Saturday, March 1, 2008

"Requiem For A Lightweight" In Which I Share Deep Thots About The Life And Times Of The Late Bill Buckley, Noted TV Huckster

Bill Buckley made only two mistakes in life:

  1. Creating the Conservative Movement.
  2. Letting the riffraff in.
Bill Buckley never met a contrarian he didn't copy, figuring out early in life how to make money promoting other peoples' bad ideas.

If Washington, D.C. is where good ideas go to die, Bill's magazine, the Weekly Standard, was where bad ideas went to be fruitful and multiply.

Although Bill was of the right, he was never right, a proud tradition carried on by his acolytes in what are today sarcastically called "think tanks."

Do "progressives" need their own Bill Buckley? It's a little like asking if liberals need their own Joe McCarthy.

Buckley hitched his wagon to the stars of billionaires with extreme right wing ideologies, ideologies that just happened to advance their own economic interests. That's really all one needs to know about Bill Buckley. All the rest, including his own circuitous rants, are mere window-dressing.

Bill's epitaph:

Here Lies William F. Buckley, Jr.
Again, and again, and again.

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Buckley's magazine was National Review, not the Weekly Standard. You may be confusing him with Bill Kristol, who works for the latter.

Sam Thornton said...

So much for my theory about Merlot and blogging.