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Mark Steyn’s Buckley send-off.
If you were running one of those Frank Luntz machine-wired focus groups to produce the ideal conservative leader for America, I doubt you’d come up with an urbane patrician harpsichordist who lived part time in Switzerland and was partial to words like “eremitical” and “periphrastic.” “It’s the epigoni, stupid” is not a useful campaign slogan – although, in fact, a distressingly large number of political candidates are certainly epigoni (“a second-rate imitator”).
But William F. Buckley Jr. was a first-rate original, who founded the modern conservative movement half a century ago and saw it through to victory in the 1980 presidential election and then to vindication in the collapse of communism a decade later. He would demur when credited with “creating” the entire show but he was certainly its impresario, and at a time when there wasn’t exactly a lot of talent stampeding to audition.
The 1950s are assumed, at least by children of the Sixties, to be a “conservative” era. But at home New Deal liberalism controlled all the levers of society, and abroad the communists had gobbled up half of Europe, neutered most of the rest, swiped China, were eyeing up other valuable real estate across the planet, and Washington’s foreign policy establishment was inclined to accept this as a permanent feature of life to be “managed” rather than defeated.
The Republican minority in Congress were isolationists or country-club liberals, and their presidential nominees were “moderates” like Dewey or nonpartisans like Ike. There was virtually no serious intellectual energy in American conservatism. The notion that in the early 21st century more Americans would identify themselves as “conservatives” than as “liberals” would have struck the elites of 50 years ago as preposterous: a scenario unimaginable outside the more-fanciful dystopian science fiction. …
Thomas Sowell too.
Writing in 1954, Lionel Trilling said that most conservatives do not “express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”
One of the perks of being a liberal is disdaining people who are not liberals. However, as of 1954, Trilling’s dismissive attitude toward conservatives’ intellectual landscape was painfully close to the truth.
Trilling wrote ten years after Friedrich Hayek’s landmark counterattack against the left in his book “The Road to Serfdom.” But that was a book with great impact on a relatively small number of people at the time, though its influence spread around the world over the years.
Trilling also wrote eight years before Milton Friedman’s first book aimed at a popular audience — “Capitalism and Freedom” — and a quarter of a century before Rush Limbaugh pioneered conservative talk radio.
They say it is always darkest before the dawn. One year after Lionel Trilling’s dismissal of conservative intellectual thought, William F. Buckley founded National Review, the first in a series of conservative journals of opinion that would build on its success.
In short, Bill Buckley revitalized conservatism, with his wit, his intellect, and his inimitable mannerisms that made him a TV icon as a guest on many programs, even before he created his own long-running program, “Firing Line.” …
Peter Wehner points out there is more working well in the Middle East besides the military surge.
… In November 2007 Sayyid Imam al-Sharif (“Dr Fadlâ€) published his book, Rationalizations on Jihad in Egypt and the World, in serialised form. Mr Sharif, who is Egyptian, argues that the use of violence to overthrow Islamic governments is religiously unlawful and practically harmful. He also recommends the formation of a special Islamic court to try Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s number two and its ideological leader, and calls the attacks on September 11 2001 a “catastrophe for all Muslimsâ€.
Mr Sharif’s words are significant because he was once a mentor to Mr Zawahiri. Mr Sharif, who wrote the book in a Cairo prison, is “a living legend within the global jihadist movementâ€, according to Jarret Brachman, a terrorism expert.
Another important event occurred in October 2007, when Sheikh Abd Al-‘Aziz bin Abdallah Aal Al-Sheikh, the highest religious authority in Saudi Arabia, issued a fatwa prohibiting Saudi youth from engaging in jihad abroad. It states: “I urge my brothers the ulama [the top class of Muslim clergy] to clarify the truth to the public . . . to warn [youth] of the consequences of being drawn to arbitrary opinions and [religious] zeal that is not based on religious knowledge.†The target of the fatwa is obvious: Mr bin Laden.
A month earlier Sheikh Salman al-Awdah, an influential Saudi cleric whom Mr bin Laden once lionised, wrote an “open letter†condemning Mr bin Laden. “Brother Osama, how much blood has been spilt? How many innocents among children, elderly, the weak, and women have been killed and made homeless in the name of al-Qaeda?†…
Karl Rove reviews the campaign.
Tuesday’s exciting presidential primaries were about momentum, delegates and second looks.
In the Republican contest, these factors gave victory to the Lazarus candidate. John McCain’s campaign nearly collapsed eight months ago in a mass of debt and missteps. Tuesday, Mr. McCain became the GOP’s standard-bearer by passing the 1,191-delegate threshold needed for nomination. It was a remarkable comeback and personal triumph of character, grit and persistence.
The Democrats saw Hillary Clinton come back from the abyss for the third time this year. What is it about the Clintons living life on the political edge? Mrs. Clinton was on the edge after Iowa but recovered in New Hampshire. She was falling after losing South Carolina but recovered on Super Tuesday. She then endured 11 straight defeats that threatened to end her candidacy but won three of Tuesday’s four contests. However, as of Wednesday night, her victories only closed Mr. Obama’s delegate lead by nine, from 110 to 101.
As exciting as Tuesday night was, the Democratic contest has not shifted to advantage Mrs. Clinton. Mr. Obama still has a healthy advantage. There are 611 delegates to be elected in 12 future contests, 349 superdelegates have yet to commit, and 12 delegate spots from Tuesday’s primaries are still not allocated. To win, Mrs. Clinton must take 58% of these outstanding delegates. That’s a tall order.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, it doesn’t necessarily all depend on Pennsylvania and its 158 delegates. …
Roger Simon posts on the Dem dust-up.
Much of today’s Pickings is devoted to a Reason Magazine interview with one of Pickerhead’s good friends, Chip Mellor, President and co-founder of the libertarian public interest law firm The Institute for Justice. IJ has figured in these pages many times. This particular interview provides readers with an in-depth introduction to the thoughts one of the most consequential lawyers in the country.
Chip and Bob Levy (also with the Institute) have written The Dirty Dozen; How Twelve Supreme Court Cases Radically Expanded Government and Eroded Freedom. This 300 page book will be published in May. The Foreword, by Richard Epstein of the University of Chicago, is itself worth the price of admission. When out to dinner a few weeks ago, Chip and Bob gave me one of the proofs. Here, from the introduction, is the purpose of the book.
Whether it is political speech, economic liberties,property rights, welfare, racial preferences, gun owners’ rights, or imprisonment without charge, the U. S. Supreme Court has behaved in a manner that would have stunned, mystified, and outraged our founding fathers.
Here’s Chip describing IJ’s first case.
…
reason:
What was the first case that IJ took on?
Mellor: The first case was in 1991 and involved a wonderful entrepreneur here in Washington, D.C., named Taalib-Din Uqdah and his wife, Pamela Farrell. They were entrepreneurs seeking to braid hair but had the misfortune of doing so without a license to practice cosmetology.
Hair braiding is a means of both artistic and cultural expression as well as personal preference for the way that hair is styled, particularly in African-American and Caribbean communities. It is widely practiced and very popular. It’s often practiced in the home and passed on from mother to daughter in sort of an informal apprenticeship, because it is a very elaborate means of styling hair. But Taalib-Din had opened a salon. It was in a home, but one where they’d converted the first floor to a salon. He employed about a dozen people.
He actually received a knock on the door from the D.C. cosmetology police informing him that he was practicing cosmetology without a license, and he had to cease and desist immediately or face a fine—I believe it was $1,000 a day—and possibly even imprisonment for the crime of braiding hair and employing people. And when he went down to get a license, of course, he found that it was much harder than one would expect because it required that you actually attend cosmetology school for a couple of years, that you have thousands of hours of training learning skills that have nothing to do with African hair braiding. Adding insult to injury, it required you to demonstrate your proficiency by showing that you could, on a practical exam, style women’s hair in finger waves and pin curls, which were the hair styles popular with white women in 1938, when the law was passed.
reason: What happened in the case?
Mellor: We lost at the U.S. District Court and were moving it up through the appeal process when we were successful through both media and other efforts in getting it deregulated in the D.C. City Council.
reason: How did the media respond?
Mellor: All of our cases are deliberately designed as platforms to educate the general public about the importance of what may seem to be unique or even arcane issues and why those issues affect many, many people beyond the particular case, both in terms of the situation and also in terms of the constitutional principle involved. Here we had a wonderful media response from everybody. They picked up on several things: 1) the inherent injustice involved; 2) the compelling story that the clients had to tell; and 3) the way in which the law was really rigged against what could otherwise be a totally legitimate and productive activity.
The principle of law there is applicable whether it’s hair braiding or cab driving or casket retailing or flower selling or any number of entry-level occupations that are subject to arbitrary regulations. …
The Economist spent a lot of the last issue on potatoes. Even though we are already full, three articles were noteworthy and are included. It’s the weekend, so we can be a little longer. There’s actually a book you can read. The review is here too.
IT IS the world’s fourth-most-important food crop, after maize, wheat and rice. It provides more calories, more quickly, using less land and in a wider range of climates than any other plant. It is, of course, the potato.
The United Nations has declared 2008 the International Year of the Potato. It hopes that greater awareness of the merits of potatoes will contribute to the achievement of its Millennium Development Goals, by helping to alleviate poverty, improve food security and promote economic development. It is always the international year of this or month of that. But the potato’s unusual history means it is well worth celebrating by readers of The Economist—because the potato is intertwined with economic development, trade liberalisation and globalisation. …