Food Watch: Should a person give up peanut butter on account of Bill Buckley (or Charlton Heston)?

This custom label was made for William F. Buckley's lifetime supply of Red Wing, the peanut butter he declared "paradise on earth in a jar."

by Ken

Just recently I read that some big-deal food person doesn't like peanut butter, and I just grin and bore it. I love peanut butter. In fact, as I expect I've mentioned, somewhere along life's journey I switched from childhood "smooth" allegiance to a full-fledged "crunchy" addiction. (As it happens, my older brother was the "crunchy" fan in our house.) With "crunchy," I came to appreciate, you get the feel and taste and eating actual peanuts.

It was easier to deal with high-level anti-peanut-butter advocacy, however, than to deal with certain forms of peanut-butter fandom. Now, nearly 35 years after he went public, I learn that William F. Buckley Jr. was an honest-to-gosh junkie. The NYT's David Segal reports:

Throughout a life of erudite jousting and patrician bonhomie, William F. Buckley Jr. was known as a conservative, a writer, a publisher, a talk-show host, a novelist and an avid sailor. But friends and family would say this biographical summary is incomplete without three more words: peanut butter freak.

Mr. Buckley didn’t just devour the stuff; he rhapsodized about it, telling readers in a 1981 column in National Review, the magazine he founded, that when he first married, he told his wife that he “expected peanut butter for breakfast every day of my life, including Ash Wednesday.”

This lifelong passion was nurtured during Mr. Buckley’s years in an English boarding school, when his father sent twice-a-month care packages that included grapefruits and a large jar of peanut butter. To his astonishment, British pals who shared in his bounty loved the grapefruit and spat out the peanut butter.

“No wonder,” he wrote in that same column, “they needed American help to win the war.”

It was bad enough that I had to live with that obnoxious demon's classical-music advocacy. (You know, "with friends like this . . .") Now, peanut butter too? There's some consolation in knowing that WFB's passion was for the creamy, not the chunky product. In any event, just as I didn't let Bill B's love for classical music spoil mine, I don't plan to be buffaloed by this news.

SPEAKING OF BUFFALO --

The occasion for reporter Segal's resuscitation of this blot on the good name of peanut butter is his visit to the now-shutting-down factory in Fredonia, NY, 45 miles southwest of Buffalo, of the plant where Red Wing peanut butter was formerly made, following the 2013 acquisition of the plant (where mayonnaise, barbecue sauce and jellies were also made) by food conglomerate ConAgra. The visit was made in the company of the longtime president of the company that made Red Wing, Douglas Manly, now 87. (The plant has been shutting down in stages, and is scheduled to be fully shuttered by next month.)

And Red Wing, you see, was Bill Buckley's later-life peanut butter of choice. Manly explained that it was on "a whim" ("I didn’t really think that anything would come of it") that, after Buckley's March 1981 Buckley column, in which "he wrote something about liking Skippy," Manly "asked a sales associate to send him a jar with a note that said, 'We think you'll like this better.' "

Mr. Manly was right. Mr. Buckley’s son, the novelist Christopher Buckley, said in a phone interview: “My dad’s one true quest in life was for the Platonic ideal of peanut butter. And I remember one day he announced, with a look of utter transfiguration on his face, that he had found paradise on earth in a jar with a yellow cap. And it was called Red Wing.”

Among the idle but still present equipment Manly was able to show Segal was "a peanut roaster once hailed as the world’s largest, built to process 10 tons an hour."

Mr. Buckley was on hand for the 1981 ribbon-cutting for this industrial behemoth because soon after he discovered the joys of Red Wing, Mr. Manly invited him to give a speech at the ceremony.

“Without hesitation, my dad said, ‘I’ll be there,' ” Christopher Buckley recalled with a chuckle. “I never saw him accept an invitation faster. And he’d been invited to palaces in his day and said, ‘I’ll have to think about it.’ ”

There are news articles of Mr. Buckley’s visit, which lacked only a brass band and bunting. When Mr. Buckley and his wife, Pat, reached the roaster, a few hundred employees were waiting to hear him speak. In a photo of the event, Mr. Buckley grins in a white lab coat over his jacket and tie.

“Thank you for letting me attend this historic occasion,” Mr. Buckley told the crowd, neatly finding the seam between the grandiose and the comic. He said that he wished Red Wing could be served at United States-Soviet disarmament talks, because once the Russians sampled it, “they would give up all their assets, communism and Karl Marx.”

He took questions from reporters and confirmed that his friend Charlton Heston shared his devotion to peanut butter. Though the actor, Mr. Buckley added, is of the “chunky reform faith.”

As a thank-you for his service that day, Mr. Buckley was given a lifetime’s supply of Red Wing — a dozen 18-ounce jars of the smooth variety, mailed every six months. Each had a custom “Buckley’s Best” label, with a copy of Mr. Buckley’s autograph and his endorsement, “It is quite simply incomparable.”

For years afterward, visitors to Mr. Buckley’s home in Connecticut who expressed any peanut butter enthusiasm were dared to resist Red Wing’s charms. He praised the brand so extravagantly during a radio interview on Manhattan’s WMCA that the show’s host, Barry Gray, said listeners cleaned out local stores.

“The supermarkets in my neighborhood had a run on the peanut butter,” Mr. Gray told Mr. Buckley when he next appeared on the show. “I don’t kid you. There were simply no Red Wing jars to be found for weeks.”

Other peanut-butter fanciers subsequently seconded Buckley's endorsement of Red Wing -- including, Segal reports, New Yorker writer James Stevenson, who in a January 1985 piece announced that, despite his skepticism, given his dim view of Buckley's view on most everything else, the stuff was "superb."

Ironically, Segal learned, Red Wing came into the world as a deliberate knockoff of Jif, which Manly wanted to be able to sell to stores as indistinguishable in quality but cheaper. Why then, Segal asks, "were Mr. Buckley and others so smitten?"

Mr. Manly has a guess. One way to keep down costs was to refuse to store much product. During Mr. Manly’s tenure, orders were accepted 10 days in advance, and no more, sharply limiting the amount of time jars waited on shelves to be shipped.

Red Wing may have bowled over Mr. Buckley because it was far fresher than anything he’d ever eaten. Or not. Brand devotion is often a mystery that flavor can only partly explain. Perhaps discovering an unbidden jar with an uncelebrated name helped hook Mr. Buckley back in 1981. Perhaps he’d never tried Jif.

Actually, we learn, peanut butter like the stuff once manufactured in Fredonia, which has been sold under a bunch of store-brand labels like Wegmans, Price Chopper, Tops, and Our Family, will continue to be made elsewhere in the ConAgra plants, like other products formerly made in the closed-down Ralcorp plant. The peanut butter, supposedly made from the same recipe, will come from a plant in Streator, IL. Segal reports that "Manly sounded skeptical," saying, "We can't be sure, because they won't be using the same equipment or the same personnel."

Segal notes that even if Buckley hadn't died in 2008, he wouldn't be suffering peanut-butter deprivation now.

[A]t the time of his death, he had a stockpile of Red Wing that his son described as large enough “to see the most determined survivalist through the next Armageddon.”

But the younger Buckley didn’t keep it all.

“The night before his funeral,” he said of his father, “into his coffin I slipped my mother’s ashes, his rosary, the TV remote control — and a jar of Red Wing peanut butter. I’d say no pharaoh went off to the next world better equipped.”

Well, if Bill Buckley couldn't put me off Bach, he's not going to put me off peanut butter. Or Charlton Heston either.

#

Can An Ad Win An Election?

Politics as a bloodsport even predates Ted Cruz immigrating to the United States. Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr weren't dueling over a damsel. That video above may win a congressional seat for Carl Sciortino because people like the message. No, not especially the messages on the Blue America billboards based on the video, although those are popular messages in MA-05. But it is the message of comity between an unabashed progressive and a Tea Party member that makes it so compelling. The moment I saw it, I sent it to Norman Lear, creator of All In The Family. Norman loved it, of course.

DWT and then Blue America endorsed Carl last February. Since then, there was a slow build as other progressives joined the fight on his behalf: Alan Grayson, People for the American Way, a plethora of Massachusetts progressive groups, Congressmen Mark Takano, Raul Grijalva, Keith Ellison, Jared Polis... And then the ad came out. Suddenly the campaign was on everyone's radar. Several hundred thousand people viewed it online. It was played over and over on national and local news shows, Carl's contribution rate skyrocketed and his polling numbers started moving, especially among people who had seen the ad.

In their new book, Predisposed-- Liberals, Conservatives, And The Biology Of Political Differences, academics John Hibbing, Kevin Smith and John Alford, cite a definition of American's two political parties from Clinton Rossiter's classic work on political science, Parties and Politics in America:

Democrats: Sweaty, disorderly, offhand, imaginative, tolerant, skillful at give-and-take.
Republicans: Respectable, sober, purposeful, self-righteous, cut-and-dried, boring.

OK, this is before the advent of the Tea Party and before the Beltway Democratic Establishment transformed into "your father's Republican Party" in response to the Republicans transforming into a neo-fascist, anti-democracy operation. But travel back to 1968 for a second when ABC-TV hired conservative movement founder William F. Buckley and author Gore Vidal to serve as analysts-- and sparring partners-- at the Republican and Democratic national conventions. The country was torn apart over Vietnam a the time and the debate was nothing like the lovable back-and-forth between Carl Sciortino and his father in the ad up top. Here's an infamous minute of it:



Predisposed characterized Buckley and Vidal as "smart and hyper-articulate, and their plummy, East Coast establishment tones made them seem so, well, civilized. Perhaps they could demonstrate a more mature way to deal with political differences. Or not.

In their most famous exchange, on April 27, 1978, Buckley asserted that Vidal was unqualified to say anything at all about politics, calling him "nothing more than a literary producer of perverted Hollywood-minded prose." Vidal retorted that Buckley "was always to the right, and always in the wrong," and accused him of imposing his "rather bloodthirsty neuroses on a political campaign."

After that the gloves came off.

"Shut up a minute," said Vidal. Buckley did not shut up. Vidal called him a "proto- or crypto-Nazi." Buckley was not happy with that. "Now listen you queer," he said. "Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll sock you in the goddam face." Buckley went home in a huff and sued Vidal for libel. Vidal went home in a huff and, perhaps miffed that he didn't think of it first, counter-sued Buckley for libel.

So much for a civilized exchange of views.

Quite the contrast with the Sciortino ad and the follow-up appearances all over television with his father!



If you'd like to help Carl keep the ad running on TV, you can contribute to his campaign here... even if you're in the Tea Party.

You Say You Want A Revolution-- No, Not YOU... The Heavily Armed, Violent Freaks On The Far Right

Frederick Clarkson has penned an important essay for Religion Dispatches about calls on the religionist right for revolution. In the video above, NY Times best-selling author Eric Metaxas, is equating Obama with the Nazis and you'll even hear something about "bullets." In Metaxas' fevered mind Obama is Hitler and America needs to stop him now. Metaxas sounds perfectly reasonable-- he isn't drooling and screaming-- until you listen closely to what he's saying and realize he's actually mentally ill. Equating a regulation in the Affordable Care Act that requires employer insurance packages to include contraception coverage with Nazi atrocities probably makes a lot of sense to people who follow Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Michele Bachmann... but it's this kind of hysterical hate talk-- this time is plain vanilla wrapping-- that is tearing the country apart.

“This HHS mandate,” Metaxas warned almost matter-of-factly, “is so oddly similar to where [anti-Nazi German theologian Dietrich] Bonhoeffer found himself” early in the Nazi era. “If we don’t fight now, if we don’t really use all our bullets now, we will have no fight five years from now. It’ll be over. This it. We’ve got to die on this hill. Most people say, oh no, this isn’t serious enough. Its just this little issue. But it’s the millimeter... its that line that we cross. I’m sorry to say that I see these parallels. I really wish I didn’t.”

This is what Clarkson means when he explains how elite Christian Right "thinkers" are imagining revolution and encouraging whoever gets suckered into listening to their bullshit to do the same. Clarkson says that this doesn't necessarily mean that they are organizing or stockpiling bullets. "But it does mean," he says, "that they are trying out giving people a vision." And it's not just Metaxas. Prominent Opus Dei Catholic priest C. John McCloskey has a 30 year look back from the year 2030 describing how the Church was persecuted; that Catholics and evangelicals joined forces in a bloody civil war; and succeeded in breaking up the U.S. into independent regions. If Ayn Rand hadn't been an atheist she and John McCloskey might actually have been parents in more than just a spiritual way to freaks-of-selfishness like Paul Ryan, Alan Greenspan, Ron Johnson, and the idelogues of today's Republican Party-- though not yesterday's Republican Party:

McCloskey recently published an update of his essay. “I-- or perhaps my thesis” he wrote, “received quite a bit of vitriolic criticism from the elite mainstream media and even from the late Tim Russert on Meet the Press. A goodly number of faithful Catholic writers also found it dark and threatening, however, although I had intended it to be positive and optimistic.” “My avatar priest,” he continued, “looked back from the vantage point of 2030 to reflect on recent ‘history’: the story of American Catholics who became confessors and martyrs to the faith as the federal government of the ‘Culture of Death’ persecuted them.” In his original essay, McCloskey’s avatar, Fr. Charles, explained how “the great battles over the last 30 years over the fundamental issues of the sanctity of marriage, the rights of parents, and the sacredness of human life have been of enormous help in renewing the Church and to some extent, society.” McCloskey’s literary device allows him to avoid openly seditious language, while suggesting that conservative Catholics and allied evangelicals should prepare for civil war.

It's another dimension to consider when the national debate on gun control resumes in light of the mass murder in Aurora... if it does. Delusional priests-- and what priest isn't, to one extent or another-- with assault rifles.

Like Most Republicans, Paul Ryan Can't Think For Himself-- And Only Reads Discredited, Failed Economists

Econ 4 is the OccupyWallStreet of the economics profession. In fact, I first became aware of the group when I saw their statement of support for OccupyWallStreet and watched the video statement they several of the economists made about it. Both are here.

We support the efforts of the Occupy Wall Street movement across the country and across the globe to liberate the economy from the short term greed of the rich and powerful one percent.

We oppose cynical and perverse attempts to misuse our police officers and public servants to expel advocates of the public good from our public spaces.

We extend our support to the vision of building an economy that works for the people, for the planet, and for the future, and we declare our solidarity with the Occupiers who are exercising our democratic right to demand economic and social justice.

Don't expect Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, The Hermanator or Mitt Romney to sign on to the list of distinguished economists behind this statement. Don't even expect them-- nor the Republicans in the House like Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan and Fred Upton (to name just three of the worst) whose political careers are built on the edifice of protecting the special interests of the one percent at the extent of their own constituents-- to even understand any of this. To a shill like Paul Ryan, the study of economics begins and ends with the mediocre adolescent ravings in Ayn Rand's "greed is good" novels. Unlike, Rand-- or Ryan-- James Boyce of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst is a real economist. I'd like to quote his short statement about why he's backing OccupyWallStreet.

"One of the key issues is the extent to which governments get captured by relatively wealthy and powerful interests, who turn the government away from serving the public towards serving their particular set of interests."

But, let's me honest with ourselves, not all conservatives are as congenitally stupid and corrupt as Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor and Fred Upton. I want to quote from a 2001 Corey Robin article in Lingua Franca, The Ex-Cons: Right-Wing Thinkers Go Left. You've probably already heard of Reagan era war strategist Edward Luttwak, but let's catch up with him after he fled both the Nazis and the communists in Europe and escaped to America in his early 40s.

Edward, meet your worst nightmare, Bishop Romney

For most of his adult life, Luttwak waged a militant struggle against communism. Inspired by a strategic military vision that connected the Gallic Wars to the civil wars of Central America, he worked closely with the U.S. Defense Department as a consultant, advising everyone from junior officers to the top brass. But Luttwak was more than a cold warrior. He was a warrior, or at least a fervent theorist of "the art of war." Whereas generals thought victory depended on aping management styles from IBM, Luttwak made the case for ancient battlefield tactics and forgotten maneuvers from the Roman Empire. Luttwak urged the military to look to Hadrian, not Henry Ford, for guidance. It was an arduous struggle, with officers more often acting like organization men than soldiers. Once again, Luttwak found his preferred way of life threatened by the culture of capitalism.

Luttwak first gained notoriety in Britain, where he settled after receiving his undergraduate degree in economics at the London School of Economics. In 1968, he published Coup d'État: A Practical Handbook. The twenty-six-year-old author dazzled his readers with this audacious how-to guide, prompting a delighted John Le Carré to write, "Mr. Luttwak has composed an unholy gastronomic guide to political poison. Those brave enough to look into his kitchen will never eat quite as peacefully again." In 1970, Luttwak published an equally mischievous piece in Esquire, "A Scenario for a Military Coup d'État in the United States." Two years later, he moved to the United States to write a dissertation in political science and classical history at Johns Hopkins, conducting extensive research using original Latin, German, French, English, and Italian sources. The result was the widely praised The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire. While in graduate school, Luttwak began to work as a consultant to various branches of the U.S. armed services, ultimately making recommendations on everything from how NATO should conduct tactical maneuvers to what kind of rifle soldiers in the El Salvadoran military should carry.

When Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980, Luttwak was at the top of his game. A fellow at Georgetown's Center for Strategic and International Studies and a frequent contributor to Commentary, he argued that the United States should accelerate the high-tech arms race, forcing the Soviet Union into a contest it could not win. Reagan's closest advisers eagerly welcomed Luttwak to their inner circle. Just after Reagan's election, Luttwak attended a dinner party in Bethesda, along with Jeane Kirkpatrick, Fred Iklé, and other luminaries of the Republican defense establishment. Richard Allen, who would become Reagan's first national security adviser, worked the crowd, pretending to dispense positions in the administration as if they were party favors. As the Washington Post reported, Luttwak declined, explaining over chocolate T"a Maria pie, "I don't believe scribblers like myself should be involved in politics. It's like caviar. Very nice, but only in small quantities." When pressed by Allen, he joked, "I only want to be vice-consul in Florence." Allen responded, "Don't you mean proconsul?"

The prep-school gladiator bonhomie evaporated before the end of Reagan's first term. Luttwak may have been an invaluable asset when pushing for more defense spending, but he made enemies with his loud-- and ever more sarcastic-- criticisms of Pentagon mismanagement. In 1984, he published The Pentagon and the Art of War, where, among other things, he depicted Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger as more of a slick used-car salesman than a genuine statesman. Military politicos struck back, dropping Luttwak from a roster of pro bono Pentagon consultants (he continued to do contract work elsewhere in the defense establishment). In 1986, Weinberger explained to the Los Angeles Times that Luttwak "just lost consulting positions from total incompetence, that's all."

But it was more than Luttwak's criticisms of Weinberger in The Pentagon and the Art of War that got him in trouble with the Defense Department. His real mistake was to go after the military's conduct during the Vietnam War. Luttwak downplayed the armed forces' favorite explanations for their defeat in Vietnam-- weak-willed politicians, the treasonous press, a defeatist public. He argued instead that America's warrior elite had simply lost the taste for blood. During the Vietnam War, he wrote, "desk-bound officers" were always "far from combat." Their penchant for "outright luxury" had a devastating effect on troop morale. Although Julius Caesar "retained both concubines and catamites in his rearward headquarters, ate off gold plate, and drank his Samian wine from jeweled goblets," when he was on the front lines with his soldiers he "ate only what they ate, and slept as they did-- under a tent if the troops had tents, or merely wrapped in a blanket if they did not." By contrast, American officers refused "to share in the hardships and deadly risks of war."

Pointy-headed bureaucrats also sapped the military's strength, according to Luttwak. Always looking to cut costs, Pentagon officials insisted that weapons, machinery, and research-and-development programs be standardized. But this only made the military vulnerable to enemy attack. Standardized weapons systems were easily overcome; having overwhelmed one, an enemy could overwhelm them all. When it came to the military, Luttwak concluded, "we need more 'fraud, waste, and mismanagement.'"

Top generals were obsessed with efficiency partially because they learned the methods of business management instead of the art of war. For every officer with a degree in military history, there were a hundred more "whose greatest personal accomplishment is a graduate degree in business administration, management or economics." "Why should fighter pilots receive a full-scale university education," Luttwak asked in The Washington Quarterly, "instead of being taught how to hunt and kill with their machines?"

The ultimate source of the military's dysfunction was its embrace of American corporate culture and business values. Like Robert McNamara, whom President Kennedy transferred to the Pentagon from Ford Motor Company, most defense secretaries were in thrall to "corporate-style goals." They sought the least risky, most cost-effective means to a given end. They preferred gray suits, eschewing "personal eccentricities in dress, speech, manner, and style because any unusual trait may irritate a customer or a banker in the casual encounters common in business." Officers were merely "managers in uniform," Luttwak told Forbes. But, he noted, "what is good for business is not good for deadly conflict." Although "safely conservative dress and inoffensively conventional style" might work in an office, they could be deadly on the battlefield; they squelched bold initiatives and idiosyncratic genius. Intimating that capitalism had colonized-- indeed destroyed-- spheres of society that were not strictly economic, Luttwak came perilously close to identifying himself with leading voices from the Marxist tradition-- Jürgen Habermas, Georg Lukács, even Marx himself.

While the Soviet Union still existed, Luttwak was able to channel his contempt for managerial and corporate values into proposals for military reform. The struggle against Bolshevism fully captured his imagination, speaking to principles of individualism, independence, and personal dignity that he had learned as a child of Jewish atheists. Luttwak's parents taught him, he says, that "you wanted your shoulders out walking down the street. The master of your fate. Not to walk hunched, afraid that God will punish you if you eat a ham sandwich." He continues: "There was a certain contempt about piety. Piety was not seen as compatible with dignity." Dignity, he goes on, "is what we were defending in the Cold War. It was ideological. It was very fitting for me to be in the United States, to become an American, because the Americans were and are the ideological people. They were perfectly cast to be enlisted in an ideological struggle."

But now that the battle against communism has been won, Luttwak has lost interest in most military matters; he no longer sees any compelling ideological reason to care about strategy and tactics. "Security problems and such have become peripheral, for all countries and for people, for myself as well. I don't engage my existence in something that is peripheral.... There was a compelling imperative to be involved. There isn't now."

...Military struggle may no longer hold any ideological allure for Luttwak, but his disaffection affords him the time and intellectual space to confront the enemy he has been shadowboxing his entire life: capitalism itself. "The market," he says, "invades every sphere of life," producing a "hellish society." In the same way that market values once threatened national security, they now threaten the economic and spiritual well-being of society. "An optimal production system is a completely inhuman production system," he explains, "because...you are constantly changing the number of people you employ, you're moving them around, you're doing different things, and that is not compatible with somebody being able to organize an existence for himself."

Although Luttwak writes in his 1999 book Turbo-Capitalism, "I deeply believe...in the virtues of capitalism," his opposition to the spread of market values is so acute that it puts him on the far end of today's political spectrum-- a position that Luttwak congenitally enjoys. "Edward is a very perverse guy, intellectually and in many other ways," says former Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz, one of Luttwak's early champions during the 1970s. "He's a contrarian. He enjoys confounding expectations. But I frankly don't even know how serious he is in this latest incarnation." Luttwak insists that he is quite serious. He calls for socialized medicine. He advocates a strong welfare state, claiming, "If I had my druthers, I would prohibit any form of domestic charity." Charity is a "cop-out," he says: It takes dignity away from the poor.

The only thing that arouses Luttwak's ire more than untrammeled capitalism is its elite enthusiasts—the intellectuals, politicians, policy makers, and businessmen who claim that "just because the market is always more efficient, the market should always rule." Alan Greenspan earns Luttwak's special contempt: "Alan Greenspan is a Spencerian. That makes him an economic fascist." Spencerians like Greenspan believe that "the harshest economic pressures" will "stimulate some people to...economically heroic deeds. They will become great entrepreneurs or whatever else, and as for the ones who fail, let them fail." Luttwak's other b'te noire is "Chainsaw Al" Dunlap, the peripatetic CEO who reaps unimaginable returns for corporate shareholders by firing substantial numbers of employees from companies. "Chainsaw does it," says Luttwak, referring to Dunlap's downsizing measures, "because he's simpleminded, harsh, and cruel." It's just "economic sadism." Against Greenspan and Dunlap, Luttwak affirms, "I believe that one ought to have only as much market efficiency as one needs, because everything that we value in human life is within the realm of inefficiency--love, family, attachment, community, culture, old habits, comfortable old shoes."

Imagine if one of the networks was smart enough to get Luttwak as a host for one of the 30-some-odd Republican "presidential" debate shows. How much more elucidating would it be for American voters-- even Republican-American voters-- to hear Luttwak questioning self-professed capitalist boosters like Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, than a string of questions from the war criminals and Koch-paid shills from the AEI? Or perhaps we should hope for a moderator like Irving Kristol or William F. Buckley, the intellectual godfathers-- pre Herman Cain-- of neoconservatism. Corey Robin quotes them in The Reactionary Mind admitting, as though they were describing Mitt Romney, that "American conservatism lacks any political imagination, which has always been, I have to say, a property of the left." That was Kristol. Buckley is even harsher: "The trouble with the emphasis with conservatism on the market is that it becomes rather boring. You hear it once, you master the idea. The notion of devoting your life to it [the way Romney, Ryan, Cain and Gingrich have] is horrifying if only because its so repetitious. It's like sex." I just threw up in my mouth.

Why is it so hard for "Poor Old Pat" Buchanan to believe that pro-choice people might really hope to see fewer abortions?

It wasn't till this morning that I noticed the comments added to my post yesterday about Christopher Buckley's departure -- a slight step ahead of the wingnut lynch mob -- from National Review, the magazine created by his father, the late William F. Buckley Jr.

It was impossible for me to resist leading with the "sighful" quote Christopher recalled from "dear Pup" ("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.'” To which our old friend "Me" responded: "That was wasted effort. It can't be done."

Then commenter Matthew ventured: "His father was actually a horrible human being who is rotting in hell. If he likes his dad, he's probably a bad dude." And in fact Bill Buckley seemed to me quite a horrible human being. (One of my particular problems with Bill Buckley was his steadfast championing of classical music. Jeepers, that's not the kind of ally I'm looking for.) While it seems to me a bit strong to declare someone a bad dude for liking his dad, if we changed that to "If he's like his dad," I could hardly complain. And Christopher Buckley indeed seems quite a lot like old Bill -- even apart from the increasingly creepy physical resemblance.

I was happy to have these correctives, in case I may have been seen to be sentimentalizing Bill Buckley. My point, rather, is that his brand of conservatism, which was at least firmly attached to the real world, serves as a benchmark for how far into the loonosphere the present-day variant has traveled.

Which brings me to Pat Buchanan. I don't mean to link Poor Old Pat to the present-day conservative lunacy, but then, he never quite fit into the old Buckley-style lunacy. Our Pat has always been his own loon. Unless you want to count his even loonier sister, Bay. Myself, I try not to even think about Bay Buchanan.

Poor Old Pat has become especially important to one of his part-time employers, MSNBC, as MSNBC has cast its prime-time lot with two unabashedly liberal hosts, Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow. Pat, of course, provides "balance."

One of the, er, surprising features of Rachel's show, which continues to shine, has been the semiregular feature "It's Pat," in which Rachel's "fake uncle" moans and whines about some issue of importance to the Right. (More often than not this has so far involved defending the Republican vice presidential candidate, Gov. Danger Moose.) Rachel to her credit fights back. Indeed, as AP television writer David Bauder notes in a really good piece that's ostensibly about the "odd couple" of Rachel and Pat, but in fact is more about Rachel and the show itself, with lots of excellent background material, including Rachel talking about how the show has developed and will continue to develop:

Maddow is something of a happy warrior compared to Olbermann's increasingly dark prince. The Rhodes Scholar can lap almost anyone intellectually without making you hate her for doing it.

"She's likeable," Griffin said. "She smiles, she has fun. She's interesting."

If Olbermann's show has a drumbeat that drives it, Maddow's "got a little bit of a symphony," he said.

She also doesn't back down from a fight. Olbermann's "Countdown" is well-written and meticulous, but he relies on guests who rarely disagree with him.

Maddow frequently brings on guests to argue with her, none more so than Buchanan.

He can exasperate her, and vice versa. To date, it hasn't become nasty.

Of course we understand why Rachel is saddled with Pat. Apart from the fact that MSNBC has him on the payroll, the network is surely conscious of the risk it's taking in turning its whole prime time over to Keith and her. Poor Old Pat is there to provide balance -- and to give him credit, even in his dotage he does a better job of it than, say, the "liberals" who supposedly provide "balance" on Fox News.

Nevertheless, our Pat -- with that whine that's amplified into a roar, one of the odder modes of vocal delivery I've heard -- drives me nuts in a way that not many TV talking heads have since, well, old Bill Buckley, with his exaggeratedly patrician drawl.

But sure enough, on the special post-debate wrap-up edition of Countdown last night, there were Rachel and Uncle Pat squaring off. Pat was arguing that Obama has gone so cautious that he has failed to seal the deal, even with voters who may have decided to vote for him -- and I certainly can't say I entirely disagree with this. If it weren't said in that screechy roar-whine, I might even want to ponder his claim that Obama isn't going to win any kind of "mandate" in this election. (Yes, yes, we know that Tiny George Bush didn't have any electoral mandate in his stolen election "victories" and that didn't stop him from ruling like an emperor. But that doesn't make it right!)

But Poor Old Pat said something that gave me pause. He was talking about Obama's practice in the debate of reining in his positions, "moving to the center." Again, this is something that generally speaking we liberals have been bitching about throughout the campaign. On the question of abortion, though, when Rachel pointed out that Obama had tried to find some area of accomodation by pointing out that he would like to see fewer abortions, Poor Old Pat dismissed this as "standard boilerplate."

Which stuck with me. Why is it so difficult for Poor Old Pat to believe? Has he been roped in by Young Johnny McCranky's characteristically lying rhetoric? Young Johnny loves to pretend that there's a "pro-abortion" faction, people who want to promote abortions until everybody's had one, or more. There may in fact be people who like abortion, but they keep themselves well hidden. What many of us are is pro-choice, believing that there are cases where abortion is the least objectionable solution and therefore ought to be available as a free choice.

I suppose it's important to the Right to believe that it has some kind of high moral ground. They're the ones who should be calling themselves "anti-abortion," which accurately states their position. Instead they call themselves "pro-life," which is one of the vilest lies in the history of the human race. With the single exception of fetuses, the anti-abortion crowd is, for the most part, as bloody-minded a party of death as has ever existed.

Is it because of all the lies the anti-abortion movement is built on that it's so hard for someone like Poor Old Pat to believe that, really and truly, Barack Obama -- and a lot of the rest of us -- would like to see as few abortions as possible? We would just like that decision to rest where we think it properly belongs: with the woman.

And of course any woman, or any man for that matter, who saw young Johnny put those "air quotes" around "the health" of a woman who seeks an abortion as a medical necessity -- perhaps the most shameful moment of the most shameful national political campaign I've witnessed -- it should be perfectly and permanently clear that the Crankyman ought never to be permitted any say of any kind at any time in any matter in any way relating to any woman's health.

In the wake of his Obama endorsement, Christopher Buckley exits National Review, and the right-wing blood-letting is on

“You know, I’ve spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks.”

-- the late William F. Buckley Jr., as recalled by his son Christopher last week in his endorsement of Barack Obama

"The only thing the Right can’t quite decide is whether I should be boiled in oil or just put up against the wall and shot. Lethal injection would be too painless. . . .
"I retain the fondest feelings for the magazine that my father founded, but I will admit to a certain sadness that an act of publishing a reasoned argument for the opposition should result in acrimony and disavowal. . . .
"I no longer have any clear idea what, exactly, the modern conservative movement stands for. Eight years of 'conservative' government has brought us a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance. As a sideshow, it brought us a truly obscene attempt at federal intervention in the Terry Schiavo case."

-- Christopher Buckley, in a new column on The Daily Beast reporting his resignation as back-page columnist for the magazine founded by his father

by Ken

On Friday Howie passed on the news of Christopher Buckley's endorsement of Barack Obama on Tina Brown's Daily Beast webzine. Finding himself the object of a "tsunami" of online hatred at the National Review's website, Buckley has explained why he offered his resignation as back-page columnist to the current editor and publisher of the magazine that was founded by, and through most of its history was synonymous with, his father, the late William F. Buckley Jr., who as much as anyone deserves to be called the godfather of the modern American conservative movement.

But then, as Christopher Buckley pointed out in his Obama endorsement, the present-day version of that movement bears little resemblance to anything his father envisaged. In his Obama endorsement, Christopher recalled: "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.'”

Buckley Bows Out of National Review

by Christopher Buckley

Christopher Buckley, in an exclusive for The Daily Beast, explains why he left The National Review, the magazine his father founded.

I seem to have picked an apt title for my Daily Beast column, or blog, or whatever it’s called: “What Fresh Hell.” My last posting (if that’s what it’s called) in which I endorsed Obama, has brought about a very heaping helping of fresh hell. In fact, I think it could accurately be called a tsunami.

The mail (as we used to call it in pre-cyber times) at the Beast has been running I’d say at about 7-to-1 in favor. This would seem to indicate that you (the Beast reader) are largely pro-Obama.

As for the mail flooding into National Review Online -- that’s been running about, oh, 700-to-1 against. In fact, the only thing the Right can’t quite decide is whether I should be boiled in oil or just put up against the wall and shot. Lethal injection would be too painless.

I had gone out of my way in my Beast endorsement to say that I was not doing it in the pages of National Review, where I write the back-page column, because of the experience of my colleague, the lovely Kathleen Parker. Kathleen had written in NRO that she felt Sarah Palin was an embarrassment. (Hardly an alarmist view.) This brought 12,000 livid emails, among them a real charmer suggesting that Kathleen’s mother ought to have aborted her and tossed the fetus into a dumpster. I didn’t want to put NR in an awkward position.

Since my Obama endorsement, Kathleen and I have become BFFs and now trade incoming hate-mails. No one has yet suggested my dear old Mum should have aborted me, but it’s pretty darned angry out there in Right Wing Land. One editor at National Review -- a friend of 30 years -- emailed me that he thought my opinions “cretinous.” One thoughtful correspondent, who feels that I have “betrayed” -- the b-word has been much used in all this -- my father and the conservative movement generally, said he plans to devote the rest of his life to getting people to cancel their subscriptions to National Review. But there was one bright spot: To those who wrote me to demand, “Cancel my subscription,” I was able to quote the title of my father’s last book, a delicious compendium of his NR "Notes and Asides": Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription.

Within hours of my endorsement appearing in The Daily Beast it became clear that National Review had a serious problem on its hands. So the next morning, I thought the only decent thing to do would be to offer to resign my column there. This offer was accepted -- rather briskly! -- by Rich Lowry, NR’s editor, and its publisher, the superb and able and fine Jack Fowler. I retain the fondest feelings for the magazine that my father founded, but I will admit to a certain sadness that an act of publishing a reasoned argument for the opposition should result in acrimony and disavowal.

My father in his day endorsed a number of liberal Democrats for high office, including Allard K. Lowenstein and Joe Lieberman. One of his closest friends on earth was John Kenneth Galbraith. In 1969, Pup wrote a widely-remarked upon column saying that it was time America had a black president. (I hasten to aver here that I did not endorse Senator Obama because he is black. Surely voting for someone on that basis is as racist as not voting for him for the same reason.)

My point, simply, is that William F. Buckley held to rigorous standards, and if those were met by members of the other side rather than by his own camp, he said as much. My father was also unpredictable, which tends to keep things fresh and lively and on-their-feet. He came out for legalization of drugs once he decided that the war on drugs was largely counterproductive. Hardly a conservative position. Finally, and hardly least, he was fun. God, he was fun. He liked to mix it up.

So, I have been effectively fatwahed (is that how you spell it?) by the conservative movement, and the magazine that my father founded must now distance itself from me. But then, conservatives have always had a bit of trouble with the concept of diversity. The GOP likes to say it’s a big-tent. Looks more like a yurt to me.

While I regret this development, I am not in mourning, for I no longer have any clear idea what, exactly, the modern conservative movement stands for. Eight years of “conservative” government has brought us a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance. As a sideshow, it brought us a truly obscene attempt at federal intervention in the Terry Schiavo case.

So, to paraphrase a real conservative, Ronald Reagan: I haven’t left the Republican Party. It left me.

Thanks, anyway, for the memories, and here’s to happier days and with any luck, a bit less fresh hell.

By the way, you'll recall that Rich "Little Starbursts" Lowry, the National Review editor who accepted Buckley's resignation offer "rather briskly," is the selfsame imbecile who responded to the vice presidential debate with what may be the most achingly, humiliatingly imbecilic gibberish ever written by a human being who claims to think serious thoughts about, well, anything:

I'm sure I'm not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, "Hey, I think she just winked at me." And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America. This is a quality that can't be learned; it's either something you have or you don't, and man, she's got it.

#