[Peace-discuss] Christopher Buckley Dumps McCain

Sat Oct 11 20:17:16 CDT 2008

-------- Original Message --------
Subject:  Christopher Buckley Dumps McCain
Date:  Sat, 11 Oct 2008 15:44:51 -0700
From:  Alexander Cockburn <alexandercockburn at asis.com>

The son writes almost as badly as the father. Same posturing fatuity.

> *Sorry, Dad, I'm Voting for Obama*
> by Christopher Buckley
>
> *The son of William F. Buckley has decided—shock!—to vote for a Democrat.*
>
> Let me be the latest conservative/libertarian/whatever to leap onto 
> the Barack Obama bandwagon. It’s a good thing my dear old mum and pup 
> are no longer alive. They’d cut off my allowance.
>  
>
> Or would they? But let’s get that part out of the way. The only reason 
> my vote would be of any interest to anyone is that my last name 
> happens to be Buckley—a name I inherited. So in the event anyone 
> notices or cares, the headline will be: “William F. Buckley’s Son Says 
> He Is Pro-Obama.” I know, I know: It lacks the throw-weight of “Ron 
> Reagan Jr. to Address Democratic Convention,” but it’ll have to do.
>  
>
> I am—drum roll, please, cue trumpets—making this announcement in the 
> cyberpages of The Daily Beast (what joy to be writing for a 
> publication so named!) rather than in the pages of National Review, 
> where I write the back-page column. For a reason: My colleague, the 
> superb and very dishy Kathleen Parker, recently wrote in National 
> Review Online a column stating what John Cleese as Basil Fawlty would 
> call “the bleeding obvious”: namely, that Sarah Palin is an 
> embarrassment, and a dangerous one at that. She’s not exactly alone. 
> /New York Times/ columnist David Brooks, who began his career at NR, 
> just called Governor Palin “a cancer on the Republican Party.”
>  
>
> As for Kathleen, she has to date received 12,000 (quite literally) 
> foam-at-the-mouth hate-emails. One correspondent, if that’s quite the 
> right word, suggested that Kathleen’s mother should have aborted her 
> and tossed the fetus into a Dumpster. There’s Socratic dialogue for 
> you. Dear Pup once said to me sighfully after a right-winger who 
> fancied himself a WFB protégé had said something transcendently and 
> provocatively cretinous, “You know, I’ve spent my entire life time 
> separating the Right from the kooks.” Well, the dear man did his best. 
> At any rate, I don’t have the kidney at the moment for 12,000 emails 
> saying how good it is he’s no longer alive to see his Judas of a son 
> endorse for the presidency a covert Muslim who pals around with the 
> Weather Underground. So, you’re reading it here first.
>  
>
> As to the particulars, assuming anyone gives a fig, here goes:
> I have known John McCain personally since 1982. I wrote a 
> well-received speech for him. Earlier this year, I wrote in /The New 
> York Times/—I’m beginning to sound like Paul Krugman, who cannot begin 
> a column without saying, “As I warned the world in my last 
> column...”—a highly favorable Op-Ed about McCain, taking Rush Limbaugh 
> and the others in the Right Wing Sanhedrin to task for going after 
> McCain for being insufficiently conservative. I don’t—still—doubt that 
> McCain’s instincts remain fundamentally conservative. But the problem 
> is otherwise.
>  
>
> McCain rose to power on his personality and biography. He was 
> /authentic/. He spoke truth to power. He told the media they were 
> “jerks” (a sure sign of authenticity, to say nothing of good taste; we 
> /are/ jerks). He was real. He was unconventional. He embraced former 
> anti-war leaders. He brought resolution to the awful missing-POW 
> business. He brought about normalization with Vietnam—his former 
> torturers! Yes, he erred in accepting plane rides and vacations from 
> Charles Keating, but then, having been cleared on technicalities, 
> groveled in apology before the nation. He told me across a lunch 
> table, “The Keating business was much worse than my five and a half 
> years in Hanoi, because I at least walked away from that with my 
> honor.” Your heart went out to the guy. I thought at the time, God, 
> this guy should be president someday.
>  
>
> A year ago, when everyone, including the man I’m about to endorse, was 
> caterwauling to get out of Iraq on the next available flight, John 
> McCain, practically alone, said no, no—bad move. Surge. It seemed a 
> suicidal position to take, an act of political bravery of the kind you 
> don’t see a whole lot of anymore.
>  
>
> But that was—sigh—then. John McCain has changed. He said, famously, 
> apropos the Republican debacle post-1994, “We came to Washington to 
> change it, and Washington changed us.” This campaign has changed John 
> McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament 
> has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack 
> coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the 
> federal budget “by the end of my first term.” Who, really, believes 
> that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of 
> his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads 
> are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there 
> was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?
>  
>
> All this is genuinely saddening, and for the country is perhaps even 
> tragic, for America ought, really, to be governed by men like John 
> McCain—who have spent their entire lives in its service, even willing 
> to give the last full measure of their devotion to it. If he goes out 
> losing ugly, it will be beyond tragic, graffiti on a marble bust.
>  
>
> As for Senator Obama: He has exhibited throughout a “first-class 
> temperament,” /pace/ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s famous comment about 
> FDR. As for his intellect, well, he’s a Harvard man, though that’s 
> sure as heck no guarantee of anything, these days. Vietnam was brought 
> to you by Harvard and (one or two) Yale men. As for our current 
> adventure in Mesopotamia, consider this lustrous alumni roster. Bush 
> 43: Yale. Rumsfeld: Princeton. Paul Bremer: Yale /and/ Harvard. What 
> do they all have in common? Andover! The best and the brightest.
>  
>
> I’ve read Obama’s books, and they are first-rate. He is that /rara 
> avis/, the politician who writes his own books. Imagine. He is also a 
> lefty. I am not. I am a small-government conservative who clings 
> tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have 
> balanced budgets. On abortion, gay marriage, /et al/, I’m libertarian. 
> I believe with my sage and epigrammatic friend P.J. O’Rourke that a 
> government big enough to give you everything you want is also big 
> enough to take it all away.
>  
>
> But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, 
> President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that 
> traditional left-politics aren’t going to get us out of this pit we’ve 
> dug for ourselves. If he raises taxes and throws up tariff walls and 
> opens the coffers of the DNC to bribe-money from the special interest 
> groups against whom he has (somewhat disingenuously) railed during the 
> campaign trail, then he will almost certainly reap a whirlwind that 
> will make Katrina look like a balmy summer zephyr.
> Obama has in him—I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy “We are the 
> people we have been waiting for” silly rhetoric—the potential to be a 
> good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what 
> the historical moment seems to be calling for.
>  
>
> So, I wish him all the best. We are all in this together. Necessity is 
> the mother of bipartisanship. And so, for the first time in my life, 
> I’ll be pulling the Democratic lever in November. As the saying goes, 
> God save the United States of America.
> ________________________________________________________________________
>
>
> Buckley’s books include /Supreme Courtship/ 
> <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0446579823/thedaibea-20>, /The 
> White House Mess/, /Thank You for Smoking/, /Little Green Men/, and 
> /Florence of Arabia/. His journalism, satire, and criticism has 
> appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street 
> Journal, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and Esquire. He was chief speechwriter 
> for Vice President George H.W. Bush, and the founder and 
> editor-in-chief of Forbes FYI.

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