Shed No Tears For Bill Buckley

I’m sure that, at any moment, our corporate media will go fully into “dead Diana mode,” as the eternal Molly Ivins once called it, with the passing of conservative icon and godfather William F. Buckley today.

Upon hearing that the cause of death was emphysema, I should note that I’m sorry that he went out that way; it’s a horrible way to go. However, that is where my sympathy for Buckley begins and ends.

Because, event though he denounced the foreign policy interventionism of George W. Milhous Bush here, Buckley (along with individuals such as L. Brent Bozell) laid the foundation for the conservative moment that drew like-minded individuals through the late ‘50s to the present day. Through his frequently obscure literary denunciations of those who disagreed with him as a result of his thin intellectual skin, he crafted the attack blueprint readily adopted by his disciples such as Lee Atwater and Karl Rove, all helping to denigrate our political dialogue by demonizing the opposition any way possible.

And I find that I cannot mourn a man who once said the following in 1954 (noted here): "as long as McCarthyism fixes its goal with its present precision, it is a movement around which men of goodwill and stern morality can close ranks."

In my folly, I once laughed at Buckley, considering him nothing more than a well-heeled intellectual curiosity of little importance outside of his own insular circle of power and influence. However, he preserved the insidious conservative “brand” through years of domination by moderate to left-wing orthodoxy in our politics and our media, to the point where it was viable when the time arrived for its ascendancy under Ronald Reagan, initiating what has led to its currently-slipping-but-still pervasive dominance.

Give him a brief moment of remembrance for the sake of his admirers and then relegate him to the dustbin of history where be belongs.