William F. Buckley

Darryl G. Thomas · February-28th-2008, 10:46 AM

William F. Buckley, RIP
Why we should be (mostly) glad that he outlived his brand of conservatism.
By Timothy Noah
Updated Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2008, at 8:36 PM ET

William F. Buckley, who died today, outlived a conservative movement that was largely his creation.

Buckley established himself as intellectual father to conservatism in 1955, when he founded National Review. Contrary to Lionel Trilling's famous declaration in 1950 that liberalism was "the sole intellectual tradition" in the United States, conservatism did exist before Buckley. But it was diffuse, encompassing WASP aristocrats (the people Franklin Roosevelt denounced as "economic royalists"); an assortment of cultural conservatives motivated largely by anti-Semitism, racism, nativism, and anti-Catholicism; and a small circle of intellectuals, of whom the best-remembered are the Burkean Russell Kirk and libertarians Friedrich Hayek and Ayn Rand. Buckley gathered and sifted through these disparate groups, spurning the anti-Semites and anti-Catholics (prompting the John Birch Society to tag him the "pied piper for the establishment"), tolerating but not joining the racists and the nativists, and embracing the libertarians so long as they didn't disparage religious belief. This last caveat excluded the cultish Rand, whose Atlas Shrugged Whittaker Chambers panned in National Review, taking exception to its atheism and its materialism, which in Chambers' view made it a conservative mirror image of Marxism. Christian piety and anti-communism were Buckley's twin pillars, the former to such an extent that Buckley ruled out David Brooks, his onetime protégé, as a possible editor of National Review on the grounds that Brooks was Jewish. Buckley wasn't willing to sacrifice National Review's identity as a publication whose mission was at least partly theological.

More prosaically, National Review defined itself in opposition to the "modern Republicanism" of Dwight D. Eisenhower. In a publisher's statement accompanying the first issue—the one famous for pledging to stand "athwart history, yelling Stop"—Buckley denounced conservatives who "made their peace with the New Deal," as the sitting president did, as "the well-fed Right, whose ignorance and amorality [have] never been exaggerated for the same reason that one cannot exaggerate infinity." It was this mission, more than the others, that defined Buckley's influence on conservatism. Within 10 years, the Republicans would nominate for president Barry Goldwater, a candidate who represented the antithesis of modern Republicanism. After Goldwater's landslide defeat, Buckley's movement pressed on, and in 1980 it installed Ronald Reagan, one of its own, as president.

It's rare that a writer as influential as Buckley leaves behind so little in the way of lasting works. Buckley published many books in his lifetime, but only his first, God and Man at Yale, will likely stand the test of time. Buckley extended his influence mainly through National Review, through a syndicated newspaper column, and through Firing Line, the lively debate program on public television that elevated him to national celebrity. His public persona drew admiration from ideological friend and foe alike because of Buckley's obvious charm, his playful wit, his generosity, and his insistence that political differences be expressed in a civil tone.

But sorry as we may be to mark Buckley's passing, we should be very glad that the country ignored much of what he had to say. Consider, for example, this National Review editorial from 1957 (cited in Paul Krugman's recent book The Conscience of a Liberal):

The central question that emerges—and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by merely consulting a catalog of the rights of American citizens, born Equal—is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. …

National Review believes that the South's premises are correct. If the majority wills what is socially atavistic, then to thwart the majority may be, though undemocratic, enlightened. It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority. Sometimes it becomes impossible to assert the will of a minority, in which case it must give way; and the society will regress; sometimes the numerical minority cannot prevail except by violence: then it must determine whether the prevalence of its will is worth the terrible price of violence.

The equanimity in that last clause is particularly chilling when you consider that it was published only two years after Emmett Till's murder. Buckley was not himself a bigot, but he was at best blind and at worst indifferent to the bigotry all around him, and there can be no question that he stood in the way of racial progress. In a 1963 column taking exception to the imminent march on Washington, where Martin Luther King would deliver his "I Have a Dream" speech, Buckley described himself as someone who believed that

a federal law, artificially deduced from the Commerce Clause of the Constitution or from the 14th Amendment, whose marginal effect will be to instruct small merchants in the Deep South on how they may conduct their business, is no way at all of promoting the kind of understanding which is the basis of progressive and charitable relationships between the races.

Buckley was similarly oblivious to the danger posed by Sen. Joe McCarthy, about whom he co-authored a sympathetic book in 1953. As late as December 2005, Buckley was still hedging carefully any criticism of McCarthy's irresponsible witch hunt:

[M]y own study of McCarthy ended with his activity in September 1953 … his fight with the Army, which was what the fracas [depicted in George Clooney's film Good Night and Good Luck] was about in 1954—which got him censured, and which loosed Edward R. Murrow—was something else. … McCarthy had thrown restraint to one side. ... [H]e was deep in booze in those days and did some flatly inexcusable things, for instance his attack on General Ralph Zwicker.

Although he was tough on communism, Buckley was soft on fascism. In a "Letter From Spain" for National Review (also unearthed by Krugman), he wrote:

General Franco is an authentic national hero. It is generally conceded that he above others had the combination of talents, the perseverance, and the sense of righteousness of his cause, that were required to wrest Spain from the hands of the visionaries, ideologues, Marxists and nihlistis that were imposing on her, in the thirties, a regime so grotesque as to do violence to the Spanish soul, to deny, even Spain's historical identity.

Fortunately for all of us, by the time Buckley's man Ronald Reagan entered the White House, various civil rights laws were already on the books, communism was dying of natural causes, and Gen. Franco (to quote Saturday Night Live) was still dead. As for dismantling the New Deal, Reagan rallied the nation against big government but did little to shrink it, instead ballooning the budget deficit from $74 billion to $155 billion. About this, Buckley said at the close of Reagan's presidency, "most cool observers now realize that the deficit is a problem not curable by any means as easy as voting for one or another presidential candidate." Meanwhile, Buckley praised the tax cuts that helped create those deficits as "a revolution not merely in economic thought but in ethical thought as well."

Reagan was clearly a Buckleyite, but the presidency of his ideological successor George W. Bush led Republicans away from Buckley-style conservatism. Partly, Bush did this by making his peace with the New Deal. Reagan had railed against big government while doing little to reduce it; Bush dispensed with the rhetoric and used the federal agencies as a patronage machine for disastrously incompetent loyalists. Bush also turned his foreign policy over to the neoconservative movement to a much greater extent than Reagan had, with the unending Iraq war the result. Buckley had never cottoned to the neoconservative movement, probably because it was too tolerant of the New Deal. Eventually Buckley would declare the Iraq war a mistake, putting himself at odds with his own magazine, which under the editorship of Rich Lowry had become emphatically neoconservative. Shortly before he died, David Frum, a National Review writer, published a book that called for a carbon tax and promoted government action to combat obesity. As I write this, the Republican Party is preparing to nominate a candidate—John McCain—who, if elected, seems likely to revive Eisenhower-style modern Republicanism.

History did not stop. It never does. That's the good news, and also the bad.

Root Doctor · February-28th-2008, 12:28 PM

The "father of modern conservatism," dead at 82

William F. Buckley declared war on the political left during Vietnam and the civil rights era. But even he rejected the extremism of George W. Bush.

By Glenn Greenwald

Feb. 27, 2008 | William F. Buckley, the so-called father of modern conservatism and founder of the National Review, died this morning at the age of 82. Born to great wealth and privilege, with a conservative oil baron father determined to provide him with every advantage a child can have, Buckley made the most of those opportunities. Following a childhood filled with private tutors and exclusive European boarding schools, Buckley graduated from Yale University, where he was chairman of the Yale Daily News and a member of Skull & Bones.

After Yale, he proceeded to shape and drive political conservatism in America with more influence than any figure with the possible exception of Ronald Reagan. Buckley epitomized some of the worst excesses of political conservatism, as a leading proponent of the Vietnam War, one of the nation's most vociferous Cold Warriors, and a vocal opponent at times of both the feminist and civil rights movements. Yet he also aggressively, and successfully, sought to expel extremists, such as John Birch Society adherents, from the conservative movement, and deviated from conservative dogma with some frequency, such as the support he voiced for Jimmy Carter's decision to give the Panama Canal back to Panama. While Buckley remained a highly controversial and divisive figure, his influence on American political life was unquestionably enormous.

The political right excels at using the deaths of its political leaders to sanctify its ideas. The intense, weeklong canonization of Ronald Reagan following his death was the template for that exploitation, and the same process with Buckley is already well under way. Today's conservatives will celebrate Buckley as an icon of modern conservatism, the epitome of their belief system. But this ritual will obscure a deeper truth: Buckley bears little resemblance to the modern-day, Bush-era "conservative" movement, and, particularly in recent years, he began making his opposition to it more explicit.

The split between Buckley and the Bush-led right was perhaps most vivid when it came to the war in Iraq, the defining belief of today's conservative movement. In December 2005, Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean generated intense outrage on the right when he compared the Iraq war to Vietnam and said: the "idea that we're going to win the war in Iraq is an idea which is just plain wrong." That statement produced limitless recriminations from conservatives, with Michael Reagan, son of the former president, actually calling for Dean's hanging as a traitor as a result of Dean's statements: "Howard Dean should be arrested and hung for treason or put in a hole until the end of the Iraq war!"

But Buckley, a mere eight weeks later, echoed Dean's comments almost verbatim while writing about the war in National Review: "One can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed," Buckley declared. "Our mission has failed because Iraqi animosities have proved uncontainable by an invading army of 130,000 Americans." He urged the Bush administration to consider "acknowledgment of defeat." In an earlier November 2005 interview with the Wall Street Journal -- on almost the same exact day Dean made his comments -- Buckley went even further, declaring that the invasion of Iraq was "anything but conservative."

Buckley explicitly distinguished the conservatism he founded from what it had become under the Bush-led Republican Party. In July 2006, he told CBS Evening News that "Mr. Bush faces a singular problem best defined, I think, as the absence of effective conservative ideology." And he specifically identified the war in Iraq as a major cause of the nation's problems, arguing that the war was such a failure that it had single-handedly rendered the Bush presidency a failure: "If you had a European prime minister who experienced what we've experienced it would be expected that he would retire or resign."

On one key issue after the next, Buckley came to reject the defining principles of today's conservative movement. In the same CBS interview, he rejected the neoconservative approach of belligerence toward Iran and, more generally, labeled as "too ambitious" the sweeping vision of democracy promotion set out by Bush in his second Inaugural Address. In a subsequent interview, Buckley warned: "The neoconservative hubris, which sort of assigns to America some kind of geo-strategic responsibility for maximizing democracy, overstretches the resources of a free country.''

New Republic writer Johann Hari went undercover on a National Review cruise in 2006 and detailed a bitter argument that broke out between Buckley and neoconservative icon Norman Podhoretz. After listening to the two right-wing elders bicker on virtually every foreign policy issue, Hari concluded: "Podhoretz and Buckley now inhabit opposite poles of post-September 11 American conservatism."

Nonetheless, there is no question that the bulk of adherents to the conservative movement that Buckley founded now side with Podhoretz, not with Buckley. As Hari reported, the crowd cheered loudly for Podhoretz, and not for Buckley. One of the National Review cruise member seated at Hari's table scoffed that Buckley's refusal to fight Muslim terrorists made him a "coward," while his wife dismissed Buckley as nothing more than an "old man," and then "tapped her head with her finger to suggest dementia."

Indeed, while the allegedly epic and all-consuming nature of the so-called war on terrorism has become the central, overarching theme of Bush-era conservatism, as well as of the magazine he founded, Buckley was clearly uncomfortable with, even hostile to, such a grandiose vision of this conflict. When asked by the WSJ whether this "war" was comparable to the "long twilight struggle" of the Cold War -- the ideological battle that was Buckley's bread and butter -- he refused the comparison, dismissing away the threat posed by Muslim radicals on the ground that they "lack the resources" to truly threaten the U.S.

Although the postmortem iconography of Buckley as the Ultimate Conservative will attempt to obscure these developments, it became an increasing source of embarrassment and discomfort that the political movement of which he is deemed to be the "father," and even the magazine he founded, came to bear so little resemblance either to Buckley's style or substance. The erudite and civil debates that Buckley famously engaged in with the likes of Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky are about as far removed as possible from the shallow, anti-intellectual screeching found in today's National Review from the likes of Kathryn Jean Lopez, Jonah Goldberg and editor Rich Lowry. And as Buckley's heresies became more numerous and pronounced, right-wing pundits such as popular blogger Ed Morrissey began actually dismissing Buckley's conservatism as an obsolete relic of the pre-9/11 past, claiming that the profound lessons of 9/11 are what account for "the difference between traditional conservatives and the Bush Administration's efforts in foreign policy, along with a host of other arenas."

To be sure, many of Buckley's original principles are still central prongs in the conservative movement, including his fierce opposition to taxes, his reflexive defense of the right of the U.S to use military force against other countries, and his Catholicism-inspired opposition to a woman's right to choose. Buckley remains responsible for the remaining though dwindling beliefs held in common between Goldwater/Reagan conservatives and the Bush-era movement on the right.

But in both style and substance, the Limbaugh-Coulter-Kristol-National Review-led conservative movement of today bears little resemblance to what Buckley spent most of his adult life developing and creating. Modern conservative polemicists continue to use Buckley as a symbolic prop behind which they march -- and that exploitation will intensify by many magnitudes now that he has passed away -- yet, as Buckley himself increasingly recognized, today's conservatives repudiate and violate much of what Buckley stood for and believed.

Scott Dolan · February-28th-2008, 12:50 PM

Wow. Outstanding piece, Rootz.

walto · February-28th-2008, 01:25 PM

Quote:

The erudite and civil debates that Buckley famously engaged in with the likes of Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky

That is really hilarious! Mr. Greenwald must have been absent those days. I used to watch his show regularly, and Buckley was actually almost never civil with anybody who disagreed with him about anything. And, as almost everybody knows except Mr. Greewald, Buckley and Vidal almost came to blows on several occasions.

Root Doctor · February-28th-2008, 01:37 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by walto

That is really hilarious! Mr. Greenwald must have been absent those days. I used to watch his show regularly, and Buckley was actually almost never civil with anybody who disagreed with him about anything. And, as almost everybody knows except Mr. Greewald, Buckley and Vidal almost came to blows on several occasions.

Buckley could be a dink, that's for sure (see his rude and rough treatment of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac), but he was largely civil as a rule. That certainly wasn't the case with Chomsky, who outdebated him, and Vidal, who is almost always a smug asshole and in need of a solid thrashing.

James Wolcott has some salient points about Buckley:

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/blogs/wolcott

Scott Dolan · February-28th-2008, 01:42 PM

Shit, does it matter really? Buckley was the model of restraint and intellectualism compared to the current crop of "conservative" "thinkers".

I mean please, could you imagine Buckley going one on one with Michael Savage? Ann Coulter? Hannity?

He would have left them all with therapy bills that could bankrupt your average european nation.

Darryl G. Thomas · February-28th-2008, 01:51 PM

Scott,

Buckley was a conservative intellectual who started a movement. Savage, Coulter, Hannity, et al are just entertainers who've found a niche that earns them some nice change. You give them too much credit if you think they'd be traumatized debating Buckley. They'd simply play to their audience and call him a traitor to "the cause" whatever that cause is.

What amuses me about the conservative movement of today is illustrated by that conservative conference held here in DC a couple of weeks ago. There, avowed "conservatives" gave George Bush a standing ovation and cheered his every word. It made me wonder if they even knew what conservative meant. hasn't Bush violated about 85% of conservative philosophy? Limited foreign involvements? Small government? Balanced budget? Keeping government out of people's lives?

Al in NYC · February-28th-2008, 01:54 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Scott Dolan

Shit, does it matter really? Buckley was the model of restraint and intellectualism compared to the current crop of "conservative" "thinkers".

Yeah, but when he got mad... look out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYymnxoQnf8

Scott Dolan · February-28th-2008, 01:59 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DGT

Savage, Coulter, Hannity, et al are just entertainers who've found a niche that earns them some nice change.

Yeah, but you can't argue with the bigger picture. And that is that they are viewed by modern "conservatives" as intellectual leaders of the movement. And that was my main point.

Scott Dolan · February-28th-2008, 02:02 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Al in NYC

Yeah, but when he got mad... look out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYymnxoQnf8

Hahahahaha.....

Intellectual threats!

Can you imagine me trying to pull off "I'll sock you in the face and you'll stay plastered!"

C'mon!

Darryl G. Thomas · February-28th-2008, 02:03 PM

Scott,

When you're right, your right.

One of my coworkers went to work on the pc of another coworker. Her husband was having a problem with his Limbaugh streaming video. At least the guy didn't have a Mac, they're more expensive and it be a shame to waste that much money.

Root Doctor · February-28th-2008, 02:03 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Scott Dolan

Shit, does it matter really? Buckley was the model of restraint and intellectualism compared to the current crop of "conservative" "thinkers".

I mean please, could you imagine Buckley going one on one with Michael Savage? Ann Coulter? Hannity?

Absolutely, Scott. That Buckley's closest friends were people like John Kenneth Galbraith and Murray Kempton speaks volumes about how different he was from the bilious boneheads who later capitalized on the conservative movement.

Scott Dolan · February-28th-2008, 02:09 PM

Take out "capitalized" and replace it with "hijacked" and I'm right there with you.

rollhead · February-28th-2008, 02:40 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by walto

That is really hilarious! Mr. Greenwald must have been absent those days. I used to watch his show regularly, and Buckley was actually almost never civil with anybody who disagreed with him about anything. And, as almost everybody knows except Mr. Greewald, Buckley and Vidal almost came to blows on several occasions.

They showed a clip of one of the "civil" Buckley-Vidal debates in which Vidal called Buckley a "crypto-Nazi," and Buckley responding by saying he would "punch him in the goddamn face." -- or something close to it.

That said, any time you had an argument like Buckley v. Vidal or Mailer or Chomsky -- it was a hell of a lot more interesting than most of what passes for "debate" on TV now.

walto · February-28th-2008, 02:48 PM

No question. And a lot of smart people had Buckley as a sort of mentor, like Wills and Kinsley. But Buckley was not above most of the crap the people being dissed engage in today. Misprepresentation, insult, evasion, confusion, deflection, utter bullshit, smarminess, condescention, the whole disgusting gamut.

It is true, however, that in every column he ever wrote he tried to put in at least one word nobody had used for the last 75 years (and only about five people in the world before that). So, if that's erudition, he was erudite.

walto · February-28th-2008, 03:00 PM

Quote:

James Wolcott has some salient points about Buckley:

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/blogs/wolcott

Thanks for posting that Roots: it is an interesting piece. I think Buckley was more of Thatcherite and Waugh-type traditional Catholic/patriot than he was a prefigurer of Goldwater/Reagan style Libertarianism. All that stuff has gotten so mixed up together over the years, though.

Root Doctor · February-28th-2008, 03:14 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by walto

Thanks for posting that Roots: it is an interesting piece. I think Buckley was more of Thatcherite and Waugh-type traditional Catholic/patriot than he was a prefigurer of Goldwater/Reagan style Libertarianism. All that stuff has gotten so mixed up together over the years, though.

It sure has, Walter. What I particularly liked about the Wolcott piece was it reminded me of coming across the likes of Hugh Kenner, Guy Davenport, and D. Keith Mano (boy, did he write some wild novels) when I was a teenage subscriber to "National Review." I doubt you'll find their successors in the pages of "The Limbaugh Letter."

Hudson Boy · February-28th-2008, 03:26 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by walto

Buckley and Vidal almost came to blows on several occasions.

Wouldn't surprise me about Gore Vidal, but I didn't know Buckley felt the same way.

groover · February-28th-2008, 03:27 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Darryl G. Thomas

Buckley gathered and sifted through these disparate groups, spurning the anti-Semites and anti-Catholics (prompting the John Birch Society to tag him the "pied piper for the establishment"), tolerating but not joining the racists and the nativists, and embracing the libertarians so long as they didn't disparage religious belief. This last caveat excluded the cultish Rand, whose Atlas Shrugged Whittaker Chambers panned in National Review, taking exception to its atheism and its materialism, which in Chambers' view made it a conservative mirror image of Marxism. Christian piety and anti-communism were Buckley's twin pillars, the former to such an extent that Buckley ruled out David Brooks, his onetime protégé, as a possible editor of National Review on the grounds that Brooks was Jewish. Buckley wasn't willing to sacrifice National Review's identity as a publication whose mission was at least partly theological.

He spurned anti-semites but he discriminated against Jews in hiring?

The one thing I remember Buckley for the most is admitting that he tried marijuana, but only on a boat in international waters so he wasn't breaking any law. Kind of lame, though it would still cause him to fail a drug test and not be hired by any major company today.

Gary Sisco · February-28th-2008, 03:35 PM

I'm with Darryl. The current crop of consoivatives are show biz personalities, not thinkers. I've occupied a totally different political planet from Buckley, needless to say, but at least he had ideas and things to say. That alone puts him out in front of most today, of whatever persuasion.

shrugs · February-28th-2008, 03:47 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by walto

It is true, however, that in every column he ever wrote he tried to put in at least one word nobody had used for the last 75 years (and only about five people in the world before that). So, if that's erudition, he was erudite.

Maybe he read a lot of Faulkner and McCarthy?

Monte Smith · February-29th-2008, 08:55 AM

NPR had a remarkable obit in its hourly news yesterday. Remarkable for its brevity and its incompetence. The whole of the piece was two soundbytes from WFB on his philosophy of the presidency in 1968, then a statement about his political allegiance in 1974, then the news that he was dead at age 82.

Wha? The NPR-niks must have a file in their news bureau marked Can't Be Bothered/Doesn't Matter/Republican.

Gary Sisco · February-29th-2008, 09:08 AM

A-and he had an American name, too!

Jason Bivins · February-29th-2008, 10:49 AM

Monte, you must not have heard the 5 or 10-minute interview with Sam Tanenhaus, wherein WFB was described in measured and at times admiring terms as a more complex figure than was often assumed.

Monte Smith · February-29th-2008, 01:40 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jason Bivins

Monte, you must not have heard the 5 or 10-minute interview with Sam Tanenhaus, wherein WFB was described in measured and at times admiring terms as a more complex figure than was often assumed.

No, I was referring to the hourly news breaks that NPR does. Even for an hourly news break, they made some eccentric choices for the Buckley obit. Here's what he thought in 1968 and here's what he thought in 1974 and now he's dead.

They had Tanenhaus on, huh? He's a good person to talk about WFB, I bet.

Dr Dave · March-3rd-2008, 10:08 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by walto

That is really hilarious! Mr. Greenwald must have been absent those days. I used to watch his show regularly, and Buckley was actually almost never civil with anybody who disagreed with him about anything. And, as almost everybody knows except Mr. Greewald, Buckley and Vidal almost came to blows on several occasions.

That's not right, Walto. I can't get to the relevant link right now, but Greenwald is well aware that there was no lost love between Buckley and Vidal, and links to commentary on how Vidal eventually dropped the "crypto-" prefix in his description of Buckley as a Fascist.

Monte Smith · March-3rd-2008, 10:54 PM

Buckley was the most hated rightwinger of his time. My copy of God and Man at Yale has a useful introduction by Buckley which reproduces the liberla attacks of the time. "Crypto-Nazi" is light. Here was a man who challenged Marx, challenged Dewey, challenged Russell, challenged Roosevelt, and challenged the administration and professors of the univeristy he just graduated from. This was a barbarian. This was a mongrel. Before we knew the slime could descend to the cavities bored by first Bush or Reagan or Nixon or Goldwater, here was Buckley and his spade. He was hated.

Now he is given the warm send off. "Oh, we''re going to miss him." "He was the kind of people that we hate that we liked."

Buckley lives. He still might punch you in your goddam faces until you stay plastered.

Scott Dolan · March-3rd-2008, 11:24 PM

"Bring it on!!"

Monte Smith · March-3rd-2008, 11:34 PM

In some of these funeral orations you get the feeling that Buckey was the good kind of Republican. The kind that has been dead for years except for John McCain and Lincoln Chafee. No he wasn't.

shrugs · March-4th-2008, 01:18 AM

Nope.

He knew all aboit Ollie.

and that's at a minimim!