Jeff Hart on WFB

I guess I disagree with you a tad on Bush and his effects on conservative ideas. I really think the problem is not the GOP leadership or Bush but us.

We have seemed to have spent a lot of time the past 4 years trying to read each other out of the Republican party and the conservative movement. Eating our own as it were even though we often agree on 80 percent of things. Are you for Immigration Reform? You are a Rino and not a true COnservative. For the Dubai Port Deal? Horrors no true conservative would be for that. Did you committ the sin the gang of 14 was not a bad idea.Are you for MIke Huckabee- Ahhh you Christian Socialist. HEretic turn in your conservative secret decoder. It seems that conservative direct mail, bloggers, and pundits have a new litmus test on what true conservatism is every week.

It is hard it seems to me for Conservatism problems to be laid at the feet of Bush and GOP leadership since in reality on the Cable News and on other media outlest I am far more likley to see Hannity interviewing Coutler about what some other pundit says.

My email is full of "conservative" email that is basically spam asking me again to send 20 dollars in so I can fax all members of Congress on the latest threat to the Republic and Conservatism and the memory of Ronald Reagan and Mom and Apple Pie.

When we start listening and engaging each other with respect then the ideas will come and Conservatism will be refreshed. Till then at times I don't think we deserve to govern at times.

You're right, JH, mostly. I think Bush et alia have led us into the ditch, but it's not like I, or many people like me, were standing there saying, "Wait, no, don't do this!"

I pulled the lever for a Democratic congressman for the first time in 2006 in my fifties. Bush really did lead me to reassess many of my beliefs and ideas. A lot of this seems to me equivalent to what the Dems did with the New Deal. They hung onto it way past the point where it even had a small chance of working. An entire economic plan that has pretty much just tax cuts is different now than when Reagan took over. He took office with personal tax rates of 70% and our debt at about 20% of GDP. Now we have top tax rates of 36% and debt at 70% of GDP and climbing. Time for some new ideas.

The Republican Party has also somehow become subservient to the cult of personality. People like Limbaugh, Coulter, and Hannity hold way too much power. I listened to Rush for a year or so. Great fun. I got tired of his self-promotion but I also realized that a daily dose of self-righteous rage wasnt especially good for me or my country.

Steve

Rod,

Well I guess I have supported Bush on most things. From Iraq to immigration. Still I was hesitant of this movement to usher Paul and his supporter out of the party last Fall. You did a post some time back that I think was called "Conservatisims" that kinda of touched on this.

The Huckabee Campaign and supporting him again drove this home to me. The guy that runs the Evangelical Outpost had a post shortly after he did his short stint with the Huckabee campaign complaining that the COnservative media seemed very disinterested in getting their side or facts. He had more luck with the mainstream media. THis is just the latest example. I know that different Conservative magazine will have different points of view and their own valid agendas. For instance the National Review has the Numbers USA propaganda guy on staff and is thus more restrivtive on views of immigration while the Weekly Standard is perhaps more open too it. THe problem is we never really know who is watching the Guardians of the Conservative media themselves. How many well known bloggers or pundits are being paid to advocate on Issue x by Lobby .We never know.

It just seesm the temperature in the room as to this issues is often too hot for no apparent reason and one wonders why certain things become issues. A lot of seems like ole fashioned Astro Turfing. Anyway this is going off topic but those are my thoughts.

Neither Ron Paul nor Mike Huckabee have or will have any credibility among the investor class in this country, and thus their influence over the GOP (which is the only avenue for conservatism to have any real political influence in this country) will be limited at best. You may not like the Bushes and the Romneys of the world, but Iraq incompetence notwithstanding, their basic worldview is still the dominant one amongst the wing of the Republican party that writes the checks and inhabits the boardrooms. And that wing is the one that ends up in the driver's seat at the end of the day, whether you like it or not, regardless of whether they are "crunchy" enough for your tastes or would make Russell Kirk happy with their lifestyles or viewpoints. In practice, conservatism is for the most part a mere solicitude for tidy incomes, because that's what those with tidy incomes want it to be.

This is shoddy journalism, both from Hart's end and Rod's.

"At the conclusion of Tanenhaus’s article, Buckley said more or less explicitly that support for Bush had destroyed the conservative movement."

Very little reporting is going on here. With the exception of the quoted "Absolutely" we have no firm idea what was really said. We have here Hart's suggestions, but not much more.

Either report the matter correctly or write an op-ed. Otherwise you are being dishonest.

From today's NYT coverage of the memorial service yesterday at St. Patrick's:

nytimes.com/2008/04/05/nyregion/05buckley.html

2,200 Fill St. Patrick’s for Buckley’s Memorial

...at least 2,200 people, filling every seat, gathered for a memorial service for Mr. Buckley, who died on Feb. 27 at the age of 82.

Some were famous — the writer Tom Wolfe, the actor Tom Selleck, the television hosts Chris Matthews and Charlie Rose, the former mayor Edward I. Koch and the former senator George McGovern, the 1972 Democratic candidate for president. Most were not famous. The memorial, announced weeks in advance, was open to the public...

The Rev. George W. Rutler, who celebrated the memorial Mass, spoke of Mr. Buckley’s playfulness, recalling a conversation between Mr. Buckley and a television host who referred condescendingly to sailing, one of Mr. Buckley’s loves. Is there any real difference, the host said sarcastically, between sailing east to west and west to east?

Father Rutler — without benefit of Mr. Buckley’s customary clipboard, arched eyebrow or silken voice — evoked Mr. Buckley (and got a laugh) with the words: “Yes. They are in *opposite* directions.”

One eulogist, Henry A. Kissinger, the former secretary of state, related a sailing story, too, about Mr. Buckley’s losing a race that he thought he would win. The story somehow combined Xerxes, Themistocles and e-mail.

Dr. Kissinger’s gravelly voice choked with emotion several times.

“Over a decade ago,” he said, clearing his throat, “Bill and I discussed the relationship of knowledge to faith. I surmised it required a special act of divine grace to make the leap from the intellectual to the spiritual. In a note, Bill demurred. No special epiphany was involved, he argued. There could be a spiritual and intellectual drift until, one day, the eyes opened and happiness followed ever after. Bill noted that he had seen that culmination in friends. He did not claim it for himself.”

The other eulogist, Christopher Buckley, noted that if his father’s columns, books and other papers were stacked one on top of another, they would rise 550 feet, or some 220 feet above the spires of St. Patrick’s...

Mr. Buckley revealed that at his father’s wake, treasured items were placed in the coffin: his father’s favorite rosary, his television remote control and a jar of peanut butter.

“No pharaoh off to the afterlife goes better equipped than he does,” Mr. Buckley said.

He added that his father was once asked in an interview in Playboy magazine what he would want for an epitaph. He replied, “I know that my redeemer liveth.”

“Only Pop could manage to get the Book of Job into a Hugh Hefner publication,” Mr. Buckley said...

There was a piece by Jon Rauch, I think, that observed, "Conservatism can never fail; it can only be failed." Great line, solid observation -- except that it really is possible for a certain kind of conservative to look at the GOP and point out how it has essentially been about boosting the free market, and not much else identifiably conservative. The problem with this analysis is it forces conservatives who make it to recognize that the US is not by their standards a particularly conservative country.