A few years ago, I wrote an extended piece bearing the title The Republicans: WTF Happened to this Party?. Recently, in response to a couple of engaging (relatively) meas culpas—Matthew Continetti’s The Right The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism and Tim Miller’s Why We Did It—I began preparing an update. I originally planned to…
Tag: William F. Buckley
Winds of Change Blowing Through the National Review? Or Is Kevin D. Williamson Just Stupid?
Okay, Kevie D. is not stupid, but he seems to be straying very far from the reservation as staked out by William F. Buckley—generally known as “Saint Bill” around the NR water cooler. As anyone who read Buckley and his Merry Band back in the 1960s knows, the National Review regarded Franklin Roosevelt and his…
Kevin Williamson, more peccant than impeccable
There’s a bit of a to-do in the blogosphere regarding the recent hiring of Kevin “Mattress Face” Williamson1 by the Atlantic, one that leaves me, remarkably enough, on the side of the ululating left, who are (mostly) mad at Kev’s pathetically “provocative” “jest” that women who get abortions should be hung.2 I don’t think old…
Good News!
Good news indeed! You may remember the unfortunately still with us William J. Bennett, once secretary of education and later drug “czar”—doing the same bang-up job in both positions—who has been harrumphing about the decline and fall of the “West” for the past thirty-five years and now is illustrating it by harrumphing on behalf of…
William F. Buckley, still racist after all those years
As is (fairly) well known, back in 1957, William F. Buckley wrote the following: “The central question that emerges…is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes—the White community…
Less than Zero
This shot of Ronnie and William F. Buckley, taken in 1988, Reagan’s last year in office, fascinates me. Ronnie looks pretty much stuffed, ready for Madame Tussaud’s. But even though he may not remember what he had for breakfast, or the name of the dude in the cheap suit who keeps talking his ear off,…
It’s Whiter than White: It’s Republican White!
Sam Tannenhaus has a very good read at the New Republic about how the Republican Party, and Sen. Barry Goldwater in particular, traveled from being the champions of racial integration to being the defenders, not of segregation, but of the “right to segregate’—“neither a segregated society nor an integrated society, but a free society,” as…
Thoughts on Chairman Bill
‘Pup was once asked in a published interview if he were aware that roughly 10 percent of the U.S. male population is homosexual. “If that’s the case then I’ve met them all.”’ That’s perhaps the sweetest meat from Christopher’s memoir Losing Mum and Pup, which recounts the death of his parents William F. and Patricia…