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Pickerhead with his favorite Buckley story.

Bill Kristol with his Buckley send off.

Here’s one measure of the man and the scope of his achievement: No serious historian will be able to write about 20th-century America without discussing Bill Buckley. Before Buckley, there was no conservative movement. After Buckley, there was Ronald Reagan. Reagan was the most important American political figure of the latter half of the 20th century. No one was more central to his emergence and success than Bill Buckley.

It was not just a happy coincidence that Buckley, in the course of promoting conservatism, also helped his country. It’s true that he saw in conservatism a set of doctrines that transcended any one nation, or any one time, and that approached the status of political, even metaphysical, truths. But Buckley wasn’t embarrassed to view his conservatism as being in the service of his patriotism, and to see in the conservative movement a means of defending our country and of defending freedom. Indeed, because of the debilities of postwar liberalism, conservatism had to take as its task the defense of Western civilization itself. And so it did.

A few years ago, Charles Kesler called attention in these pages to Buckley’s explanation of the “basic assumption” behind his bestselling Blackford Oakes spy novels:

that the survival of everything we cherish depends on the survival of the culture of liberty; and that this hangs on our willingness to defend this extraordinary country of ours, so awfully mixed up, so much of the time; so schizophrenic in its understanding of itself and its purposes; so crazily indulgent of its legion of wildly ungovernable miscreants–to defend it at all costs. With it all, this idealistic republic is the finest bloom of nationhood in all recorded time, and save only that God may decide that the land of the free and the home of the brave has outrun its license on history, we Americans must contend, struggle, and if necessary fight for America’s survival. …

Christopher Hitchens.

“At his desk,” wrote Christopher Buckley in his email to friends, “in Stanford this morning.” Well, one had somehow known that it would have to be at his desk. The late William F. Buckley Jr. was a man of incessant labor and productivity, with a slight allowance made for that saving capacity for making it appear easy. But he was driven, all right, and restless, and never allowed himself much ease on his own account. There was never a moment, after taping some session at Firing Line, where mere recourse to some local joint was in prospect. He was always just about to be late for the next plane, or column, or speech, or debate. Except that he never was late, until last Wednesday.

Ahh, Firing Line! If I leave a TV studio these days with what Diderot termed l’esprit de l’escalier, I don’t always blame myself. If I wish that I had remembered to make a telling point, or wish that I had phrased something better than I actually did, it’s very often because a “break” was just coming up, or the “segment” had been shortened at the last minute, or because the host was obnoxious, or because the panel had been over-booked in case of cancellations but at the last minute every egomaniac invited had managed to say “yes” and make himself available. But on Buckley’s imperishable show, if you failed to make your best case it was your own damn fault. Once the signature Bach chords had died away, and once he’d opened with that curiously seductive intro (“I should like to begin .  .  . “), you were given every opportunity to develop and pursue your argument. And if you misspoke or said anything fatuous, it was unlikely to escape comment. In my leftist days, if I knew I was going on the box with Buckley, I would make sure to do some homework (and attempt to emulate him by trying to make sure it didn’t show). …

Mark Steyn says you’ll be sorry you were wondering what’s going on with Canada’s Human Rights Commissions.

What does Maclean’s have in common with a labiaplasty and blood-drinking space lizards from the star system Alpha Draconis?

Well, they’re all part of the wacky world of Canadian “human rights.”

First things first: what is a labiaplasty? Well, it’s a cosmetic procedure performed on the female genitalia for those who are dissatisfied with them. I think I speak for many sad male losers living on ever more distant memories when I say that I find it hard to imagine being dissatisfied with female genita . . .

What’s that? Oh, it’s the women who are dissatisfied are they? Ah, right. Well, there’s the rub. The Ontario Human Rights Commission is currently weighing whether or not to become the (at last count) third “human rights” commission in Canada to prosecute Maclean’s for the crime of running an excerpt from my book. The Globe And Mail’s Margaret Wente was interested to know what Canada’s vast “human rights” machinery does when it isn’t sticking it to privately owned magazines, so she swung by the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal to check out the action. And it seems the reason they haven’t yet dragged Maclean’s into court is because they’re tied up hearing the case of two women who claim they were denied their human right to a labiaplasty by a Toronto plastic surgeon who specializes in that particular area. The women proved to be post-operative transsexuals who were unhappy with some of the aesthetic results of their transformation, and Dr. Stubbs declined to perform the procedure on the grounds that he usually operates on biological females and is generally up to speed on what goes where and, when it comes to transsexuals, he had no idea what he was, so to speak, getting into. Had he done it and it had all gone horribly wrong, the plaintiffs would have sued his pants off. So, as a private practitioner, he chose to decline the business, and as a result now finds himself in Human Rights Commission hell. …

Power Line notes Wesley Clark’s latest.

John Fund details some of Obama’s heritage in Chicago politics.

On Tuesday, Barack Obama may well wrap up the Democratic nomination. Yet how he rose so quickly in Chicago’s famously suspect politics — and who his associates were there — has received little scrutiny.

That may change today as the trial of Antoin “Tony” Rezko, Mr. Obama’s friend of two decades and his campaign fund-raiser, gets under way in federal court in Chicago. Mr. Rezko, a master fixer in Illinois politics, is charged with money laundering, attempted extortion, fraud and aiding bribery in an alleged multimillion dollar scheme shaking down companies seeking state contracts.

John McCain’s dealings with lobbyists have properly come under a microscope; why not Mr. Obama’s? Partly, says Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass, because the national media establishment has decided that Chicago’s grubby politics interferes with the story line of hope they’ve set out for Mr. Obama. Former Washington Post reporter Tom Edsall, who now teaches journalism at Columbia University, told Canada’s Globe & Mail that “reporters have sometimes allowed themselves to get too much caught up in [Obama] excitement.” Then there are Chicago Republicans, loath to encourage the national party to pounce because some of their own leaders are caught in the Rezko mess.

For its part, the Democratic Party may once again nominate a first-time candidate they haven’t fully vetted politically. Democrats flocked to Michael Dukakis in 1988, ignoring Al Gore’s warnings about Willie Horton; later they were blindsided by revelations about Bill Clinton after he was elected president. …

David Ignatius points out Obama’s thin résumé.

Hillary Clinton has been trying to make a point about Barack Obama that deserves one last careful look before Tuesday’s probably decisive Democratic primaries: If Obama truly intends to unite America across party lines and break the Washington logjam, then why has he shown so little interest or aptitude for the hard work of bipartisan government?

This is the real “Where’s the beef?” about Obama, and it still doesn’t have a good answer. He gives a great speech, and he promises that he can heal the terrible partisan divisions that have enfeebled American politics over the past decade. This is a message of hope that the country clearly wants to hear.

But can he do it? The record is mixed, but it’s fair to say that Obama has not shown much willingness to take risks or make enemies to try to restore a working center in Washington. Clinton, for all her reputation as a divisive figure, has a much stronger record of bipartisan achievement. And the likely Republican nominee, John McCain, has a better record still. …

Sun-Times reporter Lynn Sweet asks when Obama’s going to answer Rezko questions.

… Obama has never agreed to an interview about Rezko with the reporters from the Chicago papers who know the story the best, and it has not been for lack of trying. My Sun-Times colleagues who are investigating Rezko have pressed for a chance to talk to Obama about Rezko.

At issue is trying to put together the whole story about Obama and Rezko — all of which speaks to Obama’s judgment, his main selling point as he seeks the presidency and seems positioned to win the Democratic nomination.

The Obama campaign’s response to the conference call was to put out a statement reminding people that Clinton did not release her tax returns and Obama did, and that her first lady records are still under wraps. After I asked if that diversionary tactic was their response, I was given a sheet with excerpts of news stories that concluded Obama has done nothing wrong. …

Melanie Phillips says the world has been saved from global warming.

The Economist on what forensic experts can now learn from hair.

Ever wonder about the sacrifices made by university administrators? University Business.com has answers.

A comprehensive spending review, conducted by Vanderbilt University (Tenn.) and the media, revealed some interesting facts: renowned Chancellor Gordon Gee, 62, earns close to $1.4 million annually; he has spent as much as $700,000 more on parties and a personal chef at his university mansion; the aforementioned mansion, Braeburn, has been renovated to the tune of $6 million since he was hired in 2000; …

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Awesome picture of Buckley and Reagan.

Obituary writing is an art form in England. The Times shows how with this for Buckley.

… America lacked any journal of right-wing opinion, comparable to The Nation and The New Republic on the left. In 1955 was launched National Review, a weekly — afterwards fortnightly — magazine of political comment and opinion, with arts and review sections, rather like The Spectator or Time and Tide, to be both a platform and a debating ground for sophisticated conservatives.

Although only a third of the money came from family sources, it was agreed that Buckley should have absolute control of the voting shares, a provision allowing him to prevent the ideological schisms which had destroyed similar journals in the past. Rallying to this new masthead came such theoreticians of the Right as Russell Kirk, Frank S. Meyer, Whittaker Chambers and James Burnham. They shared a strong anti-communism — several of them had once been communists themselves — but in their domestic policy they formed two recognisably distinct, and to some extent incompatible, schools. On one hand were the traditionalists, whose Burkean doctrine emphasised continuity, order and Christian morals. On the other were libertarians who believed in a minimum of state interference and control.

These schools complemented each other but could never quite merge. As a group American conservatives were formulating their position almost from scratch. Despite some indigenous elements (a strict interpretation of the Constitution, for example), there was no historic party line for them to follow, so they drew heavily on British and European ideas. Their economics, derived from such Austrian liberals (very different from American liberals) as Hayek and von Mises, had much in common with what would afterwards be called “Thatcherism” in Britain.

Buckley himself was neither the best writer nor the most original thinker, but he conducted the group brilliantly. In ferocious clashes he separated National Review conservatism from two, at that time influential, factions — the “objectivists”, led by Ayn Rand who preached a doctrine of atheistic selfishness, and the John Birch Society, led by Robert Welch, which was obsessed by the notion of communist conspiracy. Ayn Rand would never afterwards stay in a room with Buckley, and the John Birchers bombarded National Review with hate mail.

The liberal establishment had responded to the appearance of National Review with a degree of venom which seems incredible now. Buckley was compared to Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin and the Ku Klux Klan. As he wrote in an early issue of the magazine: “Liberals do a great deal of talking about hearing other points of view, but it sometimes shocks them to learn that there are other points of view.” However, as he became fashionable, he became acceptable, the pet conservative of highbrow liberals, on friendly terms with such as John Kenneth Galbraith and Norman Mailer. …

Good Corner post on WFB.

David Brooks with his memoir.

When I was in college, William F. Buckley Jr. wrote a book called “Overdrive” in which he described his glamorous lifestyle. Since I was young and a smart-aleck, I wrote a parody of it for the school paper.

“Buckley spent most of his infancy working on his memoirs,” I wrote in my faux-biography. “By the time he had learned to talk, he had finished three volumes: ‘The World Before Buckley,’ which traced the history of the world prior to his conception; ‘The Seeds of Utopia,’ which outlined his effect on world events during the nine months of his gestation; and ‘The Glorious Dawn,’ which described the profound ramifications of his birth on the social order.”

The piece went on in this way. I noted that his ability to turn water into wine added to his popularity at prep school. I described his college memoirs: “God and Me at Yale,” “God and Me at Home” and “God and Me at the Movies.” I recounted that after college he had founded two magazines, one called The National Buckley and the other called The Buckley Review, which merged to form The Buckley Buckley.

I wrote that his hobbies included extended bouts of name-dropping and going into rooms to make everyone else feel inferior.

Buckley came to the University of Chicago, delivered a lecture and said: “David Brooks, if you’re in the audience, I’d like to offer you a job.”

That was the big break of my professional life. A few years later, I went to National Review and joined the hundreds of others who have been Buckley protégés. …

Roger Simon wants to make sure we don’t miss Power Line’s smackdown of CBS lies.

Here’s the Power Line post. It examines last week’s 60 minutes segment retailing one Jill Simpson who claims she was performing opposition research for Karl Rove with the intent to destroy Alabama’s Dem governor.

… Jill Simpson is a sad case, but she’s not the only one. The world is full of mildly deranged people who are convinced that they alone have stumbled onto the great conspiracy of their time, or that they themselves have played a key role in events, unaccountably unacknowledged by anyone else. There once was a time when journalists tried, at least, to avoid being led down blind alleys by such sad cases.

What is surprising is not that Jill Simpson exists, but that CBS chose to put her forward on 60 Minutes as a credible witness, without disclosing the many facts that would have enabled the network’s viewers to draw their own conclusions about Simpson’s story. It seems fair to wonder whether, at some level, the people who run CBS and 60 Minutes are as deranged as Jill Simpson when it comes to Karl Rove and the Republican Party.

Let’s turn our attention to the campaign. Gerard Baker of the Times continues explaining the race to his readers in the old country.

… It’s hard to escape the feeling that all this excitement is going to be repaid in the devalued currency of disappointment. Mr Obama’s ego is certainly writing cheques his body can’t cash. There’s an expectation that a President Obama will change everything in America’s relations with the world. But my guess is that, for all his campaign rhetoric and for all his genuine intent, the facts on the ground won’t change much. …

… The problem is that there’s a danger that the presidential contest between Mr Obama and Mr McCain will become not a debate but a silly battle of conflicting icons. You can be sure that, in the eyes of the rest of the world, and much of America, if Mr McCain wins it will be not because of his superior experience or the quality of his ideas, but because America is irredeemably racist.

Instead of being the welcome break with America’s recent past that he truly is, he will be painted as a continuation of it. Worse, than that, he will have won by vanquishing Hope and Peace. He will be for ever The Man Who Shot Bambi.

The Economist still has Obama reservations.

… The sad thing is that one might reasonably have expected better from Mr Obama. He wants to improve America’s international reputation yet campaigns against NAFTA. He trumpets “the audacity of hope” yet proposes more government intervention. He might have chosen to use his silver tongue to address America’s problems in imaginative ways—for example, by making the case for reforming the distorting tax code. Instead, he wants to throw money at social problems and slap more taxes on the rich, and he is using his oratorical powers to prey on people’s fears.

Mr Obama advertises himself as something fresh, hopeful and new. But on economic matters at least he, like Mrs Clinton, has begun to look a rather ordinary old-style Democrat.

WaPo editors look askance at Obama and Clinton’s NAFTA talk.

… Whole U.S. industries have grown up to take advantage of NAFTA. Meanwhile, none of the U.S. jobs that left for Mexico would come back; they’d simply go to China, India or elsewhere.

The Democratic candidates understand that trade with the developing world has both costs and benefits, which are not evenly distributed across the United States. Two days before this week’s debate, Mr. Obama said, “I don’t think it’s realistic for us to repeal NAFTA,” because that “would actually result in more job loss . . . than job gains.” Ms. Clinton awkwardly pleaded that NAFTA has benefited some parts of the country — such as Texas. Yet the urge to win Ohio trumped, and both Democrats made a threat that, if taken seriously, can be described only as reckless. In other words, we have to hope that they were only pandering.

American Thinker tips a hat to Angelina Jolie.