Listen, I’m just an average guy. I’m even more average and nondescript than Joe the Plumber. I don’t fancy myself a better writer than the brilliant people whose works find themselves in National Review.
But read this and tell me it’s not the dumbest thing you’ve ever heard. From Kathleen Parker’s syndicated column concerning Christopher Buckley’s endorsement of Barack Obama:
When [William F. Buckley] created the modern conservative movement, he didn’t call a neighborhood meeting and whisper, “Come along now.” He stood athwart history and yelled, “Stop!”
His son, though he customarily takes the more circuitous route to the revolution via satire, is now merely answering WFB’s original call to political activism.
Come on.
The conventional wisdom is that Barack Obama’s campaign is unstoppable. Christopher Buckley sums up his endorsement of Obama thus: “Obama has in him—I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy ‘We are the people we have been waiting for’ silly rhetoric—the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for” (emphasis added). His father stood athwart history and yelled: “Stop!” The younger Buckley is trying to get out in front of history, and yelling at everyone else: “Get with the program!”
K-Park again:
Christopher Buckley, ever the swashbuckling heir to his father’s defiant spirit, walked the plank so that the sinking mother ship might right itself.
No doubt his seafaring father is cheering from heaven: “Ahoy there, Christo! Well done, my son.”
Are you kidding me? Then why did Christo title it “Sorry, Dad, I’m voting for Obama”?
Listen, if you want to have this discussion, fine. WFB never shied away from a good old-fashioned argument. But don’t feed this bullshit to the people who have, by their dollars, made you as successful as you have been. And if you do, then don’t be surprised when people cancel their own goddamn subscriptions.
Comment by Carin on 10/17 @ 4:18 pm #
Good essay about this, via Treacher.
Comment by Dan Collins on 10/17 @ 4:23 pm #
He waited till Daddy couldn’t disinherit him to show his spine.
Comment by psycho... on 10/17 @ 4:57 pm #
Doesn’t seem very spiny, really, saying what everyone whose approval he desires wants to hear, in exactly the way they want to hear it.
On matters of disinheritance, I think you’d find WFB a rather disappointing not-quite-man, were you to read the first thing you’d find if you searched for “Buckley disinherit.”
If it’s important to you to think well of him, don’t do it.
(Buckleyan tw: cilabic crispness)
Comment by Dan Collins on 10/17 @ 5:45 pm #
I already know all about that, psycho, which is why I think Christopher was cunning to let the old man drop before coming out of the closet for Baracky. I have never been a big fan of WFB.
Comment by dicentra on 10/17 @ 7:05 pm #
Christopher Buckley, ever the swashbuckling heir to his father’s defiant spirit, walked the plank so that the sinking mother ship might right itself.
“Mother” being the operative term. As in mother of five, including a “head of cabbage,” as a recent troll so affectionately called him.
All of the arguments against Palin and for Obama that come from those conservative elites who abandon the “sinking mother ship” have been arguments for style over substance.
They use words like “vulgarization” and “anti-intellectualism” to describe
“what’s happened” to the GOP, whereas “what the historical moment seems to be calling for” is an argument for hopping aboard the bandwagon.
Admit it, Parker, Buckley, Noonan, McDonald: You’re embarrassed by Sarah’s folksy ways, folksy accent, bearskin rugs, field-dressed caribou, and insufferable hair. You cannot endure the mockery from your fancy Manhattan friends, so rather than renounce their twisted values and opinions, you invent pretexts to distance yourselves from her “on principle.”
And look how the left has embraced you! You go on Colbert, get feted by all the cool people, and now you don’t have to spend another eight years defending an ignorant “rube.”
Good riddance. You can take your aristocratic attitudes over to the other team, where you’ll find more support. Congratulations.
Comment by BJTexs on 10/17 @ 8:15 pm #
You are right on the money, dicentra. I would also add that there is a big old F.U. being tossed at those pesky bible thumping godbotherers.
My brother is a case in point. He is a conservative/libertarian small business owner who was never enamored with George Bush but proudly supported the Iraq and the G.W.O.T. Now he feels, with some justification, that the Republican party has abandoned both him and conservatism.
Where it gets weird is his vitriol with regards to Palin, until you understand that he is an avowed atheist, like Buckley. He started spouting the old tired talking points of “Ultra-Right Wing Creationists” hijacking the party and the idea that Palin was a joke and a danger. He has completely bought into the cartoon idea of the anti-intellectualism of the McCain/Palin ticket and sees in Obama the sort of “potential for leadership” that McCain lacks and just thinks we should torpedo the Republicans once and for all, especially the “Christian Right” and rebuild the party from the ashes of an Obama victory. All of it is phrased in the construct of “hope” that Obama can “change” from his far left background to grow into his moderate leadership. If not, we’ll have to reassert conservatism in 2012 and just live with whatever damage is done. Oh and he also told me I need to be a good loser.
Don’t underestimate the power of secularists willing to cut off their nose to spite their face in preventing a “religious fanatic” like Palin having any place at the table. Yea, it depresses the hell out of me.
Comment by dicentra on 10/17 @ 10:08 pm #
Don’t underestimate the power of secularists willing to cut off their nose to spite their face in preventing a “religious fanatic†like Palin having any place at the table.
And here we see exactly why Hitchens’s tenuous alliance with the Right fell apart.
But how can you blame them, given that Palin did nothing but use her office to mandate Sabbath worship, baptism, Bible study, sexual abstinence, shot-gun weddings, and Creationism in the schools.
Comment by guinsPen on 10/18 @ 2:21 pm #
Parker, Buckley, Noonan, McDonald
Radical? Try, over-fed Right. Yo Kate, put the fork down.
Comment by Fred Barnes on 10/18 @ 2:27 pm #
Parker, Buckley, Noonan, McDonald
Radical? Why, they’re Revolutionary!
Trackback by The Son Of Heaven on 11/26 @ 3:10 pm #
The Son Of Heaven…
…a good post over at . . ….