that’s what links him to the odious Ron Reagan Jr.
Shame on you Mr. Buckley.
Buckley is responding to class myths rather than reason. He believes Obama is a first class intellect and first class writer. He has slender evidence for both those propositions. What he has are cultural cues.
Oct 12, 2008 - 6:41 pm 54. Peter M.:He’s a Buckley. What did you expect?
Bill Buckley did more to retard the intellectual development of the conservative movement than any other person of the last 50 years.
Oct 12, 2008 - 6:46 pm 55. ThomasD:First class temperament, first class intellect…
Class, class, class…
Status quo; heavy on the status.
If Chris Buckley is conservative count me out.
Oct 12, 2008 - 6:50 pm 56. joe forshaw:PLEASE!!! BHO was the President of the law review, not the editor. Big difference – president is elected. Not there because of grades or writing.
Oct 12, 2008 - 6:51 pm 57. Tim:I can’t help but wonder if C. Buckley isn’t a bit guilty of paternal envy. Frankly, it wouldn’t be all that out of place: for example, while I’ve read quite a lot of his father’s work — both commentary, non-fiction book, and fiction — I’m familiar with ‘en fil’ only by reputation. Might this be Christopher’s declaration of independence.
Oct 12, 2008 - 6:56 pm 58. mrkwong:You note:
“But WFB was no populist. He was, rather, opposed to the liberal consensus, that smug covenant of elites that presumed to define the perquisites of virtue for the rest of us. In the famous editorial with which he opened the first issue of National Review, Bill noted that the magazine was ‘out of place, in the sense that the United Nations and the League of Women Voters and the New York Times and Henry Steele Commager are in place.’ No one on the contemporary political scene is more ‘in place’ than Barack Obama…”
Might not C. Buckley, in opposition to his father’s deserved, but now-useless, reputation, be “opposed to the conservative consensus, that smug covenant of elites that presume(s) to define the perquisites of virtue for the rest of us?..”
I fear so.
TeamPlayer – I have to say I disagree with everything you’ve said. Please give me an example of Palin’s “complete lack of intellectual curiosity.” You refer to this with such certainty, I’d like to know to what you’re referring.
Frankly, Brooks’ nonsense about Obama spewing on about Niebuhr looks pathetic when you consider what Palin’s been doing to the power-corrupted GOP in Alaska. You have there a clear illustration of theory versus practice.
The presidency is all about understanding the uses and limits of power, and I’d much rather have someone with a practical, Lincolnesque understanding of this than a theoretical, maybe Wilsonian approach.
Oct 12, 2008 - 6:58 pm 59. Deagle:Wow…am taken aback by your comments Jamie Irons. I have read many of your comments and always thought of you as a centrist but when you describe your background and your former support of Obama, I have to question my reading ability (and of course your ability to reason – supporting Obama at any point means that he was able to convince you of his candidacy – scary in itself). I am beginning to think that politicians from Chicago are actually electable!
You had to have totally thrown out your reasoning to be able to support Obama at any point in his career. Oh well, I will take that into consideration when reading your next comments.
The bright spot is that you have finally realized that you were taken in…too bad that way too many will not realize it until it is too late.
Oct 12, 2008 - 6:58 pm 60. tim maguire:It doesn’t sadden me when I disagree with close friends. In fact, it would sadden me (and make me question myself) if I never did. That said, there are limits. I lose respect for people when they say they will vote for Obama.
As others have pointed out here, there is no conservative choice on the ballot. The question then becomes, who will do the least damage? With an economic disaster unfolding and a Democratic congress itching to take over the economy, only a fool would say Obama is the less dangerous choice.
And only fools have.
Oct 12, 2008 - 6:59 pm 61. Barry Dauphin:Some writers fall in love with writers. It’s not only Christopher Buckley but folks like David Brooks as well (who got tingly when Obama talked with him about Niebuhr). Many of the elite punditry and public quasi-intellectuals value verbal expressive abilities above all else. Actually there are many faces and forms of intelligence. I’m not sure Obama could have made it through flight school as McCain did. And we have no idea what Obama math abilities are (which might be important to know right about now).
Christopher Buckley is a very witty writer and a good satirist, but he is pretty much a lightweight, especially compared to his father. It would be very tough for any boy with writing talent to grow up in WFB’s shadow. To me Christopher has focused more on having fun than on being important or serious. The folks at NRO care about what he says simply because of who his father was.
Oct 12, 2008 - 7:05 pm 62. Deagle:Dang Charles…
I would have sworn you were talking about Obama until you cleared it up there – against anybody except Obama…heh.
Yes, it really IS about Socialism and your man is going to give it his best! We out in the hinterland will try to prevent it. It does seem that all parties are hell bent on taking us there though…
Oct 12, 2008 - 7:06 pm 63. MarkJ:Palin is a threat because she’s an idiot. Would you want a moron operating on you or designing your bridges? Why don’t you go with the “you betcha” cnadidate for engineers, doctors, lawyers, CEOs, etc. Keep on buying the crap that intellect is the biggest threat to this country.
TeamPlayer: how long have you been orbiting Neptune? Since you’re so big on “intelligence,” how about all those supposedly smart Donks like Frank, Dodd, Schumer, et. al. who managed to bring on the biggest financial crisis in our nation’s history? Yeah, they were real Super Geniuses, weren’t they? Don’t even try to argue about this: it’s all on video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3p1Wc2NFa3w&feature=related
Now, let’s talk about YOUR “intellectual curiosity,” shall we?
Oct 12, 2008 - 7:11 pm 64. Mrs. Jackson:Harumpf. The Buckley endorsement seems to be a meeting of elite minds…
Mr. Buckley wrote this:
“Dear Pup once said to me sighfully after a right-winger who fancied himself a WFB protégé had said something transcendently and provocatively cretinous, “You know, I’ve spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks.”
And Sen. Obama said this:
“…And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations..”
Oct 12, 2008 - 7:12 pm 65. martin:There are two things that help me understand Buckley’s piece. First, his reference to a “secular” prayer, second the recent article about his complete failure as a father to his illegitimate child. McCain’s and Palin’s sins are not really “temper” (McCain) or lack of appropriate credentials (Palin). Rather, McCain/Palin symbolize the idea of duty (McCain) and faithfulness to religion (Palin) against which Buckley Jr. knows he falls short. As someone with a conservative understanding, his pain at these failings must be acute.
Palin is a constant reminder to many, liberals and social “libertarians” that they have sold their soul for respectability and comfort. Of course they wouldn’t have kept a Down syndrome child. Of course they would have forced their teenage daughter to abort. Yet after selling their souls, it is she, and not they, who defeated the corrupt Alaskan establishment. It was she, not they, who had an 80% approval rating in this age of public despair. It was she, not someone like them, who “Marverick” turned to and set before the American people. They cannot forgive her, and cannot forgive him for making them feel so small, and they have set out to destroy her.
Oct 12, 2008 - 7:14 pm 66. Amadeus 48:TeamPlayer seems to have a fixation on Gov. Palin. Her many attractions have caused him to short circuit mentally (what’s wrong with domestic drilling–even the Congressional Dems are now for it). I think we can quickly discern his true identity from his irrationnal and unnatural rage: Andrew Sullivan, post under your own name!
Oct 12, 2008 - 7:15 pm 67. bob:Christopher Buckley, like Kathleen Parker and Peggy Noonan, are cowards. They want to be on what they — in their fear — consider to be the winning team, so as to maintain their invitations to all the right cocktail parties.
Whenever I read their future scribblings — IF I bother to read their future scribblings — it will always be colored by what these last weeks have revealed about their character and their values. They value acceptance by the sneering and condescending left over conservative principles. Therefore, they can no longer speak or write as one of us, as fellow conservatives. They can now speak only as a typical craven representatives of the lefty chattering class. I hope that works out for them.
Oct 12, 2008 - 7:28 pm 68. Harold D.:Thank you, Roger Kimball.
I will vote for McCain this November for one reason and one reason only: Sarah Palin. She is the future of this country, the brightest star to appear since Ronald Reagan.
And by the way, I have a degree from Dartmoth.
Oct 12, 2008 - 7:40 pm 69. austin:i think that peer pressure played a role in C. Buckley’s endorsement. Jesus sent the apostles out two by two for a reason. The East coast is for Obama, and all the academics are. It is very lonely being a conservative while writing for the New Yorker and such magazines. and his parents just died.I teach on the college level, and those of us who are conservative miss the camradarie that the leftists enjoy……..Poor Christopher,,.the pressure got to be too much but now he’ll be on all the A lists….
Oct 12, 2008 - 7:41 pm 70. J. Allen Wilcox:“First class temperament and intellect”?!? Really?? Well, I suppose these are just as good of reasons to vote for “the One” as his alleged literary talents (of which I know nothing and have no intention of finding out). I cannot help but be impressed by the glibness of Mr. Buckley’s reasoning. I would suggest to Mr. Buckley that a better marker of one’s presidential qualifications, if he really wishes to stick with intellect and temperament, would be to what end these traits have actually served the candidate in question. In short, results man, results!! Here we find almost nothing. And not for want of being given a chance. Mr. Obama has simply not done much of anything with this vaunted intellect and temperament: he has sponsored no significant legislation and has never really reached across the aisle, two things one might have expected someone with a first rate intellect and temperament to have done! In the light of these serious lacuna’s in Obama’s resume and the degree to which this is obvious to any of us who have bothered to take a look, Mr. Buckley’s decision indeed lacks the kind of serious reflection and intellectual weight we’ve come to expect from someone with Mr. Buckley’s last name. Truly glib and unserious. Too bad.
Oct 12, 2008 - 7:43 pm 71. bc:When Obama’s brown shirts come and start kicking Roger in the stomach, as he’s lying on the ground, he’ll realize why Buckley turned.
Oct 12, 2008 - 7:54 pm 72. SteveS:Mr. Buckley writes “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 out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves. If he raises taxes and throws up tariff walls and opens the coffers of the DNC to bribe-money from the special interest groups against whom he has (somewhat disingenuously) railed during the campaign trail, then he will almost certainly reap a whirlwind that will make Katrina look like a balmy summer zephyr.”
But, sir, that is exactly Sen. Obama’s modus operandi. I have always had the uneasy sense that he ultimately takes the advice and the position of the last person who spoke to him. By himself he brings nothing to the table: a vessel to be filled by proxy, and by proximity. The right-wing-o-sphere has despaired of discovering what he stands for (besides himself), seeming to never suspect that he truly stands for nothing. You label him coolly analytic; I see him as lost without him knowing it. You label him in possession of a first-rate intellect; I see him as the parrot of the intellectuals. He will not be President; he will be but a conduit. He personifies the relativism of this age, and cannot distinguish between ideals, having the sole touchstone of Chicago-style ward politics in a disadvantaged neighborhood to inform him. It percolates his proposals for taxes, for community service, for public order and discipline, for parceling out rights and favors with the other ward bosses (read “National Governments”) as directed by “the powers that be.” I do not believe that he understands that, as President, he IS the “power that be.” (Yes, it’s horrible prose.) He has not risen above that, and cannot truly imagine that the world is not like that.
Doug Adams once wrote the “the job of the President was not to wield power, but to attract attention away from those who do.” I used to think that that was funny.
Oct 12, 2008 - 8:43 pm 73. Mike_K:The trolls have interrupted an interesting thread. I fear they will now make any more comments difficult to consider. I have not read any of Buckley’s books but have considered him a rich dilettante son trying to fit in in New York society. His endorsement fits the picture exactly. The last troll comment above is an illustration.
then there’s plain stupid…like advocating domestic driling as they key to energy independence.
No, the Obamabots advocate wind power as the key and do what they can to increase the supply. This is the scariest part of the Obama phenomenon. Stalin killed millions trying to prove that communism worked. I fear similar motivation by Obama in “proving” that global warming trumps survival. These people are not practical and will hurt or kill us all in proving their weird ideology.
Oct 12, 2008 - 8:43 pm 74. Brian G.:I cannot believe for the life of me that I haven’t read more of what I think Mr. Buckley is up to. He has a book to sell, and nothing gets you on the MSM circuit and front pages faster than being a Republican who is turning to a Democrat. And, given who is father is, he will be a big shot immediately.
I actually think this is a brilliant move for him personally. I am sure though he won’t find Obama’s writing and intellect so appealing after seeing some of his policies in action should he win.
Oct 12, 2008 - 8:50 pm 75. Rob Sterling:I see I’m not the first commenter to suspect that the likes of Buckley and George Will are mainly annoyed that Palin’s ascent will alienate them from their cocktail party crowd. I could scarcely care less what those two think. If a sitting governor of Alaska isn’t such a ridiculous choice for the vice-presidency then I can’t see where a pair of glorified scribblers get off thinking their opinions are worth a damn.
Oct 12, 2008 - 9:03 pm 76. Rob Sterling:Sorry, that should be “is a ridiculous”. Up past my bedtime.
Oct 12, 2008 - 9:06 pm 77. Mack:Kookville, U,S.A. Palin is as dumb as a post and that’s an insult to posts. She makes Dan Quayle seem like Kant. No one could be more centrist and moderate than Obama. It’s the reason why no one in America buys the Ayers connection. Ayers was a spoiled, silly-ass pseudo-revolutionary. Obama comes from a humble background and wouldn’t spit on the sidewalk. McCain’s the wild-eyed moonbat. Lieberman whispers sour Zionist insanities in his ear and John repeats them as if they were policy prescriptions. It’s why it’ll be Obama in a major landslide. You can fool some of the people…
Oct 12, 2008 - 9:07 pm 78. misanthropicus:Re: Buckley’s lefty chic & Roger’s humbly acquiescing it:
Oct 12, 2008 - 9:26 pm 79. Steve:Roger, since you (apparently) were able to discover that Obama’s literature is solid… well, fuzzy crap, now collect your senses & courage and admit that your pal Buckley is nothing more but an weathervane who fears that he’s losing his chic in some salons if he doesn’t get a shiny hat and a drum to beat for Obama.
Further, stop talking about champagne, Quintillian and Oscar Wilde – looks like your cultural thermometer for today’s America comes from a 1930’s MGM movie.
Tom H: “endorsing the O goes against EVERYTHING that I ever understood WFB to represent – SUBSTANCE OVER STYLE. … How about an analysis of what would Bill [Buckley] do?”
“Buckley himself later explained his support for Nixon in the language of a pragmatic ideologue. “I’d be for the most right, viable candidate who could win,” Buckley told the Miami News in 1967.” [EJ Dionne, Why Americans Hate Politics, p. 192]
Obama is not the rightmost viable candidate. McCain is. There’s your answer.
Oct 12, 2008 - 9:36 pm 80. Bart:cfbleachers,
I too join in the praise of your post and the eloquent manner in which you differentiated between liberals and leftists. I am among the throng who do love liberals because if one opens the pages of a dictionary or encyclopedia and reads the definition of a liberal, you will find that a liberal supports and expouses minimal governmental intrusion into the free market principles along with their equally passionate resistance to governmental interference into how we live our lives, choices we make, and other personal freedoms we enjoy. Liberals or shall I say, true liberals do enjoy listening to both sides of an argument with an open mind along with a reasonable and civil dialogue. I can sit and talk for hours with a true liberal but cannot tolerate for one moment spending time with a leftist or a rightist.
Another poster, Alo Keivalar penned some rather disparaging and graphic depictions of the anger and mean spirited comments on some blogs frequented by those who wish to be heard but have no other outlets for their frustration and anger. I have watched this anger build over the last ten years or so and it is now coming to the surface in my opinion mainly because the voice of the “Joe Six Pack” and those who cling to their “guns and religion” have no audience or someone to speak for them. Instead we are subjected to the writings and posings of a plethora of pundits, some who find great pleasure and satisfaction insulting their readers. Mr. Buckley’s op-ed was nothing less than a broad indictment of conservatives and Republicans who do not support Obama. We are the unwashed and unthinking. The uneducated and uninformed. No Mr. Buckley, we are the ones who do not have the Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Brown, or any of the other Ivy League school education to put on our resume’. No, we are the ones who have the high school diploma, tech school degree, community college degree, or state university degree who are a supreme embarassment to the intellectual elites from the liberal and conservative enclaves who dare engage in the expectations of having someone at the highest level of government giving a true voice to our honest concerns. We don’t think in the abstract nor do we engage in conversations with the Buckleys, Wills, Sullivans, or other described or self described intellectuals who are considered to be the enlightened ones. No, we are the ones who truly have no voice other than our vote and still hold to traditional values that we see being destroyed before our eyes each day.
We were not involved in the downward spiral into a financial black hole by irresponsible politicians, investors, bankers, hedge fund managers, and foolish subprime predators. We were not involved when Jimmy Carter using FDR as his example delved into social engineering without a mandate from the people. We were not involved when Andrew Cuomo acting on behalf of Clinton took legal action against a bank to commit legal extortion to the tune of $2.1 billion dollars so people with questionable credit could obtain a home loan even with the acknowledged expectation of a high rate of defaults. We were not asked if it was acceptable to take the risks and cut them into what was considered an inconvenient risk, posing only minimal impact if the worst scenario were to come true. No, it was done through a leftist court system that in it’s hubris and arrogance chose to ignore the will of the people and give sway to the socialist agenda.
That along with a news media moving ever further left, beyond liberal and foregoing their once proud and honorable as being the gatekeepers of truth for all the people is another prime contributor to the seething anger you see coming to the surface.
I fear what we will experience over the next four or eight years. If all goes as predicted, we will awaken November 5th to find ourselves with a veto proof congress giving full support to a President Obama’s political and social agenda. We will be subjected to one political party’s unprecedented control over our lives with no checks and balances without an impartial and bipartisan press to keep them in line. A poster on one local blog expressed my fears very well when he posted the following and I am presenting it exactly as written…..”The only way things are gonna ever get done you need a president that reflects the congress for anything to get SIGN off on. With Barack all he has to do is give hints to congress on what bills they should bring up to gat past and he will sign them. Alot of things will get done.”…..
That is my concern and fear…a lot of things will get done but at what price freedom?
Oct 12, 2008 - 9:56 pm 81. wilky:No one could be more centrist and moderate than Obama….You can fool some of the people… — Mack
And you are one of those people Mack
Oct 12, 2008 - 10:15 pm 82. john from cinncinati:junior just gets by on the good will built by his father. that is one big pair of shoes he has to fill.
Oct 12, 2008 - 10:15 pm 83. Ernst Blofeld:Mack: no one could be more moderate and centrist than Obama? did you fall down and bump your head?
Obama did write one unsigned note in the HLR. It finally surfaced a couple months back.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0808/12705.html
Oct 12, 2008 - 10:19 pm 84. Someone75:How dare C. Buckley not vote for McCain? How DARE he think critically and for himself. How DARE he not blindly follow his party? I’ve always thought that I would vote for the better candidate. I voted for Bush twice. This time, I’m voting Obama.
Call me a troll, call me a moron, call me whatever you must: I still maintain that someone who thinks through a situation and arrives at a decision through some sort of reasoning process, is a wise man.
I don’t care who you vote for, as long as you’re informed and have made up your own mind. What’s so terrible about that?
Oct 12, 2008 - 10:24 pm 85. McSame:Lynn,
Oct 12, 2008 - 10:30 pm 86. Judy, NYC:You are a liar. You are not a democrat. Obama is winning this election. Not only that, compared to McCain’s campaign Obama’s campaign has been clean and about the issues. If you were a real democrat after 8 years of Bush you would be satisfied to win by any means necessary. So don’t give us that bs, and btw if you are a democrat and don’t support Obama after the winning campaign he has run, then guess what honey you only vote for white guys.
children of great men are not clones. they are who they are. it is not surprising that the son of william f. buckley, wants to be part of the new. most of germany wanted the new despite the horror. every american who is not on life support knows how dangerous this obama is. we’ve known about the obama thugs at the caucuses, saw his campaign to destroy hillary clinton, we let the media cover up obama’s background, and ignored his stumping in kenya for his murderous cousin odinga while he was a united states senator. he didn’t hide his eager embrace and encouragement of racial separateness, which alone, should have made him unacceptable for any office. we know that he is an extremist who is both paranoid and narcissistic, without one thought (with the exception of an obsession with whitey) that is clearly stated, no intellectual paper trail, and a paucity of any ideas. and, he is well ahead in the polls. perhaps things have turned out badly because they began badly. we allowed a similarly unqualified gw to ignore the will of the people and the constitution, construct an imperial presidency sucking power, cronyism and corruption into the executive branch, that remained shrouded in secrecy his entire two terms. our president was joking around with his favorites, the haves and have mores, all the while ignoring a jobs crisis, a housing crisis and a looming financial collapse. the road to barry obama was paved with bad intentions. our new fake messiah, is history’s oldest story.
Oct 12, 2008 - 10:53 pm 87. franko:I think the best comparator for Palin is Andrew Jackson. Jackson was despised by the east coast intelligentsia of his time for his uneducated ways. However, he was a warrior and he hated corruption. The citizens responded to him as they only can to a heroic figure. Palin has not actually been in the military; but she is not afraid of guns, and she takes on corruption in the establishment without fear. I hope she has a great future with us. She more than anyone else on the scene embodies my hope that corruption in our government can one day be reduced.
Oct 12, 2008 - 11:11 pm 88. franko:cfbleachers, that was a touching post. When I read a thread with so many thoughtful comments as this, it gives me great pleasure. While I do not often LOL, I often think, gosh, what a wonderful phrase. And never think of thanking the writer. So thank you and all the other correspondents that have made this thread particularly interesting. And thank you Roger K. for the thoughts on CB, it’s wonderful to have your timely reflections on a development like CB’s article. Of course there are too many good comments here to thank them all, but -
mrkwong: thank you for your post that you summarized, “You have there a clear illustration of theory versus practice.” That crystallized for me why I admire Palin.
Oct 12, 2008 - 11:39 pm 89. BMoon:To add to many sharp comments above….
C. Buckley’s only qualifications for approving Obama as POTUS are that he gives a good speech, seems to have an even temperament, and writes (apparently) a fair memoir? Pathetically preppy and shamelessly shallow, that C. Buckley. Never read him. Never will. Sons never measure up to great fathers anyway, but C. Buckley, is almost too painful to contemplate. Mired in mid-life crisis, with a failed marriage, hopelessly mediocre writing career, desperately faking independent thinking, lashing out subconciously at his father’s unattainable greatness, pitifully trying compensate by ingratiating himself to the East Coast Leftist snob cabal, – it has all the makings of a sme kind of new genre – tragi-comic conservative satire.
As to His Oneness, he seems to have deviously calculated his ambitious political career by trying to emulate the other great myth of liberal elites and the biggest fraud foisted by the Media and the hapless American public – JFK. Hey, seemed to work for Jack, why not? But while Obama refuses to release his thesis’ and other key writings, JFK’s were considered by family friend Arthur Krock of the NYT to be, “very sloppy, mostly magazine and newspaper clippings stuck together.” Eventually, with the help of ghost writers, favors owed, and family purchases of 40,000 copies, it became Why England Slept and managed to get him the covetted cum laude designation from ‘Ha’va’d.’ Kennedy jumbo dollars, Theodore Sorensen, and an army of writers and historians also managed to take Jack’s horrid “incoherent melange from secondary sources” and miraculously transmutate it into Profiles Of Courage. Other parallels arise – the emphasis on youth, glamour, pseudo-intellectualism, but the most poignant is from Paul Johnson’s A History of the American People”: “In some ways the most dangerous kind of politician is a man who is good at PR and nothing else – and in some respects JFK fitted that description exactly.” And so does Obama. And the facile believers in both are equally phony.
Oct 12, 2008 - 11:53 pm 90. Mark H.:Once again, this is why no one should ever send their children to an Ivy League school. There was a time when these schools were able to produce intelligent, thoughtful, patriotic citizens. Now they are only able to produce those individuals that slip further and further away from the ideals of our founding fathers. That William F. Buckley’s son is embracing the most liberal senator that is in the congress today, as well as that senator’s relationships with individuals that only wish harm on the “Shining City on the Hill” saddens me immensely. For me, education at one of these institutions is an automatic indictment of the individual, and gives me greater reason to dig into their past, to ensure that said individual has no ties to elitists, terrorists, socialists, racists or any one else that would conspire to tear apart the constitution and “Damn America.”
Oct 13, 2008 - 12:14 am 91. wavynavy:Chris Buckley is an unprincipled man. A weasel. It’s that simple.
Oct 13, 2008 - 12:15 am 92. ghostu:what a bunch of crap. the republican party has become the vehicle for the monied and the ignorant, two groups that would have nothing to do with each other except for their contempt, disdain, and perhaps hate of people of color. forget patriotism, fear of socialism, or terror. the driving force in republican politics is evident in “hes not one of us”, see buchanan, “that one over there”. see mccain, or “he doesnt see america like you and I”, see palin. its RACISM and the same smug disregard for liberal thought as “harvard” has for conservatives. both dismiss each other, to the harm of all. as for roger and his poor friend christo, i suspect both would be better off dwelling on how they became syncophantic pawns of donald kagan and that outdated group obsessed by the ancient greeks.
Oct 13, 2008 - 12:31 am 93. Bozoer Rebbe:Since you’re so big on “intelligence,” how about all those supposedly smart Donks like Frank, Dodd, Schumer, et. al. who managed to bring on the biggest financial crisis in our nation’s history? Yeah, they were real Super Geniuses, weren’t they?
Certainly the folks on Wall Street and in Fannie Mae / Freddie Mac who were creating derivatives, and credit default swaps, and other risk and debt related securities are really smart. A lot of that stuff requires some very high level math and let’s face it, very few people are capable of doing high level math.
I don’t need a president that’s smarter than me, I need a president who has good judgement (and shares my basic political philosophies). Smart people have created all sorts of impractical and sometimes dangerous ideas. Anyone with above average intelligence is smart enough to be president. A good executive must be able to delegate power effectively and smart enough to understand something when explained by experts.
Oct 13, 2008 - 12:43 am 94. chuck,:Buckley, WIll, etc: A bunch of Uncle Toms. They’ve screwed us for the last time.
Oct 13, 2008 - 3:35 am 95. Steve Bourg:Brilliant Roger, but a bit long-winded, and hides the true point of Chris Buckley’s idiocy. Basically, he’s hoping that Obama won’t follow through with his economic philosophy that he’s obviously adhered to his whole life. If he stays consistent with the past, Obama will march our capitalism further towards the soft-socialism (at best) of Europe…..or even towards the socialism of Norway. But what the extreme Leftists like Obama don’t realize is that the way Norway stays economically afloat is that they mine the living daylights out of their natural energy resources. They produce their own energy and then sell the rest to Europe. They’re a net exporter. If not for their aggressive drilling, they’d be economic toast. And that’s the 2nd part of the fallacious logic of Obama’s…….that we can move towards soft-socialism and not drill offshore and Alaska. In combination, those two beliefs of Obama’s will economically kill us. And our children will suffer with the lack of job-creation. Does Chris Buckley have kids? I think he does. His asinine logic of voting for Obama is the stuff that economic catastrophe is made of. Not to mention further “unreasonable seizure” of the fruits of our labor with higher tax rates. Hell, how much taxes does Obama/Biden want from me? I’m paying close to 50% when everything’s counted and trying to save for retirement and pay egregious college-costs for the 1st of our 3 kids. This is completely absurd to hear that O/B want even more taxes from me. -SBourg
Oct 13, 2008 - 4:06 am 96. Sioux Lady:When I read pieces like Mr. Kimball’s and the non-trolls at this site, my despair for my country lifts a bit. Thanks guys and gals.
Oct 13, 2008 - 4:06 am 97. darkjethro:Of course, I’m only a happy resident of fly-over country. It took me ten years to get a BA from the University of South Dakota and I think anthropogenic global warming is a con game and that domestic drilling would go a long way to solving our energy problems, etc. etc. So . . . who am I to be commenting or voting?
Buckley has endorsed style over substance – yawn – Ive come to expect no less from “the enlightened” in this country.
“then guess what honey you only vote for white guys.”
And to prove CFbleachers point about leftist tolerance, we get McSame right on cue with the accusation of racism, from a sock puppet with a “talking point” handle.
Behold the prototype for the new Obama Civillian Corps.
Oct 13, 2008 - 4:40 am 98. sailor:Only a moron would think that being articulate is a measure of intelligence. What baffles me is how Obama speaks and says nothing. And yet you have people in focus groups saying that Obama won the first debate because he was “articulate” “well spoken” and “didn’t stammer”.
My God, what has happened to our country? Some of our most revered leaders were plain-spoken people. Straightforward. Palin and McCain are of those people.
The more I hear Obama speak, the more I realize what a sham a university education is today. The leftists of academia no longer want us to engage in critical thinking, they want to tell us exactly what to think.
What scares me most is I feel we are on the cusp of a civil war between the atheist, non-thinking left, and the moderates and conservatives. While I would love for McCain to win, I genuinely fear that if it does not happen decisively, the sea of hatred, racism-accusing leftists will rise up and destabilize the country.
One more thing: The more I hear the race card being played, the more I know we’re getting somewhere. In the past week, since Palin started mentioning Ayers and Acorn and Rezko started popping up, I’ve seen countless accusations of racism against the right. When you have reached critical mass and you’re being called a racist for questioning Obama’s associations with self-hating American Ayers and his Abbadonesque minions, it’s time to realize that this is the story that the media/Obama campaign/Obama’s thugs do not want you to hear. The louder they shout “RACISM!!!” the more I pay attention to what they’re upset about.
As far as Buckley, Jr. goes. Ummmm…who? XD
Oct 13, 2008 - 4:47 am 99. TeamPlayer:Harold, I doubt your Darmouth degree very seriously.
Amadeus and others, the domestic drilling statement is point number 1 for my evidence that she’s an idiot. No one has defended the idea of a 1% supply increase reducing prices. Other points of evidence…debate performances and Kouric interviews. She lacks any ability to reason and has clearly not thought about issues beyond local Alaskan politics, which consists of “what do I do with my oil dollars?”. Alaska is perhaps the WORST barometer for governance.
She is a liar:
see bridge to nowhere,
she is not a reformer – thinks she did no wrong in TrooperGate (Please don’t make me correct you with direct quotes from the report) – increased debt in Wasilla.
Creationist:
In a 2006 gubernatorial debate, the soon-to-be governor of Alaska said of evolution and creation education, “Teach both. You know, don’t be afraid of education. Healthy debate is so important, and it’s so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both.”
If you believe in creationism you’re an idiot. If you believe man and dinosaur co-habited the Earth, you’re an idiot.
Debates: When she debated in Alaska, her Republican competitors noted how few facts and substance she brought to the debate. She was however adept at playing the religion card and the glittering generality card – all logical flaws and non-sequitors. She did the same in the VP debate and the televised interviews were just ridiculous.
Palin is a well-meaning, attractive idiot whom the Republican party believes it can control. That’s fine for a local judge or a spokesmodel like Tucker Bounds, but for VP? I think not.
Oct 13, 2008 - 4:53 am 100. Kathleen:Christopher Buckley has allowed himself to be both ‘hoodwinked’ and ‘bamboozled’ by a stylish speaker. As for his obvious contempt for Sarah Palin, all I can say is what a snob! He and his elist ilk are incapable of recognizing the ‘genuineness’ of Sarah Palin which we ordinary folk find so refreshing. It’s always sad Mr Kimball when our friends expose their flaws to us; you will still be friends of course but your opinion (and mine) of Mr Buckley will be forever diminished. Truly sad.
Oct 13, 2008 - 5:28 am 101. Never Yet Melted » Now We Know Where the Name Buckley Came From:[...] Roger Kimball responds to his friend Chris Buckley’s endorsement of Obama. [...]
Oct 13, 2008 - 5:30 am 102. Tina Trent:David Levavi — Wolfe would be a very welcome voice, reminds me of “The Me Decade and the Third Awakening,” his insightful look at the Carter presidency.
Oct 13, 2008 - 6:05 am 103. Neil Ferguson:“…He is an immensely engaging chap–a draught of champagne (the real stuff, not some domestic sparkler) on legs–and a boon travel companion to boot. Someday, we may amaze the world with our co-authored travelogue/political thriller about our journeys in and around Nootka. But that is a saga for another occasion.”
AAAAHHHHH!!! STOP WRITING LIKE THAT!!! IT HURTS MY BRAIN! AAHHH!!! AAHHH!!! AAHHH!!!
Oct 13, 2008 - 6:40 am 104. Lynn:re McSame
Oct 13, 2008 - 6:56 am 105. Robert Hurley:I never lie. Winning by “any means necessary” will only hurt all of us, ACORN’s means are not justifiable to any honest American. I believe in a strong military, a gov freeze across the board, (no additional social programs), cuts in bloated government depts., and balancing the budget (fiscal responsibility). I am against any and all tax hikes which will result in further recession of our economy. And, since I obviously am a whole lot more intelligent then you are, I know McCain isn’t Bush and I know Obama isn’t JFK. I agree with Bill Clinton on the causes of the market crash, mostly Dems who refused to regulate the Fannie and Freddie social institutions. As for voting for “only white guys”, playing the race card is beyond ignorant but lately I don’t have high hopes for the Dems with people like you in their ranks and idiots like Pelosi and Reid running Congress. My hope is one day the Democratic Party realists will disappoint you so much you will leave it. Then and only then will I ever vote Democrat again. Your vicious attack just reinforces my views. Thank you, and have a very nice day.
I find it amazing that witout one scintilla of evidence Simon will repeat an accusation that Obama’s memoir was written by Ayers. Based on the fact that this was the first memoir he had written?
Oct 13, 2008 - 7:29 am 106. liamascorcaigh:Roger, you’re bemused by Christopher Buckley’s apostasy, yet you unwittingly reveal the cause by remarking on “his continuing connection with the center of elite conservative opinion”, “elite” here being of the essence. Sarah Palin has proved to be the catalyst that has separated the snobs who just happen to be Conservatives from the Conservatives who just happen to be snobs. “Christo” is of the first type, you, God bless your Tory soul, belong most decidedly to the second. If Obama is elected just watch Mr. Buckley’s whiggery burgeon!
‘Buckley’ from the Irish ‘Ó Buachalla’ = ‘grandson [i.e. descendant] of the cowherder’.
He has come a long way from Tipperary, indeed ‘n he has!
Oct 13, 2008 - 7:53 am 107. bobby b:“On this and other websites, the ferocity and viciousness of McCain supporters is something astonishing to behold. There is something almost sub-human and unnatural about it. It is totally appalling and frightening”
- – -
Oh, please.
I’ve spent the last eight years being called every vile name in the book because I’m a conservative. I’m an irrational godsquadder, (um, I’m actually an atheist), I want to keep women as property (no, but I don’t want them to kill their babies just to prove they’re NOT property), I want Iraq’s oil for – I’m unclear on this part, not sure if they’re saying “my buddies in Big Oil”, or “my buddies in industry”, or just “to pollute, for fun” – I helped to kill millions of innocents in Iraq (frankly, except for a small number of civilian deaths that should have been avoided, I think we killed lots who needed killing, and we continue to do so, thankfully) . . . I’ve been called murderer, and racist, and sexist, and hater-of-this, and raper-of-that, and I’ve watched people of great intellect and (in my opinion) utter good intentions be ripped to shreds publicly by vermin who care not what the cost, all that matters is that THEY BE IN CHARGE . . .
And you’re lying about being a non-partisan making casual comments while being above the fray. Everywhere I look these days, I see long comments by posters claiming to have always been faithful and sincere conservatives but who are now so utterly disillusioned because of what that damn evil Bush and Rove have done to us . . .
Yeah, right. You lack the moral character to make your own argument.
Or is it that your espoused philosophy cannot survive illumination? You can whisper to everyone, quietly and individually, “hey, you’ll get more, we’re taking it from Them!”, but the lie becomes apparent when you say it aloud to everyone at once.
Oct 13, 2008 - 8:57 am 108. nlcatter:75,000 children needed killing?
you are why the MEDIA highlights the Mcain/palin incitment of hatred
Oct 13, 2008 - 9:14 am 109. Amused Cynic » Blog Archive » I am really tired of “conservative public intellectuals” trying to apply rules in a knife fight….There are no rules…..:[...] Courtesy of commenter Stickershock, a real conservative public intellectual takes a swipe at the new, housebroken version of Christopher Buckley. (In high school, we used to have another [...]
Oct 13, 2008 - 9:42 am 110. syn:It appears the intellectual class is so enamored with its ego that the intellectual has lost all ability to connect with basic commonsense.
“On this and other websites, the ferocity and viciousness of McCain supporters is something astonishing to behold. There is something almost sub-human and unnatural about it. It is totally appalling and frightening”
See what I mean, this is so over the top outrageously crazy that reason has lost all sense.
Oct 13, 2008 - 10:00 am 111. Bart:When I read Obama’s life journey, I thought to myself, “Who wrote this book? Who was the ghostwriter?” and that was well before reading about his first advance of more than $100,000 and subsequent cancellation of the contract and obtaining another one with another advance in the amount of $40,000. Before I found out he spent months in Bali with Michelle discovering himself but not to the degree where he could articulate it into a rambling account of his life the is the essence of “Dreams from my Father”. I’m not sure about the conclusion Cashill reached but there is enough to ask serious questions. I do not accept the same argument put in play by the comparison of Obama to the authors mentioned in another post.
Harper Lee, author of “To Kill a Mockingbird” was not an accidential author. She spent a long time honing her craft before taking a year to write her book. She started working on the book at the end of 1956 and had her first draft ready by the end of 1957. The book was published in 1959. Prior to this book, she had written several long stories. So, this is not a good comparison.
Margaret Mitchell was a well published and accomplished writer before she started on her novel, “Gone With the Wind”. She spent years as a writer for a newspaper, the Atlanta Journal. Other than writing articles and interviews, she also penned profiles of several generals from Georgia. Another comparison that does not hold water.
T.E. Lawrence, again another prolific writer through out his life. He rewrote “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” three times, described earlier as one of the “greatest liteary giants of the era”. There are examples of his writing on file but so far, other than one rather obscure piece about the effects of abortion, Obama has not displayed a propensity for writing, much less penning a book like “Dreams from my Father”. Another comparison falling well short of the mark.
Cervantes was not a “one hit wonder” either. He had been published before he wrote the first installment of “Don Quixote”. Subsequently, Cervantes wrote several plays and other works before he completed the second part of “Don Quixote”. The elapsed time between the first publishing of Don Quixote and the last was about ten years. Starting to get the drift here? Another miss.
Sherman and Grant were both prolific letter writers which is a remarkable similarity connecting most successful authors, especially when one is penning their personal memoirs. So far, no one has been able to secure any of Obama’s correspondence between himself and members of his family, close friends, or other acquaintances. Grant had written several articles for a magazine before starting on his memoirs. If any of those listed could be used as a comparison to Obama, maybe these two might fit the bill but again, both men were established writers of letters and articles before setting out to write a book. They had background at least. Another miss.
Suffice it to say that Obama is not a literary giant and the circumstances surrounding his book which has been described in eloquent praise from many quarters still remains as a question mark – who wrote it? And if this book is the basis on which Buckley formed his opinion and subsequent endorsement of Barack Obama, one must question Mr. Buckley’s ability to perform the basics of sound reasoning.
Oct 13, 2008 - 10:47 am 112. Bart:Just to set the record straight, my research was done on the Wikipedia site. Not the most reliable but in this instance, historically accurate.
Oct 13, 2008 - 10:57 am 113. Armand:Obama, the “rare bird,” is going to be rolled by the leaders of Congress. He has no internal gyroscope, other than running for election.
Oct 13, 2008 - 11:00 am 114. mike e. coon:As for Palin, she is not “sophisticated enough” to understand how a government can endlessly run deficits. You see, she ran a household, business, and state. Only Harvard people can discern giving everything to everyone, while not paying.
I will NOT rebew with National Review.If a silver spooned milksop endorses someone who his own father would NOT,well,then,the magazine simply is not what it once was,or ever will be again.Do not send more rewal notices,please!
Oct 13, 2008 - 11:06 am 115. mike e. coon:OOOOPS,the spelling was off a bit above.Sorry,WFB. Mike E. Coon
Oct 13, 2008 - 11:07 am 116. Nina Carlotti:I seem to be out of touch, in that I like McCain very much and find Palin distasteful. McCain proved himself long agon, which is why he does not deign to bark like dogs of lesser breeding. He warned about the coming crash long ago, though for some reason he gets no credit for having done so. He seems to be unpopular because he does not yap and screech in the way some have come to expect. Well, good for him.
Oct 13, 2008 - 11:10 am 117. T:Whereas Palin panders to exactly that sort of sullied demographic. Yes, there is a class dimension to this discussion, and I for one seem to recall that “conservative” once meant refusing to embrace the lowest common denominator. For precisely that reason, I applaud McCain and would rather not discuss Palin.
Sailor wrote (10/13 4:47 AM)
“Only a moron would think that being articulate is a measure of intelligence. . . . My God, what has happened to our country?”
Sailor, it has to do with critical thinking skills, or the lack thereof. In his book “Arrogance” Bernie Goldberg points to a study which shows that patients rated physicians more competent if they wore a white (rather than blue) lab coat. He explains this as not having any meaningful way to truly evaluate medical competence, so people latch on to something, even if it is superficial.
Now, while many people have very limited critical thinking skills, one need not be a historian or an engineer to have them; plumbers, electricians and housewives use critical thinking skills all the time. The real question is, “can one transfer those skills from the venue in which they were learned to another venue?” Many people, regardless of education simply can not do that, so they render an opinion based upon “the color of the doctor’s lab coat.”
In the case of Obama, the professorial elite like him because he sounds (and looks) just like them. Just what does this say about the critical thinking skills of those who teach our children how to think critically?!!!
Oct 13, 2008 - 11:15 am 118. oldpapajoe:Buckley is like so many contemporary “Conservatives”, he wants to enjoy the adulation of being an intellectual. This means being acceptable to the left wing MSM and other self proclaimed intellectual elites that stink up cocktail parties in Manhattan and Georgetown. The grassroots Conservatives will never follow these gutless wonders! Go, support BHO. We working stiff Conservatives don’t need you, don’t want, don’t respect you. Good riddance!
Oct 13, 2008 - 11:25 am 119. Paul S.:Plain and simple, the Buckleys, Parkers and their ilk are low-down snakes in the grass. It’s a character thing, Roger. You needn’t look for other explanations.
Oct 13, 2008 - 11:26 am 120. Avery Won:Wow, this is about half as important as any of Ron Reagen Jr’s opinions. . .
Oh look, another did nothing and inherited it all looser crapping all over their family because they will never measure up to it and don’t have the courage to stand up for it like a decent person would. . .
Zzzz
Oct 13, 2008 - 11:28 am 121. AdrianS:The October Surprise—Suit To Remove Barack Obama From The Ballot. Barack Obama And The Democratic National Committee Are Committing Fraud On The American People
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyspCRmJv7w&eurl=http://obamacrimes.com/
Barack Hussein Obama is dangerous for America:
Oct 13, 2008 - 11:29 am 122. view from afar:http://www.nextgenerationcorp.com/NextGenBlog/?p=32
team player; as I had heard often in my University years…your grades are only proof of on a certain day, of a certain year, you able to remember a measured(graded) quantity of information…why do so many people believe that a diploma is proof of intelligence? It’s proof that you can be taught, not that you are intelligent; they are not the same thing. An intelligent person is able to think and weigh through an arguement given the information from differing views, someone who is taught doesn’t necessarily learn to discern anything but can give back what they have learned, with out ever having used their intelligence to think through something and argue their conclusion…
Oct 13, 2008 - 2:32 pm 123. Marion L:Bravo to Christopher Buckley and may more courageous and thoughtful conservatives follow his example and put partisanship aside to do what is best for this country.
Oct 13, 2008 - 2:44 pm 124. Mrs. Jackson:I’ll admit it. The idea that Ayers was Obama’s ghostwriter is haunting. It doesn’t vacate the mind easily as it is unsettling. I hope Ayers wasn’t the ghost writer. For the country’s sake and WFB Buckley’s legacy.
Oct 13, 2008 - 2:52 pm 125. L.N. Smithee:cfbleachers has already articulated my feelings about Buckley’s catapult across the aisle better than I myself could, but I will nevertheless insert my own two cents into the cyberslot.
In my public-school and community college-educated effort to contribute something worth reading, please forgive me for foregoing as sources of similes such legendary works of fiction as The Importance of Being Earnest, and instead using a less prestigious source of analogy: A TV sitcom.
(BTW, I missed the motion picture based on that book — was it before or after Earnest Goes To Camp, or Earnest Goes To Prison? Just kidding!)
Christopher Buckley clearly stated reasons why someone like him would, under normal circumstances, refuse to vote for someone like Obama (bracketed comments mine): “He is … a lefty. I am not. I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets [Obama is not, unless I missed him echoing Clinton the First on budget-balancing]. On abortion, gay marriage, et al, I’m libertarian [Based on his vocal objection to the Born Alive Infants Act equivalent in Illinois, Obama is to the left of NARAL, denying postnatal survivors of abortion attempts life-saving medical care; he supports "civil unions," but is in full-throat support of the type of judicial activists that have used sleight of hand to grant same-sex couples marriage rights by saying ‘Civil union rights are essentially the same, so the titular difference is discriminatory’]. I believe … that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away [Obama not only promises to deliver such an ever-expanding monstrosity, his entire agenda is dependent on his ability to create it].”
But: Buckley’s flush-cheeked admiration for Obama’s intellect, “first-class temperament,” and writing skills overcome his own objections (verbatim):
After shaking my head at the notion of a secular prayer (uh, to whom, Chris?) I pondered how Obama’s aesthetic appeal has conquered both his and Kathleen Parker’s heretofore principled fight to halt the freedom-eating virus called socialism. It reminded me of a famous episode of Seinfeld titled “The Couch.”
A primer to the relevant part: Jerry Seinfeld and his former-lover-now-good-friend Elaine Benes are dining at an Italian restaurant. The subject of take-out pizza came up, and Elaine, who is pro-choice, says she would never order a pizza from the “Paccino’s” chain, which is owned by a man who donates millions to pro-life organizations (for real-life background, Google “Tom Monaghan”). Jerry asks Elaine what she would do if the owner of the restaurant in which they were awaiting dinner felt the same way. She replies that she would leave. Jerry – with mischievous delight — motions the owner over, and asks how he feels about abortion. The restaurateur’s face grimaces as he rants that no intelligent person could be in favor of it. This causes an ugly scene in the place, with some patrons shouting their pro-life support and others getting up and leaving in disgust.
Later in the episode, Elaine has a date with a hunky moving man that goes extremely well. The next day, she shows up at Jerry’s apartment with the status report:
This however, is not a perfect parallel to the situation with young Mr. Buckley. Elaine (played by the magnificent – and very liberal – Julia Louis-Dreyfus) summons the courage to possibly ruin her illusion by testing her new man. She feigns being upset about a non-existent female friend who “got impregnated by her troglodytic half-brother, and decided to have an abortion.” Not suspecting she might think differently, the bf’s sympathetic response was: “You know, someday … we’re going to get enough people in the Supreme Court to change that law.” Elaine frowns and sobs.
In real life, however, unlike the fictional Ms. Benes, Mr. Buckley and Ms. Parker refuse to let their better judgment dissuade them from hastily diving headlong into a whirlwind relationship they may regret in leisure — at least four years, maybe eight. In their lavishing praise on Mr. Obama’s smarts, they seem not to have considered the possibility that the Senator’s genius towers over theirs so completely, he may have (in The One’s own words) “hoodwinked” them into buying into a philosophy that is the antithesis of all they held dear – that is, until all they held dear became him.
Oct 13, 2008 - 3:03 pm 126. Mars vs Hollywood: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 out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves. If he raises taxes and throws up tariff walls and opens the coffers of the DNC to bribe-money from the special interest groups against whom he has (somewhat disingenuously) railed during the campaign trail, then he will almost certainly reap a whirlwind that will make Katrina look like a balmy summer zephyr.
Frankly, I can’t decide who is more foolish: those who vote for a candidate in the belief that he’ll actually do the things he says he’ll do in office, or those who vote for a candidate in the belief that he WON’T do the things he says he’ll do in office.
Oct 13, 2008 - 3:31 pm 127. Spartan Fan:I remember reading “Thank You For Smoking” and thinking it was autobiographical, with Chris in the position of Nick Nailer’s child having a father taking positions and *sniff, sniff* associating with unpleasant people.
Oct 13, 2008 - 3:55 pm 128. Dave Surls:Mr. Buckley’s endorsement was more of the same, an extended middle finger to “Bubba” conservatives that probably are an embarrasement on N.R. cruise cocktail hours.
Chris’s point to conservatives in his Obama endorsement is plain:
“Dad never liked you”
“Christopher Buckley”
Never heard of him.
Oct 13, 2008 - 4:36 pm 129. immigrant:Electing a skinny guy with a funny name, who looks like a cab driver without a white shirt/tie? sounds like a swell idea to me. I am at the receiving end of this subtle racism every day.
However, I’d also like to criticize our elected fearless leaders..without having to be defensive/fearful of dark (pun intended) innuendos and insinuations of being a racist/wallace/hitler/kathy lee gifford etc.
For me, this trumps EVERYthing else. Your mileage may vary, of course.
McCain is no Jesse Helms or Trent Lott. He may be temperamental but we KNOW that about him.
Vote centrist. Vote McCain (And Warner in VA)
Oct 13, 2008 - 5:16 pm 130. PC:Patricians can be so easily co-opted. “Fatigue makes cowards of us all.”
Oct 13, 2008 - 5:16 pm 131. politicobug:This is absurd! Lighten up folk.
Oct 13, 2008 - 6:28 pm 132. Norman Clemo:The world is a competitive place, and we require the most educated and competent workforce to keep the boat afloat for all of us. The ridiculous attempts to equate pole dancing and nuclear engineering (figuratively speaking) as equally valuable in moving the country forward is so silly, it would be funny if it were not so scary.
South Africa
Obama’s election to the White House will confirm the Gadarene rush to Socialism in the USA. Ronald Reagan must be turning in his grave at this betrayal of his accomplishments .
Well done George Soros and his minions .
THE SIEGE OF SOUTHERN AFRICA
by Douglas Reid ( published in 1974 )
Chapter Two
THE RAVENING WOLVES
Liberalism will be seen historically as the great destructive force of our time: much more so than communism, fascism, nazism, or any other of the lunatic creeds which make such immediate havoc. Compared with the long-term consequences of a Gilbert Murray, a Bertrand Russell, a Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, Hitler was an ineffective dreamer, Stalin a Father Christmas, and Mussolini an Arcadian shepherd.[3]
Of the birthplace of this all-destructive force in its present shape, Mr. Malcolm Muggeridge says, “I took a great dislike to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, and even more, to its imbecilic foreign admirers.” The verdict is the more damning in that Mr. Muggeridge himself, as he says, “went to Russia in a silly enough mood”. Indeed, he disposed of his home and effects, packed, and took his family with the intention of settling there for good. Six months (the winter of 1932-3) were enough for him to discover the truth of the abomination of desolation there, and the classic he produced in 1934 (Winter in Moscow, Eyre and Spottiswode) will remain for all time the true and ghastly picture of that birth and birthplace.
His phrase, “the imbecilic foreign admirers”, brings back to me vivid pictures of some of those weird travellers, whom we foreign correspondents in Berlin saw on their way through to Moscow, and others whom I encountered when I went to Moscow in 1935. How comic and ineffably stupid they seemed then: how little we could foresee the havoc they would wreak in the world, the Lady Astors, the Mrs. Roosevelts, the Webbs, the Bernard Shaws and many more.
We who knew the truth of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat watched these characters pass and return with ill-placed mirth, little realizing the power for evil that resided in them: they seemed figures of ridicule. Most of them, in fact, were infatuates rather than initiates of the great conspiracy, but as the years went by and the Second World War approached they bred around them a great band of true initiates, men in governments and administrations who were able to warp and distort actions of State, particularly in America, to the service of the World Revolution.
Some of these were the creatures exposed in Washington, Ottawa, and London when the War ended, but their exposure led to no general clearance: today, as all students of power politics know, they are more strongly and more numerously esconced in places where they can do the most damage than they were in 1945. The Siege of Southern Africa is the proof of what they have been able to achieve in the name of “liberalism”.
“What a ghastly charade that was! In those days Moscow was the Mecca for every liberal mind, whatever its particular complexion. They flocked there in an unending procession, from the great ones like Shaw and Gide and Barbusse and Julian Huxley and Harold Laski and the Webbs down to poor little teachers, crazed clergymen and millionaires, and drivelling dons, all utterly convinced that under the aegis of the great Stalin a new dawn was breaking in which the human race would at last be united in liberty, equality and fraternity for evermore….
“Stalin himself, to do him justice, never troubled to hide his contempt for them and everything they stood for and mercilessly suppressed any like tendencies among his own people. This, however, in no wise deterred them. They were prepared to believe anything, however preposterous, to overlook anything, however villainous, to approve anything, however obscurantist and brutally authoritarian, in order to be able to preserve intact the confident expectation that one of the most thoroughgoing, ruthless and bloody tyrannies ever to exist on earth could be relied on to champion human freedom, the brotherhood of man, and all the other good liberal causes to which they had dedicated their lives.
“It is true that many of them subsequently retracted; that incidents like the Stalinist purges, the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the debunking of Stalin, the Hungarian and Czech risings, each caused a certain leakage among liberal well-wishers. Yet when the dust settles the same old bias is clearly discernible.
” It is an addiction, like alcoholism, to which the liberal mind is intrinsically susceptible – to grovel before any Beelzebub who claims, however implausibly, to be a prince of liberals. Why? After all, the individuals concerned are ostensibly the shining lights of the Western world; scholars, philosophers, artists, scientists and the like … held in respect as being sages who know all the answers; sought after by governments and international agencies; holding forth in the press and on the air. The glory of faculties and campuses; beating a path between Harvard and Princeton and Washington, D.C.; swarming like migrant birds from the London School of Economics, Oxford and Cambridge into Whitehall. Yet I have seen their prototypes – and I can never forget it – in the role of credulous buffoons capable of being taken in by grotesquely obvious deceptions. Swallowing unquestioningly statistics and other purported data whose falsity was immediately evident to the meanest intelligence. Full of idiot delight when Stalin or one of his henchmen yet again denounced the corrupt, cowardly intelligentsia of the capitalist West – viz., themselves. I detect in their like today the same impulse. They pass on from one to another, like a torch held upside down, the same death wish … ”
I have reproduced these paragraphs, again with grateful acknowledgment to that unique authority on the subject, Mr. Malcolm Muggeridge, who included them in an unforgettable denunciation, The Decade of the Great Liberal Death Wish, published in December 1970 by Esquire, New York. This magnificent diatribe was of particular fascination for me because I knew from my own experience the Moscow-bound pilgrims he describes, was involved in the events of that period, and watched the emergence after the Second War of a great throng of their proselytes in the governments of the world, and particularly in the central headquarters of death-wish liberalism, the place of the ravening wolves, on the East River, called “The United Nations”. The building which houses it is tombstone-like, and the masons might very well prepare to incise on its walls, “Here lie the remains of Western civilization, of the once-United States, and of once-Great Britain.”
Founded on a deed of arrant racism, the expulsion of the Semitic Arabs from their ancient Palestinian homeland to make way for non-Semitic Jews from Russia and Poland, it devotes all its energies (and would like to start a war) to attacking “racism” in Southern Africa. Again, Mr. Muggeridge comments, “In a world full of oppressive régimes and terrorist practices, in England the venom and fury of the liberal mind picks on the White South Africans with particular spleen.”
Seldom does an honest word come out of this place, where all men are helots, enserfed to the liberal policies of their governments “which do not govern, but merely control the machinery of government, being themselves controlled by the hidden hand” (Disraeli). In 1973, for instance, the helots were marching towards the General Assembly to give the inevitable rubber-stamp vote of approval to a typically hidden-hand resolution “welcoming the accession to independence of the people of Guinea-Bissau”, (a Portuguese West African territory), “condemning Portugal for its illegal occupation of certain sectors of the Republic” and inviting other states to give “the new republic” all assistance.
The facts of the matter were that they themselves had invented “this new republic” and “welcomed it” for the purpose of swelling the clamour for war against Portugal which was in legal possession of this region. No “new republic” had been established there; the local terrorists had merely sent agents to report that they had conquered the territory, knowing that such a claim would be accepted by the General Assembly without question.
Before the General Assembly could impress its rubber stamp on this resolution, the helots, in their delegation-dens, found on their desks the following alternative resolution:
The General Assembly
confused by the situation reportedly prevailing in Guinea-Bissau
deeply concerned at its inability to find the newly independent state
puzzled by the conflicting and confusing geographical references given by the parties concerned; having lost a fact-finding mission sent to the area; disregarding such facts as are available
1. Welcomes the accession to independence of the people of Guinea-Bissau
(a) Whomever they maybe
2. Hopes to be able to find the newly independent state
3. Decides to despatch a second fact-finding mission to be composed of 135 members of the General Assembly to be selected by themselves to
(a) Find the first mission
(b) Implement paragraph 2 above
4. Invites all member states, the specialized agencies and other organizations within the U.N. system to join in the search
5. Condemns the Government of Portugal for whatever it may be doing
6. Calls on the Government of Portugal to desist forthwith
7. Decides to keep the situation under continuous review.
Even helots may be allowed a little fun, and a few of them had gathered together to produce this alternative resolution. The helots well know what frauds they are and I happened to learn that there was loud laughter in the rooms of the delegations which were about to vote for the original resolution when this “alternative” one was circulated around. It at once became a collector’s piece among the helots and was tenderly stored in hundreds of albums which, in later years of retirement, would help ageing helots to pass the long winter evenings in happy reminiscence of the good old days at Helots Hall on East 42nd Street.
While this extraordinary pantomime was being enacted, I was already engaged in my long journey around the beleaguered areas of Southern Africa.
I began with Angola.
Oct 13, 2008 - 9:37 pm 133. On disagreeing with a friend « Buttle’s World:[...] buttle @ 20:48 Roger Kimball has a thoughtful post about Christopher Buckley’s sprint off the reservation. Don’t get me wrong. Let me repeat what long-time readers know: I have plenty of criticisms of [...]
Oct 13, 2008 - 9:48 pm 134. Norman Clemo:South Africa
OBAMA’S ” UNHOLY ALLIANCE ” with the AMERICAN LEFT is ominous and chilling . Before Americans vote for their next president they must read David Horowitz’s account of the Left’s alliance with Islamic radicals and its influence on the Democrats’ approach to the War on Terror ( “Unholy Alliance : Radical Islam and the American Left” by David Horowitz )
The Great Liberal Death Wish
Malcolm Muggeridge
Muggeridge was one of the few western journalists to recognize the evil of Soviet Communism when most western thinkers were still taken in by the utopian promises of Marxism. For his honest reporting on the Stalinist show trials he lost his job and was blacklisted for a time. He never lost his critical touch.
The Great Liberal Death Wish” is a subject that I’ve given a lot of thought to and have written about, and it would be easy for me to read to you a long piece that I’ve written on the subject. But somehow in the atmosphere of this delightful college, I want to have a shot at just talking about this notion of the great liberal death wish as it has arisen in my life, as I’ve seen it, and the deductions I’ve made from it. I should also plead guilty to being responsible for the general heading of these lectures, namely, “The Humane Holocaust: The Auschwitz Formula. ”
Later on I want to say something about all this, showing how this humane holocaust, this dreadful slaughter that began with 50 million babies last year, will undoubtedly be extend-ed to the senile old and the mentally afflicted and mongoloid children, and so on, because of the large amount of money that maintaining them costs. It is all the more ironical when one thinks about the holocaust western audiences, and the German population in particular, have been shuddering over, as it has been presented on their TV and cinema screens. Note this compassionate or humane holocaust, if, as I fear, it gains momentum, will quite put that other in the shade. And, as I shall try to explain, what is even more ironical, the actual considerations that led to the German holocaust were not, as is commonly suggested, due to Nazi terrorism, but were based upon the sort of legislation that advocates of euthanasia, or “mercy killing,” in this country and in western Europe, are trying to get enacted. It’s not true that the German holocaust was simply a war crime, as it was judged to be at Nuremberg. In point of fact, it was based upon a perfectly coherent, legally enacted decree approved and operated by the German medical profession before the Nazis took over power. In other words, from the point of view of the Guinness Book of Records you can say that in our mad world it takes about thirty years to transform a war crime into a compassionate act.
But I’m going to deal with that later. I want first of all to look at this question of the great liberal death wish. And I was very delighted that you should have got here for this CCA program the film on Dostoevsky for which I did the commentary, because his novel The Devils[1] is the most extraordinary piece of prophecy about this great liberal death wish. All the characters in it, the circumstances of it, irresistibly recall what we mean by the great liberal death wish. You cannot imagine what a strange experience it was doing that filming in the USSR. I quoted extensively from the speech that Dostoevsky delivered when the Pushkin Memorial was unveiled in Moscow, and his words were considered to be, in terms of then current ideologies, about the most reactionary words ever spoken. They amounted to a tremendous onslaught on this very thing that we’re talking about, this great liberal death wish, as it existed in Russia in the latter part of the last century. The characters in the book match very well the cast of the liberal death wish in our society and in our time. You even have the interesting fact that the old liberal, Stephan Trofimovich Verkovensky, who is a sort of male impersonator of Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, with all the sentimental notions that go therewith, is the father of Peter Verkovensky, a Baader Meinhof character, based on a Russian nihilist of Dostoevsky’s time, Sergey Nechayef. To me, it’s one of the most extraordinary pieces of modern prophecy that has ever been. Especially when Peter Verkovensky says, as he does, that what we need are a few generations of debauchery – debauchery at its most vicious and most horrible – followed by a little sweet bloodletting, and then the turmoil will begin. I put it to you that this bears a rather uneasy resemblance to the sort of thing that is happening at this moment in the western world.
Now I want to throw my mind back to my childhood, to the sitting room in the little suburban house in south London where I grew up. On Saturday evenings my father and his cronies would assemble there, and they would plan together the downfall of the capitalist system and the replacement of it by one which was just and humane and egalitarian and peaceable, etc. These were my first memories of a serious conversation about our circumstances in the world. I used to hide in a big chair and hope not to be noticed, because I was so interested. And I accepted completely the views of these good men, that once they were able to shape the world as they wanted it to be, they would create a perfect state of affairs in which peace would reign, prosperity would expand, men would be brotherly, and considerate, and there would be no exploitation of man by man, nor any ruthless oppression of individuals. And I firmly believed that, once their plans were fulfilled, we would realize an idyllic state of affairs of such a nature. They were good men, they were honest men, they were sincere men. Unlike their prototypes on the continent of Europe, they were men from the chapels. It was a sort of spillover from the practice of nonconformist Christianity, not a brutal ideology, and I was entirely convinced that such a brotherly, contented, loving society would come to pass once they were able to establish themselves in power.
My father used to speak a lot at open air meetings, and when I was very small I used to follow him around because I adored him, as I still do. He was a very wonderful and good man. He’d had a very harsh upbringing himself, and this was his dream of how you could transform human society so that human beings, instead of maltreating one another and exploiting one another, would be like brothers. I remember he used to make quite good jokes at these outdoor meetings when we had set up our little platform, and a few small children and one or two passers-by had gathered briefly to listen. One joke I particularly appreciated and used to wait for even though I had heard a hundred times ran like this: “Well ladies and gentlemen,” my father would begin, “you tell me one thing. Why is it that it is his majesty’s navy and his majesty’s stationery office and his majesty’s customs but it’s the national debt? Why isn’t the debt his majesty’s?” It always brought the house down.
Such was my baptism into the notion of a kingdom of Heaven on earth, into what I was going to understand ultimately to be the great liberal death wish. Inevitably, my father’s heroes were the great intellectuals of the time, who banded themselves together in what was called the Fabian Society, of which he was a member – a very active member. For instance, Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Harold Laski, people of that sort. All the leftist elite, like Sydney – and Beatrice Webb, belonged to this Fabian Society, and in my father’s eyes they were princes among men. I accepted his judgment.
Once I had a slight shock when he took me to a meeting of the Fabian Society where H. G. Wells was speaking, and I can remember vividly his high squeaky voice as he said – and it stuck in my mind long afterward -”We haven’t got time to read the Bible. We haven’t got time to read the history of this obscure nomadic tribe in the Middle East.” Subsequently, when I learned of the things that Wells had got time for, the observation broke upon me in all its richness.
Anyway, that for me was how my impressions of life began. I was sent to Cambridge University, which of course in those days consisted very largely of boys from what we call public schools, and you call private schools. Altogether, it was for me a quite different sort of milieu, where the word socialist in those days – this was in 1920 when I went to Cambridge at 17 – was almost unknown. We who had been to a government secondary school and then to Cambridge were regarded as an extraordinary and rather distasteful phenomenon. But my views about how the world was going to be made better remained firmly entrenched in the talk of my father and his cronies. Of course, in the meantime had come the First World War, to be followed by an almost insane outburst of expectations that henceforth peace would prevail in the world, that we would have a League of Nations to ensure that there would be no more wars, and gradually everybody would get more prosperous and everything would be better and better. That rather lugubrious figure Woodrow Wilson arrived on the scene, to be treated with the utmost veneration. I can see him now, lantern-jawed, wearing his tall hat – somehow for me he didn’t fill the bill of a knight in shining armor who was going to lead us to everlasting peace. Somehow the flavor of Princeton about him detracted from that picture, but still I accepted him as an awesome figure.
My time at Cambridge was a rather desolate time. I never much enjoyed being educated, and have continued to believe that education is a rather overrated experience. Perhaps this isn’t the most suitable place in the world to say that, but such is my opinion. I think that it is part of the liberal dream that somehow or other – and it was certainly my father’s view – people, in becoming educated, instead of on Sundays racing their dogs or studying racing forms, or anything like that, would take to singing madrigals or reading Paradise Lost aloud. This is another dream that didn’t quite come true.
Anyway, from Cambridge I went off to India, to teach at a Christian college there, and I must say it was an extremely agreeable experience. The college was in a remote part of what was then Travancore, but is now Kerala. It was not one of the missionary colleges, but associated with the indigenous Syrian Church, which you may know is a very ancient church, dating back to the fourth century, and now there are a million or more Syrian Christians. In its way it was quite an idyllic existence, but of course one came up against naked power for the first time. I had never thought of power before as something separate from the rest of life. But in India, under the British raj, with a relatively few white men ruling over three or four hundred million Indians, I came face to face with power unrelated to elections or any other representative device in the great liberal dream that became the great liberal death wish. However, it was a pleasant time, and of course the Indian nationalist movement was beginning, and Ghandi came to the college where I was teaching. This extraordinary little gargoyle of a man appeared, and held forth, and everybody got tremendously excited, and shouted against Imperialism, and the Empire in which at that time the great majority of the British people firmly believed, and which they thought would continue forever. If you ventured to say, as I did on the boat going to India, that it might come to an end before long, they laughed you to scorn, being firmly convinced that God had decided that the British should rule over a quarter of the world, and that nothing could ever change this state of affairs. Which again opened up a new vista about what this business of power signified, and how it worked, not as a theory, but in practice. We used to boast in those days that we had an Empire on which the sun never set, and now we have a commonwealth on which it never rises, and I can’t quite say which concept strikes me as being the more derisory.
That was India, and then I came back to England and for a time taught in an elementary school in Birmingham, and married my wife Kitty. (I wish she were here today because she’s very nice. We’ve been married now for 51 years, so I am entitled to speak well of her.) She was the niece of Beatrice and Sydney Webb, so it was like marrying into a sort of aristocracy of the Left. After our wedding, we went off to Egypt, where I taught at the University of Cairo, and it was there that the dreadful infection of journalism got into my system. Turning aside from the honorable occupation of teaching, I started writing articles about the wrongs of the Egyptian people, how they were clamoring, and rightly so, for a democratic setup, and how they would never be satisfied with less than one man one vote and all that went therewith. I never heard any Egyptian say that this was his position, but I used to watch those old pashas in Groppi’s cafe’ smoking their hubble-bubble pipes, and imagined that under their tabooshes was a strong feeling that they would never for an instant countenance anything less than full representative government. That at least was what I wrote in my articles, and they went flying over to England, and, like homing pigeons, in through the windows of the Guardian office in Manchester, at that time a high citadel of liberalism. That was where the truth was being expounded, that was where enlightenment reigned. In due course I was asked to join the editorial staff of the Guardian, which to me was a most marvelous thing. I may say that the work of teaching at Cairo University was not an arduous job, essentially for three reasons. One was that the students didn’t understand English; the second that they were nearly always on strike or otherwise engaged in political demonstrations, and thirdly they were often stupified with hashish. So I had a lot of leisure on my hands.
Incidentally, to be serious for a moment, it seems to me a most extraordinary thing that at that time you wouldn’t have found anybody, Egyptian or English or anybody else, who wasn’t absolutely clear in his mind that hashish was a most appalling and disastrous addiction. So you can imagine how strange it was forty years later for me to hear life peeresses and people like that insisting that hashish didn’t do any harm to anybody, and was even beneficial. I see that in Canada it is going to be legalized, which will mean one more sad, unnecessary hazard comes into our world.
Anyway, these were the golden days of liberalism when the Manchester Guardian was widely read, and even believed. Despite all its misprints, you could make out roughly speaking what it was saying, and what we typed out was quite likely, to our great satisfaction, to be quoted in some paper in – Baghdad or Smyrna as being the opinion of our very influential organ of enlightened liberalism. I remember my first day I was there, and somehow it symbolizes the whole experience. I was asked to write a leader – a short leader of about 120 words – on corporal punishment. At some head-masters’ conference, it seemed, words had been spoken about corporal punishment and I was to produce appropriate comment. So I put my head into the room next to mine, and asked the man who was working there: “What’s our line on corporal punishment?” Without looking up from his type-writer, he replied: “The same as capital, only more so.” So I knew exactly what to tap out, you see. That was how I got into the shocking habit of pontificating about what was going on in the world; observing that the Greeks did not seem to want an orderly government, or that one despaired sometimes of the Irish having any concern for law and order; weighty pronouncement tapped out on a typewriter, deriving from nowhere, and for all one knew, concerning no one.
We were required to end anything we wrote on a hopeful note, because liberalism is a hopeful creed. And so, however appalling and black the situation that we described, we would always conclude with some sentence like: “It is greatly to be hoped that moderate men of all shades of opinion will draw together, and that wiser councils may yet prevail.” How many times I gave expression to such jejune hopes! Well, I soon grew weary of this, because it seemed to me that immoderate men were rather strongly in evidence, and I couldn’t see that wiser councils were prevailing anywhere. The depression was on by that time, I’m talking now of 1932–33. It was on especially in Lancashire, and it seemed as though our whole way of life was cracking up, and, of course, I looked across at the USSR with a sort of longing, thinking that there was an alternative, some other way in which people could live, and I managed to maneuver matters so that I was sent to Moscow as the Guardian correspondent, arriving there fully prepared to see in the Soviet regime the answer to all our troubles, only to discover in a very short time that though it might be an answer, it was a very unattractive one.
It’s difficult to convey to you what a shock this was, realizing that what I had supposed to be the new brotherly way of life my father and his cronies had imagined long before, was simply on examination an appalling tyranny, in which the only thing that mattered, the only reality, was power. So again, like the British raj, in the USSR I was confronted with power as the absolute and ultimate arbiter. However, that was a thing that one could take in one’s stride. How I first came to conceive the notion of the great liberal death wish was not at all in consequence of what was happening in the USSR, which, as I came to reflect after-ward, was simply the famous lines in the Magnificat working out, “He hath put down the mighty from their seat and hath exalted the humble and meek,” whereupon, of course, the humble and meek become mighty in their turn and have to be put down. That was just history, something that happens in the world; people achieve power, exercise power, abuse power, are booted out of power, and then it all begins again. The thing that impressed me, and the thing that touched off my awareness of the great liberal death wish, my sense that western man was, as it were, sleep-walking into his own ruin, was the extraordinary performance of the liberal intelligentsia, who, in those days, flocked to Moscow like pilgrims to Mecca. And they were one and all utterly delighted and excited by what they saw there. Clergymen walked serenely and happily through the anti-god museums, politicians claimed that no system of society could possibly be more equitable and just, lawyers admired Soviet justice, and economists praised the Soviet economy. They all wrote articles in this sense which we resident journalists knew were completely nonsensical. It’s impossible to exaggerate to you the impression that this made on me. Mrs. Webb had said to Kitty and me: “You’ll find that in the USSR Sydney and I are icons. ” As a matter of fact they were, Marxist icons.
How could this be? How could this extraordinary credulity exist in the minds of people who were adulated by one and all as maestros of discernment and judgment? It was from that moment that I began to get the feeling that a liberal view of life was not what I’d supposed it to be – a creative movement which would shape the future – but rather a sort of death wish. How otherwise could you explain how people, in their own country ardent for equality, bitter opponents of capital punishment and all for more humane treatment of people in prison, supporters, in fact, of every good cause, should in the USSR prostrate themselves before a regime ruled over brutal-ly and oppressively and arbitrarily by a privileged party oligarchy? I still ponder over the mystery of how men displaying critical intelligence in other fields could be so astonishingly deluded. I tell you, if ever you are looking for a good subject for a thesis, you could get a very fine one out of a study of the books that were written by people like the Dean of Canterbury, Julian Huxley, Harold Laski, Bernard Shaw, or the Webbs about the Soviet regime. In the process you would come upon a compendium of fatuity such as has seldom, if ever, existed on earth. And I would really recommend it; after all, the people who wrote these books were, and continue to be regarded as, pundits, whose words must be very, very seriously heeded and considered.
I recall in their yellow jackets a famous collection in England called the Left Book Club. You would be amazed at the gullibility that’s expressed. We foreign journalists in Moscow used to amuse ourselves, as a matter of fact, by competing with one another as to who could wish upon one of these intelligentsia visitors to the USSR the most out-rageous fantasy. We would tell them, for instance, that the shortage of milk in Moscow was entirely due to the fact that all milk was given nursing mothers – things like that. If they put it in the articles they subsequently wrote, then you’d score a point. One story I floated myself, for which I received considerable acclaim, was that the huge queues outside food shops came about because the Soviet workers were so ardent in building Socialism that they just wouldn’t rest, and the only way the government could get them to rest for even two or three hours was organizing a queue for them to stand in. I laugh at it all now, but at the time you can imagine what a shock it was to someone like myself, who had been brought up to regard liberal intellectuals as the samurai, the absolute elite, of the human race, to find that they could be taken in by deceptions which a half-witted boy would see through in an instant. I never got over that; it always remained in my mind as something that could never be erased. I could never henceforth regard the intelligentsia as other than credulous fools who nonetheless became the media’s prophetic voices, their heirs and successors remaining so still. That’s when I began to think seriously about the great liberal death wish.
In due course, I came back to England to await the Second World War, in the course of which I found myself engaged in Intelligence duties. And let me tell you that if there is one thing more fantastical than news, it is Intelligence. News itself is a sort of fantasy; and when you actually go collecting news, you realize that this is so. In a certain sense, you create news; you dream news up yourself and then send it. But that’s nothing to the fantasy of Intelligence. Of the two, I would say that news seems really quite a sober and considered commodity compared with your offerings when you’re an Intelligence agent.
Anyway, when in 1945 I found myself a civilian again, I tried to sort out my thoughts about the great wave of optimism that followed the Second World War – for me, a repeat performance. It was then that I came to realize how, in the name of progress and compassion, the most terrible things were going to be done, preparing the way for the great humane holocaust, about which I have spoken. There was, it seemed to me, a built in propensity in this liberal world-view whereby the opposite of what was intended came to pass. Take the case of education. Education was the great mumbo–jumbo of progress, the assumption being that educating people would make them grow better and better, more and more objective and intelligent. Actually, as more and more money is spent on education, illiteracy is increasing. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it didn’t end up with virtually the whole revenue of the western countries being spent on education, and a condition of almost total illiteracy resulting therefrom. It’s quite on the cards.
Now I want to try to get to grips with this strange state of affairs. Let’s look again at the humane holocaust. What happened in Germany was that long before the Nazis got into power, a great propaganda was undertaken to sterilize people who were considered to be useless or a liability to society, and after that to introduce what they called “mercy killing.” This happened long before the Nazis set up their extermination camps at Auschwitz and elsewhere, and was based upon the highest humanitarian considerations. You see what I’m getting at? On a basis of liberal-humanism, there is no creature in the universe greater than man, and the future of the human race rests only with human beings themselves, which leads infallibly to some sort of suicidal situation. It’s to me quite clear that that is so, the evidence is on every hand. The efforts that men make to bring about their own happiness, their own ease of life, their own self-indulgence, will in due course produce the opposite, leading me to the absolutely inescapable conclusion that human beings cannot live and operate in this world without some concept of a being greater than themselves, and of a purpose which transcends their own egotistic or greedy desires. Once you eliminate the notion of a God, a creator, once you eliminate the notion that the creator has a purpose for us, and that life consists essentially in fulfilling that purpose, then you are bound, as Pascal points out, to induce the megalomania of which we’ve seen so many manifestations in our time – in the crazy dictators, as in the lunacies of people who are rich, or who consider themselves to be important or celebrated in the western world. Alternatively, human beings relapse into mere carnality, into being animals. I see this process going on irresistably, of which the holocaust is only just one example. If you envisage men as being only men, you are bound to see human society, not in Christian terms as a family, but as a factory–farm in which the only consideration that matters is the well–being of the livestock and the prosperity or productivity of the enterprise. That’s where you land yourself. And it is in that situation that western man is increasingly finding himself.
This might seem to be a despairing conclusion, but it isn’t, you know, actually. First of all, the fact that we can’t work out the liberal dream in practical terms is not bad news, but good news. Because if you could work it out, life would be too banal, too tenth-rate to be worth bothering about. Apart from that, we have been given the most extraordinary sign of the truth of things, which I continually find myself thinking about. This is that the most perfect and beautiful expressions of man’s spiritual aspirations come, not from the liberal dream in any of its manifestations, but from people in the forced labor camps of the USSR. And this is the most extraordinary phenomenon, and one that of course receives absolutely no attention in the media. From the media point of view it’s not news, and in any case the media do not want to know about it. But this is the fact for which there is a growing amount of evidence. I was reading about it in a long essay by a Yugoslav writer Mihajlo Mihajlov,[2] who spent some years in a prison in Yugoslavia. He cites case after case of people who, like Solzhenitsyn, say that enlightenment came to them in the forced labor camps. They understood what freedom was when they had lost their freedom, they understood what the purpose of life was when they seemed to have no future. They say, moreover, that when it’s a question of choosing whether to save your soul or your body, the man who chooses to save his soul gathers strength thereby to go on living, whereas the man who chooses to save his body at the expense of his soul loses both body and soul. In other words, fulfilling exactly what our Lord said, that he who hates his life in this world shall keep his life for all eternity, as those who love their lives in this world will assuredly lose them. Now, that’s where I see the light in our darkness. There’s an image I love – if the whole world were to be covered with concrete, there still would be some cracks in it, and through these cracks green shoots would come. The testimonies from the labor camps are the green shoots we can see in the world, breaking out from the monolithic power now dominating ever greater areas of it. In contradistinction, this is the liberal death wish, holding out the fallacious and ultimately destructive hope that we can construct a happy, fulfilled life in terms of our physical and material needs, and in the moral and intellectual dimensions of our mortality.
I feel so strongly at the end of my life that nothing can happen to us in any circumstances that is not part of God’s purpose for us. Therefore, we have nothing to fear, nothing to worry about, except that we should rebel against His purpose, that we should fail to detect it and fail to establish some sort of relationship with Him and His divine will. On that basis, there can be no black despair, no throwing in of our hand. We can watch the institutions and social structures of our time collapse – and I think you who are young are fated to watch them collapse – and we can reckon with what seems like an irresistably growing power of materialism and materialist societies. But, it will not happen that that is the end of the story. As St. Augustine said – and I love to think of it when he received the news in Carthage that Rome had been sacked: Well, if that’s happened, it’s a great catas-trophe, but we must never forget that the earthly cities that men build they destroy, but there is also the City of God which men didn’t build and can’t destroy. And he devoted the next seventeen years of his life to working out the relationship between the earthly city and the City of God – the earthly city where we live for a short time, and the City of God whose citizens we are for all eternity.
You know, it’s a funny thing, but when you’re old, as I am, there are all sorts of extremely pleasant things that happen to you. One of them is, you realize that history is nonsense, but I won’t go into that now. The pleasantest thing of all is that you wake up in the night at about, say, three a.m., and you find that you are half in and half out of your battered old carcass. And it seems quite a toss-up whether you go back and resume full occupancy of your mortal body, or make off toward the bright glow you see in the sky, the lights of the City of God. In this limbo between life and death, you know beyond any shadow of doubt that, as an infinitesimal particle of God’s creation, you are a participant in God’s purpose for His creation, and that that purpose is loving and not hating, is creative and not destructive, is everlasting and not temporal, is universal and not particular. With this certainty comes an extraordinary sense of comfort and joy.
Nothing that happens in this world need shake that feeling; all the happenings in this world, including the most terrible disasters and suffering, will be seen in eternity as in some mysterious way a blessing, as a part of God’s love. We ourselves are part of that love, we belong to that scene, and only in so far as we belong to that scene does our existence here have any reality or any worth. All the rest is fantasy – -whether the fantasy of power which we see in the authoritarian states around us, or the fantasy of the great liberal death wish in terms of affluence and self-indulgence. The essential feature, and necessity of life is to know reality, which means knowing God. Otherwise our mortal existence is, as Saint Teresa of Avila said, no more than a night in a second–class hotel.
1. Sometimes translated as The Possessed.
2. “Mystical Experience of the Labor Camps,” included in his excellent book Underground Notes.
At the time of the original publication, Malcolm Muggeridge was quite simply one of the most delightful, articulate, brilliant thinkers in the world. His career has included journalist and Moscow correspondent for the Manchester Guardian; agent for British Intelligence in Africa during World War II; Liaison – Officer with the Free French; Deputy Editor of the Daily Telegraph; Editor of Punch; and Book Reviewer for Esquire. In addition to several anthologies of his own writings, he is a published novelist and playwright. His television career began when television began, and has continued in the United States, the United Kingdom and throughout the English-speaking world. In England he had worked extensively with the B.B.C.
Imprimis, the monthly journal of Hillsdale College. May 1979, Vol 8, No. 5.
Copyright © 2002 Reprinted by permission from IMPRIMIS, the national speech digest of Hillsdale College (www.hillsdale.edu).
Oct 13, 2008 - 9:57 pm 135. schnargley:In boldy choosing CHANGE, Chris Buckley has simply demonstrated his far superior intellect, breeding, and subtlty than the mental defect plebes like his father, and Roger Kimball. Mr. Buckley;s intelligence is sublime enough to realize that the old obtuse America of pride, simplistic values, and traditional worldview needs to CHANGE. Old war heroes and hockey moms, flagwavers and free marketeers, are utterly droll, gauche, and passé in the new America, the one emerging from the academia halls of Harvard, to the golf courses of Block Island, from the sushi bars of Georgetown, to the spas of South Beach.
Oct 14, 2008 - 12:59 am 136. ehunter:QUIT WASTING YOUR TIME OVER “CHRISTO”
Oct 14, 2008 - 3:01 am 137. B Dubya:You sound like the sheltered little preppy that just discovered the really cool kid
at prep school was nothing more than spoiled shallow twerp who had enough money to hide
behind.
You know, when a friend of mine emailed Chris Buckley’s statement in support of He Who Shall Not Be Named, I had to respond that I grieved for the memory of Bill Buckley.
Clearly, somebody got in there ahead of Bill, because there is no way that he could have sired someone that fundamentally stupid. He sounds more like a Kennedy inbreeding program product.
Oct 14, 2008 - 5:08 am 138. Otis:Pull out of Iraq?!?!
Perhaps the U.S. should pull out of Chicago?
Body count:
In the last six months:
292 killed
(murdered) in Chicago;
221 killed in Iraq.
Chicago…. Who Runs it: Senators: Barack Obama & Dick Durbin
Rep: Jesse Jackson Jr.,
Illinois Gov: Rod Blogojevich,
Illinois House leader Mike Madigan,
Illinois Atty. Gen. Lisa Madigan (daughter of Mike),
Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley (son of Mayor Richard J. Daley)
…..our leadership in Illinois…..all Democrats.
Thank you for the combat zone in Chicago.
Of course, they’re all blaming each other!
Can’t blame Republicans; they’re aren’t any!
State pension fund $44 Billion in debt, worst in country.
Cook County
(Chicago) sales tax 10.25% highest in country. (Look ‘em up if you want).
Chicago school system rated one of the worst in the country.
This is the political culture that Obama comes from in Illinois.
And he’s gonna ‘fix’ Washington politics for us?
Wake Up America!
Pull out of Iraq?!?!
Perhaps the U.S. should pull out of Chicago?
Body count:
In the last six months:
292 killed
(murdered) in Chicago;
221 killed in Iraq.
Chicago…. Who Runs it: Senators: Barack Obama & Dick Durbin
Rep: Jesse Jackson Jr.,
Illinois Gov: Rod Blogojevich,
Illinois House leader Mike Madigan,
Illinois Atty. Gen. Lisa Madigan (daughter of Mike),
Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley (son of Mayor Richard J. Daley)
…..our leadership in Illinois…..all Democrats.
Thank you for the combat zone in Chicago.
Of course, they’re all blaming each other!
Can’t blame Republicans; they’re aren’t any!
State pension fund $44 Billion in debt, worst in country.
Cook County
(Chicago) sales tax 10.25% highest in country. (Look ‘em up if you want).
Chicago school system rated one of the worst in the country.
Oct 14, 2008 - 6:27 am 139. Otis:This is the political culture that Obama comes from in Illinois.
And he’s gonna ‘fix’ Washington politics for us?
Wake Up America
What do the top ten cities with the highest poverty rate all have in common?
Detroit, MI (1st on the poverty rate list) hasn’t elected a Republican mayor since 1961.
Buffalo, NY (2nd) hasn’t elected one since 1954
Cincinnati, OH (3rd) .. since 1984
Cleveland, OH (4th) .. since 1989
Miami, FL (5th) has never had a Republican mayor
St. Louis, MO (6th) .. since 1949
El Paso, TX (7th) has never had a Republican mayor
Milwaukee, WI (8th) .. since 1908
Philadelphia, PA (9th) .. since 1952
Newark, NJ (10th) .. since 1907
Einstein once said, ‘The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.’
It is the disadvantaged who habitually elect Democrats yet are still disadvantaged. (writer unknown)
Oct 14, 2008 - 6:28 am 140. DEGUELLO:SCHNARGLEY: YOUR ASYLUM CALLED,THEY ARE EMBARRASSED BY YOUR ESCAPE,AND NEED YOU TO RETURN AS SOON AS POSSIBLE,BEFORE THE ANTI PSYCHOTIC MEDS WEAR OFF.
Oct 14, 2008 - 8:35 am 141. AdrianS:Song sung for all Obama followers
http://www.nextgenerationcorp.com/nextgenblog/
Oct 14, 2008 - 8:52 am 142. Atrooper4:William Ayers was absolutely right to bomb empty buildings. To avoid being also guilty of the murder of millions of innocent people, it is categorically imperative according to the moral laws of every major philosophy and religion that every taxpayer must do everything possible to stop an unjust* war being fought with his/her taxes.
Ayers and the other war protesters were ultimately successful in driving Nixon out or his mind and out of office and ending the holocaust that murdered five million innocent Vietnamese people. All Americans owe them a moral debt that cannot be repaid.
* See “In Retrospect”, a book written years after the war by ex-Secretary of Defense Robert MacNamara, who designed and managed the war against Vietnam for seven years under Kennedy and Johnson and who knew as much about the background of the war and its cause as anyone else Five million Vietnamese were killed over a thirty year period while successfully defending their backward nation against France and the USA, the most technologically advanced nations, in a war that MacNamara finally admitted was “…wrong, terribly wrong” and that nobody tries to defend today.
Also see the book “Mandate for Change”, 1958, written by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. (When France refused to hold UN supervised elections, he accepted the strings of the puppet government.) In the book, he reports that the CIA told him that “more than 80% of the Vietnamese people support Ho Chi Minh”.
Oct 14, 2008 - 9:41 am 143. One Fine Jay » Conflicting ideas:[...] “Conservative” persecution of Governor Sarah Palin. David Brooks, Christopher Buckley (rebutted by Roger Kimball), Kathleen Parker (rebutted by KLo), and James Joyner all might think that Gov. Palin is literally [...]
Oct 14, 2008 - 10:56 am 144. Steve:Since this thread touches on themes of education vs. common sense, and since many commenters have mentioned Sarah Palin, I wanted to highlight Spengler’s 10/7 column “Hockey moms and capital markets,” which was just electrifying.
Spengler traces the continuing attractiveness of America’s capital markets, even in crisis, back to America’s strong yeoman class — the ordinary Todds and Sarahs who, while certainly no Yalies, nonetheless maintain order and keep things relatively honest and stable. Excerpt:
“Asian capital markets cannot absorb Asia’s savings. What does America have that Asia doesn’t have? The answer is, Sarah Palin – not Sarah Palin the vice presidential candidate, but Sarah Palin the “hockey mom” turned small-town mayor and reforming Alaska governor. All the PhDs and MBAs in the world can’t make a capital market work, but ordinary people like Sarah Palin can. Laws depend on the will of the people to enforce them. It is the initiative of ordinary people that makes America’s political system the world’s most reliable.”
Oct 14, 2008 - 11:02 am 145. ROB:After the most vile and disgusting things have been said about Sarah Palin this high born clown jumps in. It is ignoble.
Oct 14, 2008 - 11:55 am 146. Freida:Obama and Acorn
Community organizers, phony voters, and your tax dollars.Article
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At the recent Emmy Awards, historian Laura Linney averred that America’s Founders had been “community organizers” — like Barack Obama. Too bad they aren’t like that any more. Mr. Obama’s kind of organizers work at Acorn, the militant advocacy group that is turning up in reports about voter fraud across the country.
APAcorn — the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now — has been around since 1970 and boasts 350,000 members. We’ve written about them for years, but Acorn is now getting more attention as John McCain’s campaign makes an issue of the fraud reports and Acorn’s ties to Mr. Obama. It’s about time someone exposed this shady outfit that uses government dollars to lobby for larger government.
Acorn uses various affiliated groups to agitate for “a living wage,” for “affordable housing,” for “tax justice” and union and environmental goals, as well as against school choice and welfare reform. It was a major contributor to the subprime meltdown by pushing lenders to make home loans on easy terms, conducting “strikes” against banks so they’d lower credit standards.
But the organization’s real genius is getting American taxpayers to foot the bill. According to a 2006 report from the Employment Policies Institute (EPI), Acorn has been on the federal take since 1977. For instance, Acorn’s American Institute for Social Justice claimed $240,000 in tax money between fiscal years 2002 and 2003. Its American Environmental Justice Project received 100% of its revenue from government grants in the same years. EPI estimates the Acorn Housing Corporation alone received some $16 million in federal dollars from 1997-2007. Only recently, Democrats tried and failed to stuff an “affordable housing” provision into the $700 billion bank rescue package that would have let politicians give even more to Acorn.
All this money gives Acorn the ability to pursue its other great hobby: electing liberals. Acorn is spending $16 million this year to register new Democrats and is already boasting it has put 1.3 million new voters on the rolls. The big question is how many of these registrations are real.
The Michigan Secretary of State told the press in September that Acorn had submitted “a sizeable number of duplicate and fraudulent applications.” Earlier this month, Nevada’s Democratic Secretary of State Ross Miller requested a raid on Acorn’s offices, following complaints of false names and fictional addresses (including the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys). Nevada’s Clark County Registrar of Voters Larry Lomax said he saw rampant fraud in 2,000 to 3,000 applications Acorn submitted weekly.
Officials in Ohio are investigating voter fraud connected with Acorn, and Florida’s Seminole County is withholding Acorn registrations that appear fraudulent. New Mexico, North Carolina and Missouri are looking into hundreds of dubious Acorn registrations. Wisconsin is investigating Acorn employees for, according to an election official, “making people up or registering people that were still in prison.”
Then there’s Lake County, Indiana, which has already found more than 2,100 bogus applications among the 5,000 Acorn dumped right before the deadline. “All the signatures looked exactly the same,” said Ruthann Hoagland, of the county election board. Bridgeport, Connecticut estimates about 20% of Acorn’s registrations were faulty. As of July, the city of Houston had rejected or put on hold about 40% of the 27,000 registration cards submitted by Acorn.
That’s just this year. In 2004, four Acorn employees were indicted in Ohio for submitting false voter registrations. In 2005, two Colorado Acorn workers were found to have submitted false registrations. Four Acorn Missouri employees were indicted in 2006; five were found guilty in Washington state in 2007 for filling out registration forms with names from a phone book.
Which brings us to Mr. Obama, who got his start as a Chicago “community organizer” at Acorn’s side. In 1992 he led voter registration efforts as the director of Project Vote, which included Acorn. This past November, he lauded Acorn’s leaders for being “smack dab in the middle” of that effort. Mr. Obama also served as a lawyer for Acorn in 1995, in a case against Illinois to increase access to the polls.
During his tenure on the board of Chicago’s Woods Fund, that body funneled more than $200,000 to Acorn. More recently, the Obama campaign paid $832,000 to an Acorn affiliate. The campaign initially told the Federal Election Commission this money was for “staging, sound, lighting.” It later admitted the cash was to get out the vote.
The Obama campaign is now distancing itself from Acorn, claiming Mr. Obama never organized with it and has nothing to do with illegal voter registration. Yet it’s disingenuous to channel cash into an operation with a history of fraud and then claim you’re shocked to discover reports of fraud. As with Rev. Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers, Mr. Obama was happy to associate with Acorn when it suited his purposes. But now that he’s on the brink of the Presidency, he wants to disavow his ties.
The Justice Department needs to treat these fraud reports as something larger than a few local violators. The question is whether Acorn is systematically subverting U.S. election law — on the taxpayer’s dime.
Oct 14, 2008 - 2:11 pm 147. theMonk:As a Free Market supporter, I strongly believe that we should put our differences aside and support and elect an intelligent person – B. Obama.
Oct 14, 2008 - 2:57 pm 148. Californio:first: atrooper 4 – Most naturally, companero, it is absolutely the imperative of the conscious to act. That is why you support the bombing of unoccuppied abortion clinics – to “stop the holocaust” as you put it. Just as you are not bothered by the attempted murder of workers, to “free” these same proles from the yoke of oppression (ironically – by your, and Ayers, PARENTS) – so too are you not bothered by those so “pro-life” that they resort to attempted (and actual) murder. What moral clarity you have! Now go invest in Lehman brothers like a good little sheep.
Oct 14, 2008 - 3:09 pm 149. Californio:Second:
I keep thinking of the rhetorical convolutions all my former law professors went through in attempting to argue how the Solomon Amendment (no fed funding for those who refuse military JAG recruiters) did not really apply to their law schools after the same academics had so gleefully argued prior that even $1 of federal funds obligated schools to follow anti-discrimination laws.
Suddenly they became a nation of men, not laws – what they really wanted to say was “The legal reasoning itself is irrelevant – the key fact is that we really like the result. It is all just so much moral posturing….”
Ah Ha!!!! Notice Companeros, the “intellectuals” seek to trick us by adopting an attitude of anti-intellectualism! Watch the anti-religious be swept up in snake-dancing rapture while praising the ONE who commands the oceans and skies – death to the non-believing infidels! Embrace the feminists who wear the t-shirts that call Palin a C**t. YES indeed – we are living in upside down times. Can we hold directly conflicting viewpoints AT THE SAME TIME!!???? …………. Yes… WE… CAN!!!
Oct 14, 2008 - 4:16 pm 150. JimCap:Hey, we have to be fair here. And credible. And have some integrity. So, let’s admit it: I like Sarah Palin’s politics too. She speaks for me on so many issues. But she’s not a person I’d hire to manage a major project at my company. She’s just not. If I saw on her resume that she attended five colleges in six years—four of which I’d never heard of—I’d honestly have to hire the person competing against her who graduated from only one college, especially if that one college was Stanford or Brown.
We conservatives look dumb when we don’t call a spade a spade. In business, good intentions and saying the right thing doesn’t cut it. I want results. And I don’t live in a fantasy land where it’s all about wishful thinking and feelings. That’s for liberals.
Why John McCain didn’t choose one of the other conservative women to run with him—and there are dozens in prominent positions, all over our country—I can’t understand. Palin is not a sharp or straight shooter. She’s just not. Why are we surprised when other people can see what is obvious?
Oct 14, 2008 - 6:10 pm 151. Keith L.:So the dilemma is how this “untested 33 year-old produced what Time Magazine has called — with a straight face — ‘the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician,’” and the explanation proposed is that Obama had a ghost-writer.
Um, this is so obvious that I’m a little embarrassed even to have to point it out, but isn’t it more likely that Obama’s book is NOT, in fact, “the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician,” or even an especially well-written one, but that Time Magazine merely said so because a) they love Obama and b) any self-obsessed memoir about a black man’s search for racial identity is going to elicit the same plaudits from guilty white media elites even if it’s literary trash — the same way Obama’s silly speech on race was lauded by the media as the heir apparent to Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech?
Oct 14, 2008 - 7:29 pm 152. RF:JimCap: “If I saw on her resume that she attended five colleges in six years…” BS sir, this line is loaded ‘wid’ too much mountebank.
Oct 15, 2008 - 12:18 am 153. ROB:“We conservatives look dumb…” Ahhh yeahhh, same thing here but your also speaking for too many people. Right, now stop spouting and take the time to write something that changes my mind, if you dare.
Re: not hiring Sarah Palin
Oct 15, 2008 - 11:30 am 154. Pleaseciteyoursource:Exactly what company on the face of the earth would pass over a state governor on the grounds that her colleges were not familiar to the HR director. If there is one I guarantee there will be a new HR director.
Please cite your source or add a correction, as Obama did NOT say Ayers is “just” a guy in the neighborhood. He said, among other things, that he was a guy who lives in the neighborhood, which is true.
There are plenty of other problems with flawed logic and lack of support for your claims in this piece, but actually putting words in someone’s mouth and not offering any source (and a reputable one please, I used the nonpartisan, nonprofit factcheck.org that factchecks both sides but the same info can be found from many other sources as well) for this alleged comment is one of the most obvious and egregious examples.
http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/he_lied_about_bill_ayers.html
Oct 15, 2008 - 1:12 pm 155. The Reformer:You all crack me up. I’m a republican, who voted for Bush twice, but I will vote for Obama this time because McCain has run one of the worst political campaigns ever. He has done nothing to show me as an average, hard working citizen that he will bring change. He is the same ol thing we’ve already had. So stop buying into the ridiculous rehetoric that Obama is a socialist, muslim, terrorist. It’s stupid! It shows a lack of education and pure ignorant thought. Our country is built with so many checks and balances it’s impossible for one man to have that much power…get real and stop scaring yourself and others into things that simply are not true. Obama will be Bill Clinton all over again. McCain will be Bush. After eight years of Clinton look where we were as a country. After eight years of Bush look where we are. Enough said!
Oct 15, 2008 - 8:51 pm 156. Will the Real McCain Please Stand Up? (Or, In Which I Get All Pomo) « phaidimoi logoi:[...] pm Tags: John McCain, Pomo Apparently, Christopher Buckley’s endorsement of Obama has reopened debate about what it means to be an “Obamacon.”For the sake of brevity, I’m not going to touch [...]
Oct 17, 2008 - 9:28 am 157. Tammy:Why would you want Palin to be Vice President? When she ran a State who she and her husband and friends wanted to break away from the USA and become there on country. That right there is enough for me to know she doesn’t think we(the other states) are good enough.
Oct 17, 2008 - 4:20 pm 158. RF:Also on this Ayers issue, so all the students (where Ayers teach) along with their parents “are palling around with a terroist”.
Ok, you done?
Oct 17, 2008 - 8:32 pm 159. Bill Adkins:How about this, pick the underdog? Why you ask? What if…what if he really has the better ideas. I mean, ok so we ignore ALL the other personality news, yes? So now how does taking money away from the rich and giving it to the middle and lower class workers…get the middle and lower class workers higher wages? What? That’s right they will have to get Bachelors degrees. This is America, you have to work hard to make a buck. So you want to throw out the Ford for the Mercedes, go for it. Just remember, ask yourself; am I throwing out the Ford because the Mercedes is more BO-Popular!
Who wrote Dreams of My Father? Not Mark Salter.
Oct 18, 2008 - 2:01 am 160. Anthony Spinelli:H. L. Mencken noted that the average voter equates the truth with a headache. Roger Kimball’s superb defense of Sarah Palin certainly illuminates the truth and hopefully gives a headache to the arugula-gnawing, Georgetown-crawling elite.
Bravo, Roger!
Oct 18, 2008 - 6:30 am 161. Edward A.:Is it true that the top 1% of Americans earn more than all the bottom 50% and this same top 1% of Americans own more assets than 90% of all Americans.
I assume if you are voting Republican, you are in this top 1%, otherwise you are voting against yourself.
Oct 18, 2008 - 6:51 pm 162. Deborah:Re: Dreams from my Father
It’s just silly to say that well-educated, intelligent, well-spoken, and thoughtful person like Barack Obama didn’t and couldn’t have written his own book. It’s a very personal book and it’s hard to imagine that it was ghost-written. But if it was, how does that point to Ayers? I don’t believe that they even knew each other at that time. I am a college teacher and I can tell you that between teaching, grading, and all the other work, it’s a struggle to find the time to write our own books, much less write someone else’s! There is no internal evidence to back up this nonsensical charge — it’s pure paranoia.
Those Obama-haters who don’t think the book is too good for Obama to have written it instead argue that it’s a piece of crap. Come on, guys. Get your story straight!
Oct 19, 2008 - 9:55 pm 163. darkjethro:“Is it true that the top 1% of Americans earn more than all the bottom 50% and this same top 1% of Americans own more assets than 90% of all Americans.”
And the top 5% pay 50% of the taxes – what is your point?
#10 -Thou shalt not covet – Is why I don’t care what somebody else owns.
Go away commie, the adults are talking here.
Oct 23, 2008 - 6:23 pm 164. darkjethro:“It’s just silly to say that well-educated, intelligent, well-spoken, and thoughtful person like Barack Obama didn’t and couldn’t have written his own book”
Well it would be easy to prove he did If we had ANY of his previous writings to compare them to, but for some reason we have none. No papers from college or law school, nothing as a president of the Law Review, nothing from his Tenure as professor or Lawyer, just these two books.
Without any evidence the man can write, Ayers as a ghostwriter sounds much more plausible.
Oct 23, 2008 - 6:36 pm 165. The White Peril 白禍 » Blog Archive » Over and over:[...] to do better on that score last fall. Maybe he did and I missed it, but all I recollect is a curt “I acknowledge that she has performed poorly in some recent interviews.” And yes, I [...]
Jul 11, 2009 - 11:30 am