Conservatives IQ just went down 80%. (Buckley RIP)

[Ronnie Roach]

Thursday, February 28, 2008

Ruminations about Bill Buckley

The Conservative movement lost their last intellectual, “William F Buckley Jr.” With the exception of George Will, all that remains on the right is collections of loud mouth broadcasters, scheming left wing apostates, “known as Neo-Cons”, greedy corporate magnates, Religious fanatics, reactionary lumped males and publicity whores. All these years of right wing protestation about Marxist college professors, it is oblivious that any university no matter how liberal they are pegged by right wing critics would have been more than happy to have Mister Buckley as a residential professor. The academic world admired him. Me, as many people who respected him, thought he was really a left wing intellectual playing the devils advocate. Buckley was no puritanical scold. He smoked pot, rode a Harley Davidson bike, and listened to the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead. Ok, one out of two is not bad.
The only living person who could match wits with Buckley were Gore Vidal, Vidal intimated Buckley so much that he resorted to homophobic ad homonyms. Buckley didn’t suffer modalities from the religious right or the Neo-Conservative movement; he was a maverick in his own way.
Buckley didn’t do so well in his emeritus years. His speech became lethargic and his physical posture got really poor. He was last seen on the Hannity show, Fox News. He used his appearance to sell his latest book. He dodged question from Hannity because Buckley knew that he was a Conservative hack. He didn’t suffer fools. Hannity was fawning all over Buckley like a pre-teen girl with a pop idol, but Buckley continued hawking his book.
William F.Buckley was a enigma. Some of reaction to his death from the left ranges from vehement denouncements to respectful condolences. Me, I will miss him. It sickens me that the only voice for Conservatism is the likes of Rush Limbaugh. Paleo-Conservatism is becoming extinct. When that political ideology dies, then it will be the Anti-Authoritarian left will be the only ideal promoting freedom. Maybe that is a good thing?

My music video..
http://video.yahoo.com/watch/1889435/6227965

[BOSSHOG]

1. Great Post, I have one disagreement

I do not consider George Will an intellectual. He's nothing more then limbaugh in sheep's clothing. I did not agree with Buckley but compared to those who call themselves "conservatives" today he was a gem of a man.

[yurbud]

7. George Will is a conservative who can read and practice Western standards of hygiene

[question everything]

2. Indeed. Several obituaries refer to Buckley as "intellectual"

and one cannot help but thinking about the current crop of conservatives, both in Congress and in the media who probably would have hard time understanding most of his writings, including Reagan.

[yurbud]

9. because he said ''vis a vis'' when most of us would say ''about''

[izquierdista]

3. Conservative "intellectuals"

Though they may polish they writing and rhetoric skills, though they may be able to discourse on a variety of topics, there lies at the heart of a conservative "intellectual" a core of intellectual dishonesty. They do not observe, analyze, and hypothesize to come to a conclusion, for they have no need for new conclusions. They state at the outset that their philosophy has no need of change so all new hypotheses are moot, and the only analysis to be done is how to recast the observation to fit the dogma.

With Buckley and C.S. Lewis before him, tracing back to the Cardinals of the Inquisition who tried to squash the Enlightenment, they are an intellectually dishonest bunch who frame greed as freedom, avarice as "market forces", progress as debauchery, and inquiry as blasphemy. They are an effete bunch, pronouncing from on high that the world would be a better place if the unwashed masses would submit to their superstitions in the Almighty and his "invisible hand" which guides the free market.

Their books will serve as a historical record of foolish thought down through the ages and in the future, people will marvel that ignorance could be masked as intellect.

[Demeter]

5. Hear! Hear! Well Said, Amigo!

If you posted this separately, I would recommend it for Greatest Page.

[nealmhughes]

11. Excellent. No matter how many dictionaries Mr. Buckley memorized and used,

no matter how "urbane" or "sophisticated" he might have seemed, in reality his was a mere patina smeared upon a man who lamented the end of the Hoover Administration.
His recundite recitals pro-segregation in the 1950s and anti-Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s do not make up for the fact that he "admired" Martin King later.
Certainly Buckley feared Vidal: Vidal's sophistication was drawn from the drawing rooms in DC as a youth. Buckley's was foisted upon him by an inferiority complex of his parents who were not old money or even vaguely "Establishment." That is why he aped a pseudo-patrician stance for the public. He was, in effect, a "rich hick from Texas" who adopted the sytle and veneer of a NE "aristocrat."
Apologists are quick to say he was a great lunch conversationalist, and that he loved children and dogs -- no wait, that was someone else -- and that he no longer espoused his more noxious paleoconservative lines as the ages passed.
Style does not trump content. I can have a bookbinder put an Ann Coulter tome in Italian lamb leather. The younger Buckley evidently read James' "The Virgin and the Dynamo" and cheered completely for the Virgin.
A soaking in Brasso can't take the verdigris off completely without taking a brass brush to it as well.
This was a man who once equated Blacks with cannibals and wanted HIV+ people tattooed. Sure, he said he prayed in Latin, but he thought in a brain that was born 100 years too late to be relevant in the end.
In the end, however, he did come out against Bush and the Iraq War -- but who knows why Buckley ever did what he did, wasn't he "the most important political writer evah?"

[AlinPA]

4. "Conservative" now means hate, intolerance, ignorance, fundamentalist "Christian", anti-science

and war.

[Demeter]

6. Yes, But Now the Voculary Level Is Down Around 3rd Grade

whereas before you could get the same opinions with $25 gold-plated words.

[yurbud]

8. Isn't a voculary the doctor that gives you invocations against childhood diseases?

[Demeter]

10. Sorry. My Fingers and Keyboard Both Suffer From Dyslexia

and I forget to spell check.

[yurbud]

12. I thought it was intentional like ''strategery"