Chris Boese's Weblog

One of the most appropriate first lines for an obituary...

Buckley was the kind of guy who, whether you agreed with him or not (and I didn't), was an institution, a sharp, wry, verbally-challenging knife on the writing landscape that you sort of oriented yourself around. The NYTimes seems to do him justice below. Added a couple other good lines I just had to pull out.

Link: William F. Buckley Jr. Is Dead at 82 - New York Times.

William F. Buckley Jr. Is Dead at 82

The New York Times

William F. Buckley lecturing at The New School in 1967.

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Published: February 27, 2008

William F. Buckley Jr., who marshaled polysyllabic exuberance, famously arched eyebrows and a refined, perspicacious mind to elevate conservatism to the center of American political discourse, died Wednesday at his home in Stamford, Conn.

[...]

Many of varied political stripes came to see his life as something of an art form — from racing through city streets on a motorcycle to a quixotic campaign for mayor of New York in 1965 to startling opinions like favoring the decriminalization of marijuana. He was often described as liberals’ favorite conservative, particularly after suavely hosting an adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited” on public television in 1982.

[...]

Mr. Buckley’s vocabulary, sparkling with phrases from distant eras and described in newspaper and magazine profiles as sesquipedalian (characterized by the use of long words) became the stuff of legend. Less kind commentators called him “pleonastic” (use of more words than necessary).

And, inescapably, there was that aurora of pure mischief. In 1985, David Remnick, writing in The Washington Post, said, “He has the eyes of a child who has just displayed a horrid use for the microwave oven and the family cat.”

[...]

Young William absorbed his family’s conservatism along with its deep Catholicism. At 6, he wrote the King of England demanding he repay his country’s war debt. At 14, he followed his brothers to the Millbrook School, a preparatory school 15 miles across the New York state line from Sharon.

In his spare time at Millbrook, young Bill typed schoolmates’ papers for them, charging $1 a paper, with a 25-cent surcharge for correcting the grammar.

[...]

He graduated from Millbrook in 1943, then spent a half a year at the University of Mexico studying Spanish, which had been his first language. He served in the Army from 1944 to 1946, and managed to make second lieutenant after first putting colleagues off with his mannerisms.

“I think the army experience did something to Bill,” his sister, Patricia, told Mr. Judis. “He got to understand people more.”

Mr. Buckley then entered Yale where he studied political science, economics and history; established himself as a fearsome debater; was elected chairman of the Yale Daily News, and joined Skull and Bones, the most prestigious secret society.

[...]

After a year in the Central Intelligence Agency in Mexico City (his case officer was E. Howard Hunt, who went on to win celebrity for his part in the Watergate break-in), Mr. Buckley went to work for the American Mercury magazine, but resigned after spotting anti-Semitic tendencies in the magazine.

[...]

In 1955, Mr. Buckley started National Review as voice for “the disciples of truth, who defend the organic moral order” with a $100,000 gift from his father. The first issue, which came out in November, claimed the publication “stands athwart history yelling Stop.”

It proved it by lining up squarely behind Southern segregationists, saying blacks should be denied the vote. After some conservatives objected, Mr. Buckley suggested instead that both uneducated whites and blacks should not be allowed to vote.

[...]

“Bill was responsible or rejecting the John Birch Society and the other kooks who passed off anti-Semitism or some such as conservatism,” Hugh Kenner, a biographer of Ezra Pound and a frequent contributor to National Review told The Washington Post. “Without Bill — if he had decided to become an academic or a businessman or something else — without him, there probably would be no respectable conservative movement in this country.”

[...]

There were exchanges on foreign policy with the likes of Norman Thomas; feminism with Germaine Greer and race relations with James Baldwin. Not a few viewers thought Mr. Buckley’s toothy grin before he scored a point resembled nothing so much as a switchblade.

[...]

At age 50, Mr. Buckley added two pursuits to his repertoire — he took up the harpsichord and became novelist. Some 10 of the novels are spy tales starring Blackford Oakes, who fights for the American way and bedded the Queen of England in the first book.

[...]

Mr. Buckley’s spirit of fun was apparent in his 1965 campaign for mayor of New York on the ticket of the Conservative Party. When asked what he would do if he won, he answered, “Demand a recount.” He got 13.4 percent of the vote.

For Murray Kempton, one of his many friends on the left, the Buckley press conference style called up “an Edwardian resident commissioner reading aloud the 39 articles of the Anglican establishment to a conscript of assembled Zulus.”

[...]

In his last years, as honors like the Presidential Medal of Freedom came his way, Mr. Buckley gradually loosened his grip on his intellectual empire. In 1998, he ended his frenetic schedule of public speeches (some 70 a year over 40 years, he once estimated). In 1999, he stopped “Firing Line,” and in 2004, he relinquished his voting stock in National Review. He wrote his last spy novel the 11th in his series), sold his sailboat and stopped playing the harpsichord publicly.

But he began a new historical novel and kept up his columns, including one on the “bewitching power” of “The Sopranos” television series. He commanded wide attention by criticizing the Iraq war as a failure.

[...]

On April 15, 2007, his wife, the former Patricia Alden Austin Taylor, who had carved out a formidable reputation as a socialite and philanthropist but considered her role as a homemaker, mother and wife most important, died. Mr. and Mrs. Buckley called each other “Ducky.”

[...]

Whatever else you want to say about him, you can't miss the point from the obit above that this iconoclast and gadfly was one hell of interesting character.

He could have been a character in a novel, but if this guy showed up in a novel, publishers would reject it as not believable. And that's about as good an epitaph as anyone would want.

Hear the Feminists Roar!

Hell yeah! Watch out, y'all. There's some uppity wimmin about! Can I have a witness?

Robin Morgan does some hell raising like the old days, and how wonderful to hear somebody tell it like it is. Can't let a rant like this go by without pulling out some of the more eloquent and rowdy juicy bits.

Trust me, you don't want to miss this. Sing it, Sister!

Link: In Support of Hillary Rodham Clinton: Good-bye to All That, Part II, by Robin Morgan | Women’s Space.

Link: WMC Commentary: Goodbye To All That (#2) by Robin Morgan - February 2, 2008.

In Support of Hillary Rodham Clinton:  Good-bye to All That, Part II, by Robin Morgan

by Robin Morgan (and thanks to the Women’s Media Center)

“Goodbye To All That” was my (in)famous 1970 essay breaking free from a politics of accommodation especially affecting women (online version is here.) During my decades in civil-rights, anti-war, and contemporary women’s movements, I’ve avoided writing another specific “Goodbye . . .”. But not since the suffrage struggle have two communities — the joint conscience-keepers of this country– been so set in competition, as the contest between Hillary Rodham Clinton (HRC) and Barack Obama (BO) unfurls. So.

Goodbye to the double standard . . .

• Hillary is too ballsy but too womanly, a Snow Maiden who’s emotional, and so much a politician as to be unfit for politics.
• She’s “ambitious” but he shows “fire in the belly.” (Ever had labor pains? )
• When a sexist idiot screamed “Iron my shirt!” at HRC, it was considered amusing; if a racist idiot shouted “Shine my shoes!” at BO, it would’ve inspired hours of airtime and pages of newsprint  analyzing our national dishonor.
• Young political Kennedys –Kathleen, Kerry, and Bobby Jr. — all endorsed Hillary. Sen. Ted, age 76, endorsed Obama. If the situation were reversed, pundits would snort “See? Ted and establishment types back her, but the forward-looking generation backs him.” (Personally, I’m unimpressed with Caroline’s longing for the Return of the Fathers. Unlike the rest of the world, Americans have short memories. Me, I still recall Marilyn Monroe’s suicide, and a dead girl named Mary Jo Kopechne in Chappaquiddick.)

Goodbye to the toxic viciousness  . . .

• Carl Bernstein’s disgust at Hillary’s “thick ankles.”
• Nixon-trickster Roger Stone’s new Hillary-hating 527 group, “Citizens United Not Timid” (check the capital letters).
• John McCain answering “How do we beat the bitch?” with “Excellent question!” Would he have dared reply similarly to “How do we beat the black bastard?” For shame.

Goodbye to the HRC nutcracker with metal spikes between splayed thighs.

If it was a tap-dancing blackface doll, we would be righteously outraged — and they would not be selling it in airports. Shame.

[...]

Goodbye to the news-coverage target-practice . . .

The women’s movement and Media Matters wrung an apology from MSNBC’s Chris Matthews for relentless misogynistic comments. But what about NBC’s Tim Russert’s continual sexist asides and his all-white-male panels pontificating on race and gender? Or CNN’s Tony Harris  chuckling at “the chromosome thing” while interviewing a woman from The White House Project? And that’s not even mentioning Fox News.

Goodbye to pretending the black community is entirely male and all women are white . . .

Surprise! Women exist in all opinions, pigmentations, ethnicities, abilities, sexual preferences, and ages — not only African American and European American but Latina and Native American, Asian American and Pacific Islanders, Arab American and — hey, every group, because a group wouldn’t be alive if we hadn’t given birth to it. A few non-racist countries may exist –  but sexism is everywhere.  No matter how many ways a woman breaks free from other oppressions, she remains a female human being in a world still so patriarchal that it’s the “norm.”

So why should all women not be as justly proud of our womanhood and the centuries, even millennia, of struggle that got us this far, as black Americans, women and men, are justly proud of their struggles?

Goodbye to a campaign where he has to pass as white (which whites—especially wealthy ones–adore), while she has to pass as male (which both men and women demanded of her, and then found unforgivable). If she were black or he were female we wouldn’t be having such problems, and I for one would be in heaven. But at present such a candidate wouldn’t stand a chance—even if she shared Condi Rice’s Bush-defending politics.

[...]

Goodbye, goodbye to . . .

• blaming anything Bill Clinton does on Hillary (even including his womanizing like the Kennedy guys–though unlike them, he got reported on). Let’s get real. If he hadn’t campaigned strongly for her everyone would cluck over what that meant.
• Enough of Bill and Teddy Kennedy locking their alpha male horns while Hillary pays for it.
• an era when parts of the populace feel so disaffected by politics that a comparative lack of knowledge, experience, and skill is actually seen as attractive, when celebrity-culture mania now infects our elections so that it’s “cooler” to glow with marquee charisma than to understand the vast global complexities of power on a nuclear, wounded planet.
• the notion that it’s fun to elect a handsome, cocky president who feels he can learn on the job,
• goodbye to George W. Bush and the destruction brought by his inexperience, ignorance, and arrogance.

Goodbye to the accusation that HRC acts “entitled” when she’s worked intensely at everything she’s done—including being a nose-to-the-grindstone, first-rate senator from my state.

Goodbye to her being exploited as a Rorschach test by women who reduce her to a blank screen on which they project their own fears, failures, fantasies.

Goodbye to the phrase “polarizing figure”  to describe someone who embodies the transitions women have made in the last century and are poised to make in this one. It was the women’s movement that quipped, “We are becoming  the men we wanted to marry.” She heard us, and she has.

Goodbye to some women letting history pass by while wringing their hands, because Hillary isn’t as “likeable” as they’ve been warned they must be, or because she didn’t leave him, couldn’t “control” him, kept her family together and raised a smart, sane daughter. (Think of the blame if Chelsea had ever acted in the alcoholic, neurotic manner of the Bush twins!) Goodbye to some women pouting because she didn’t bake cookies or she did, sniping because she learned the rules and then bent or broke them. Grow the hell  up. She is not running for Ms.-perfect-pure-queen-icon of the feminist movement.  She is running to be President of the United States.

Goodbye to the shocking American ignorance of our own and other countries’ history. Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir rose through party ranks and war, positioning themselves as proto-male leaders. Almost all other female heads of government so far have been related to men of power—granddaughters, daughters, sisters, wives, widows: Gandhi, Bandaranike, Bhutto, Aquino, Chamorro, Wazed, Macapagal-Arroyo, Johnson Sirleaf, Bachelet, Kirchner, and more. Even in our “land of opportunity,” it’s mostly the first pathway “in” permitted to women: Reps. Doris Matsui and Mary Bono and Sala Burton; Sen. Jean Carnahan . . . far too many to list here.

[...]

Goodbye to some young women eager to win male approval by showing they’re not feminists (at least not the kind who actually threaten the status quo), who can’t identify with a woman candidate because she is unafraid of eeueweeeu yucky power, who fear their boyfriends might look at them funny if they say something good about her.

Goodbye to women of any age again feeling unworthy, sulking “what if she’s not electable?” or “maybe it’s post-feminism and whoooosh we’re already free.” Let a statement by the magnificent Harriet Tubman stand as reply. When asked how she managed to save hundreds of enslaved African Americans via the Underground Railroad during the Civil War, she replied bitterly, “I could have saved thousands — if only I’d been able to convince them they were slaves.”

I’d rather say a joyful Hello to all the glorious young women who do identify with Hillary, and all the brave, smart men—of all ethnicities and any age–who get that it’s in their self-interest, too. She’s better qualified. (D’uh.) She’s a high-profile candidate with an enormous grasp of foreign- and domestic-policy nuance, dedication to detail, ability to absorb staggering insult and personal pain while retaining dignity, resolve, even humor, and keep on keeping on. (Also, yes, dammit, let’s hear it for her connections and funding and party-building background, too. Obama was awfully glad about those when she raised dough and campaigned for him to get to the Senate in the first place.)

[...]

And goodbye to the ageism . . .

How dare anyone unilaterally decide when to turn the page on history, papering over real inequities and suffering constituencies in the promise of a feel-good campaign? How dare anyone claim to unify while dividing, or think that to rouse US youth from torpor it’s useful to triage the single largest demographic in this country’s history: the boomer generation–the majority of which is female?

Older woman are the one group that doesn’t grow more conservative with age—and we are the generation of radicals who said “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” Goodbye to going gently into any goodnight any man prescribes for us. We are the women who changed the reality of the United States. And though we never went away, brace yourselves: we’re back!

We are the women who brought this country equal credit, better pay, affirmative action, the concept of a family-focused workplace; the women who established rape-crisis centers and battery shelters, marital-rape and date-rape laws; the women who defended lesbian custody rights, who fought for prison reform, founded the peace and environmental movements; who insisted that medical research include female anatomy, who inspired men to become more nurturing parents, who created women’s studies and Title IX so we all could cheer the WNBA stars and Mia Hamm. We are the women who reclaimed sexuality from violent pornography, who put child care on the national agenda, who transformed demographics, artistic expression, language itself. We are the women who forged a worldwide movement. We are the proud successors of women who, though it took more than 50 years, won us the vote.

We are the women who now comprise the majority of US voters.

[...]

So listen to her voice:

“For too long, the history of women has been a history of silence. Even today, there are those who are trying to silence our words.

“It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food, or drowned, or suffocated, or their spines broken, simply because they are born girls. It is a violation of human rights when woman and girls are sold into the slavery of prostitution. It is a violation of human rights when women are doused with gasoline, set on fire and burned to death because their marriage dowries are deemed too small. It is a violation of human rights when individual women are raped in their own communities and when thousands of women are subjected to rape as a tactic or prize of war. It is a violation of human rights when a leading cause of death worldwide along women ages 14 to 44 is the violence they are subjected to in their own homes. It is a violation of human rights when women are denied the right to plan their own families, and that includes being forced to have abortions or being sterilized against their will.

“Women’s rights are human rights. Among those rights are the right to speak freely–and the right to be heard.”

That was Hillary Rodham Clinton defying the US State Department and the Chinese Government at the 1995 UN World Conference on Women in Beijing (the full, stunning speech is here).

[...]

So goodbye to Hillary’s second-guessing herself. The real question is deeper than her re-finding her voice. Can we women find ours? Can we do this for ourselves?  “Our President, Ourselves!”

Time is short and the contest tightening. We need to rise in furious energy–as we did when courageous Anita Hill was so vilely treated in the US Senate, as we did when desperate Rosie Jiminez was butchered by an illegal abortion, as we did and do for women globally who are condemned for trying to break through. We need to win, this time. Goodbye to supporting HRC tepidly, with ambivalent caveats and apologetic smiles. Time to  volunteer, make phone calls, send emails, donate money, argue, rally, march, shout, vote.

[...]

I agree with the 97 percent of her positions that are identical with Obama’s—and the few where hers are both more practical and to the left of his (like health care). I support her because she’s already smashed the first-lady stereotype and made history as a fine senator, and because I believe she will continue to make history not only as the first US woman president, but as a great US president.

As for the “woman thing”?

Me, I’m voting for Hillary not because she’s a woman–but because I am.

—Link to Robin Morgan’s website.   Link to Women’s Media Center.

Why McCain and Huckabee give me great joy

Link: McCain vs. the Right Wing - A Capital View (usnews.com).

Link: A Rapid City Journal politics blog : Coulter announces for Clinton (end times near).

Link: Right rallies to halt John McCain as he marches to Super Tuesday - Times Online.

I was hitting the Sunday morning talk shows, feeling great pregnant anticipation toward Super Tuesday being one of the INTERESTING news days in the recent history of the U.S. This fun alone is worth the price of admission. Could brokered conventions be coming?!

But the MOST FUN (and that is saying a lot, given the ups and downs of Senators Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama, either of whom will win in November, because the electorate will overwhelmingly choose the #1 candidate running, ANYBODY BUT THE PEOPLE WHO GAVE US BUSH).

The winner will be the Anti-Bush.

So Dems vs GOP is not a real race by real numbers (although you won't hear that in the formulaic-balance enforcing press).

Drama? Oh, this is as good as it gets. The Beltway Far Right Wingnuts are in an absolute DITHER! Ann Coulter is crapping her pants and threatening to hold her breath until she passes out, or, barring that, to campaign for Hillary Clinton! Pat Robertson blew his wad by officially backing hypocrisy in the form of a candidate he thought had the best chance to win, a candidate that is no longer in the race. Bwah-ha-ha-ha!

I have many friends who are evangelical Christians, and they were not buying this idea of getting their marching orders from the "Beltway Church." Gotta love those Protestant types. They tend to protest against admonitions to goose-step. I worried about them losing their collective soul in the past 8 years, but a number of them seem to be waking up, and they will undoubtedly continue to register their protest by hanging with Huckabee to the very end.

And Huckabee? How much fun is he? He may be nutters when it comes to science and other social issues that national pols usually are conditioned to hide from their public statements by handlers before they reach the kinds of audiences Huckabee is reaching, but I knew of the guy when he was overweight and just a local pol, and I'll give him credit for one thing: unlike the Machiavellian "Christians" who have ruled their followers like fascist bosses for the past eight years, Huckabee is a true believer. He actually cares about what Jesus said and taught, and he intends to follow that to the best of his ability. I'm not sure about the full powers of his ability, but I am certain that he can't be bought, and that's why the sincere evangelicals are loving him too. At least I hope so.

But why are the dominant media far right wingnuts in such a lather over McCain? He is quite conservative. Neither Nixon nor Goldwater would question his conservative credentials, nor either, I expect, would George H.W. Bush.

What they don't like is his independence (I still question it, to tell you the truth, given his last 3 years of pathetically sucking up to Bush), and that is what gives me all this giddy joy. I had given up on those adamant red staters when I figured out they lusted so deeply for a stranglehold on power that they were willing to get in bed with crooks and take marching orders from intellectually-challenged sound-biters.

People in the Red States are more purple than that, and I beg their apology for what I thought about them in the past. It was because I couldn't imagine ANYONE but a sonambulistic sheep giving up critical thinking abilities and free agency to embrace idiots simply because they held the keys to power.

See, I could follow the reasoning that could lead them there: a principle of religious authority that places ALL power in the hands of a god who demands exact obedience and no independent thought, a god who uses power as the keys to the kingdom of heaven, winnowing the world into an end game of absolute bliss or absolute punishment.

But how could reasonable human beings accept demagogic human agents who claimed to be God's ventriloquist dummies? That one stumped me. And thankfully, those with a history of rebelling against religious authorities, those who "get" the impulse behind Protestantism, have reappeared.

So the hilarity now, is watching what happens when the bullying bloviators who so love the power they feel when they speak with the royal "We" of "Hail, Hail, the Gang's All Here," the Talk Radio and Freeper repeaters who think they are in the cool kids group in high school, HAVE LOST THEIR GANG.

What a case study in mass media theory! What a fascinating development! Leaders are leaders only when they take a risk, seize a moment, and earn a following. When they lose their following, they stand there, hanging their asses out on the end of a cracking branch, all by themselves.

But those bloviators still have the soapboxes and media platforms with corporate funding, where they hold forth as if nothing as changed, as if the electorate remains a button to be pushed, sheep which they herd, a goose-stepping army that they control, absolutely.

And there's McCain and Romney. Oh, Beltway GOP Media Wingnuts are plenty pissed at Huckabee, because they require scapegoats to blame (to avoid having the realize they are to blame for becoming drunk on power). Huckabee's the spoiler, they say. They say he's the only reason the Romney isn't our front runner (a Massachusetts Mormon governor... go figure, they got some slim pickings when the overwhelmingly winning candidate MUST be the Anti-Bush).

If I saw anything in the primaries so far, Romney is, in the words of David Letterman, a TV weatherman, a prop, a corporate prop, and somehow people sense that, feel nothing in the face of his candidacy, in spite of the money machine and now, the power players in the GOP, rallying behind him. He's got everyone behind him, that is, except real voters.

That hasn't been a problem in the past for the GOP, with companies like Diebold, ChoicePoint, and others able to scrub voter rolls, gerrymander districts, or reduce the numbers of polling places. But what happens when even the people in your gerrymandered districts turn against you? Will you, in your lust for power, accept the loss, or in desperation, turn to embrace the REALLY nutty folks who would entertain the idea of a fascist coup?

What is the GOP to do with McCain?! He will be their candidate, because even if Romney wins by some trick at the convention, some devious swift boat machinations (what, will the whisper campaigns agains McCain start up again? He's getting too old to supposedly father more African American children). He isn't even fully enough of an Anti-Bush to run an even race against the Democratic candidate, but even he offends the well-placed Bush Machine people in the party.

But even if McCain loses, he wins, because he and Huckabee would have finally broken the fascist-minded, patronage-driven, on-message stranglehold the authoritarian political bosses have held over the Republican Party, and perhaps something like real Republicans will be able to emerge, Republicans who are not openly purchased tools of the corporations, who do not willingly give absolute obedience to party bosses, who do not rule by only giving out patronage jobs, funding patronage projects, giving aid in disasters only in patronage states.

Patronage is perhaps the most overt tool of authoritarian obedience with this crowd, from K-Street to Main Street, but the second most overt tool is the use of media soapboxes, and "normalizing" far right views in the mainstream media, so that the use of logic and independent thought looks like liberalism, so that even DEMOCRACY appears far too liberal for the bloviators. That's how the voters may finally realize that their media bullies have gone over the boards.

Two days till the Shakedown Cruise!  Whoo Hoo!