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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.