One Down . . .
Feb 27
Allow me to take this opportunity to stand athwart history yelling “Go!”
Oh - sorry. Unsympathetic? Yeah, I give a shit.
I hope they tattoo a warning sign on his ass before they bury him in some place I can piss on without getting my feet wet. With any luck, though, it’ll be a two-fer: poor George Will must be traumatized at the thought of facing the inevitable failure of everything he ever wanted with nobody left to hold his hand. I’ll gladly volunteer to read “Howl” at both their funerals.
#1 by Stormy Dragon at February 27th, 2008
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Once again, can we please get an RSS feed that filters out KTK’s posts?
#2 by tgirsch at February 27th, 2008
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Dude, we can’t even get rid of Fred’s comments!
#3 by tgirsch at February 27th, 2008
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Also, let me go on record as saying that this is in extremely poor taste. When I suggested (privately) that one of the Kevins do an obituary, this isn’t what I had in mind.
No matter how reprehensible I find someone’s policies, I can’t bring myself to celebrate their death.
#4 by Mike at February 27th, 2008
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Bill Buckley, although dead, responds to this post in exactly the correct manner. Consider yourself beaten, and beaten by a dead guy, KTK!
#5 by Kevin T. Keith at February 27th, 2008
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Buckley was the embodiment of smug, wealthy, fuck-you conservatism. He lived a life of privilege devoted to making other people’s lives worse off. He is credited with a few good works and some good qualities, but nothing outweighs his pervasive and unshakable devotion to remaking the world for his own comfort and the ruin of those who wanted to live in their own way - nor the base psychological depravity of his antagonism to anything that didn’t pass through his personal Medieval emotional filter, and the glee he took in his own prancing viciousness.
These are the good things people had to say about him today:
“[National Review] lin[ed] up squarely behind Southern segregationists, saying blacks should be denied the vote. After some conservatives objected, Mr. Buckley suggested instead that both uneducated whites and blacks should not be allowed to vote.”
“Everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm to prevent common needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of homosexuals,”
[His hateful reactionism wasn't inadvertent. He reiterated his support for both the poll tax and forcibly tattooing AIDS patients at least 20 years after first embarrassing himself with such disgusting idiocies. He wasn't confused or mistaken: he was that vicious, stupid, and oblivious to others' welfare after thinking about it for decades.]
“Resolved: The women’s movement has been disastrous.” [Buckley took the affirmative position.]
[P]erhaps in cases of the permitted post-viability abortions, it should now be considered a “derivative responsibility of the state to remove the child [by forced Ceasarian section of a woman wanting a late-term abortion]”
[B]before there was Ronald Reagan, there was Barry Goldwater, and before there was Barry Goldwater there was National Review, and before there was National Review there was Bill Buckley with a spark in his mind.” [George Will - note he thinks this is a compliment]
And here from the man himself:
What I have found most arresting is the refusal of so many in the pro-choice army to submit the question to “thoughtful moral process,”
The heavy condemnatory breathing on the subject of global warming outdoes anything since high moments of the Inquisition.
There was a lot of . . . quarreling among Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists 150 years ago over the issue of slavery. And having decided to free blacks, the next thing you knew, the churches proceeded to free women. There goes the neighborhood? Well, yes, in a way. [Gays were next, don't you know.]
[T]he theologians who hold the line on the matter of homosexuality may feel a social battering on the order of what Southern theologians in the 19th century were subjected to when they defended slavery. [Note that this suggests absolutely nothing to Buckley regarding gay rights.]
labor unions, in many fields of endeavor, practice . . . a monopoly on the price of labor
we learn that the average chief executive officer earns 1,100 times what a minimum-wage worker earns. What some Americans are being paid every year is describable only as: disgusting. But that disgust is irrelevant in informing us what the minimum wage ought to be. The one has no bearing on the other.
. . .
More than his dumb statements, self-satisfied moral indifference, and childish provocateurism in regard of the central issues of other people’s lives, Buckley was simply a deluded moral shit. His view of the world was almost comically warped. (Try reading any of his spy novels, while reminding yourself that he regarded them as serious political literature. Better, try reading several in a row, and realize that he really believed the world was just very, very different from the way it actually is, and it was only pesky distortions like historical fact and the actual events of the world that kept people from seeing that.) But that view led him to a lifetime of aggrandizing dismissals of anyone worse off than himself, and grounded the modern US conservative movement in the same icily superior moral emptiness that reached its final bloom in the likes of Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Lee Atwater, Newt Gingrich, and, in his bumbling way, George Bush.
Buckley was a disgusting human being in no way redeemed by his self-indulgent verbal skills. His life was devoted - with notable success - to an ugly, adversarial crusade to condemn large parts of the world to misery. It would be an offense not to say so.
And if you don’t like truthful obituaries, take it up with Buckley, in regard of his obit of Norman Mailer, which consists of a few desultory acknowledgements of his writing ability and an entire column of stories about private behavior, intended to make Mailer look bad. (Do note, however, that for all Mailer’s many faults, they were faults of personal behavior toward other individuals. He never, for instance, touted it as a political and moral truth that entire classes of citizens should be prohibited from voting, or forcibly tattooed and imprisoned in concentration camps, or subject to forcible surgical procedures to keep them from having abortions. It’s notable that Mailer’s work was outstanding - which Buckley acknowledged - and his private life was a mess. Buckley chose his personal failings as the substance of his obituary. In contrast, Buckely is said to have been refined and charming in person, but his works are disgraceful. It seems strange to be accused of being unfair by focusing on the important parts of the life of someone who specialized in being so petty about others.) Buckley’s preferred style of obituary was to pick at things about others he personally disapproved of and then hold them up as the final truth about people he claimed to be his friends. We can at least do him the compliment of focusing his own obituary on the things he was guilty of that really mattered, while couching it in the same degree of sympathy he showed to others.
(For another example of crabbed obituary, in this case less infuriating than merely an amusing look at how truly dumb you can be and still know lots of big words [and Buckley was nowhere near as smart as people keep saying - he was verbally deft but his writing was unusually poor hackery even by the standards of the right wing], take a gander at Buckley on the death of Jerry Garcia: “He is quoted as having said two years ago that, really, he needed to do something to restore his health, otherwise he would be dead, like “two years from now.” He went on schedule, and is said to have died with a smile on his face, no doubt because he was a happy man but also because he made so many others happy. But he also killed, if that’s the right word for such as our intern, a lot of people.” [The intern in question became a Deadhead, wrote prose that the National Review editors didn't like, and got involved with non-white women. Thus he was, you know, dead. As it were.])
As Buckley’s stupid and distorted world view fades from the political scence, the world is in equal measure better off. For his real success in creating “movement conservatism” and all its ugly works, he remains guilty of much. His gift to the world was to leave it - but not to leave it better off.
Fuck him.
And, finally, fuck everyone like him and all their works. The right wing has been engaged in unbridled total war against everyone other than the members of their own club, since WWII or at least the Civil Rights Movement. They happily abandoned human decency almost at the outset; so fully renounced it that they’re hardly human themselves any more.
And I’m tired of politics as a refined game. This dipshit seriously claims Jerry Garcia was killing people, but openly advocated - repeatedly and for decades - tattoos and concentration camps for AIDS patients (blind as always to the irony that his prescient anti-anti-Semitism is one of the few decent things he contributed to the right wing). What claim does he have to respect, courtesy, or even inclusion in the community of cognitively normal, morally redeemable human beings?
I’m just not interested in taking him or his ilk seriously, or extending to them the courtesies of decent society. They set themselves against decency - devoted their lives to destroying people who wanted no more than to be let alone to live on equal terms with others - enjoyed it and celebrated it and congratulated themselves on it. There were lefty types who palled around with Buckley - thought he was witty or at least liked hanging out on his estates and sailboats and such - but I never understood it. There are differing varieties of conservatism, certainly, both moral and aesthetic; Buckley’s was of the most depraved (in a competitive field) morally and most refined aesthetically, but I am unimpressed by the latter and can’t see how anyone can overlook the former. I can’t, and see no reason to, and don’t see that he deserves any reprieve for his many uglinesses, his many hurts and hamperings of others less privileged, for his creepy life of patinaed hate and smarmy, self-indulgent condescension. And the same goes for the rest of them. We’re in a war - they have known it all along, they started it and they’re not giving up. We ought to acknowledge it. At the very least we ought not to congratulate the enemy for its self-interested triumphs.
A final unforgiving wonder: Many rejoiced when Saddam Hussein was taunted, Buckley-style, and then hanged. But it is well documented that the number of violent deaths in Iraq since the Bush military occupation is several times higher than those attributed to Saddam through his decades of military dictatorship. And given that one can draw a reasonably straight line from Buckley’s early conservatism to the decades of oil imperialism and multiple Iraqi wars of the Reagan/Bush crowd (George Will draws exactly that line, above), one could argue that Buckley bears at least a measurable share of responsibility for those deaths. And so one wonders, somewhat wistfully, how much better off the world would be, and how many more Iraqis - and Americans - would today be alive, if, in some way, a noose could have been slipped around Buckley’s neck in 1959 and he had taken the last best step of his life to the sound of mocking laughter back then instead of now? And, buoyed by that delicious though fictional thought, one might ask: if we couldn’t have cheered it then, can’t we at least cheer it now?
One down . . .
#6 by Stormy Dragon at February 27th, 2008
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>More than his dumb statements, self-satisfied moral
>indifference, and childish provocateurism in regard of
>the central issues of other people’s lives
*cough*
#7 by Ted at February 27th, 2008
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stormy, now that was funny.
#8 by gattsuru at February 27th, 2008
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And now back to enjoying the deaths of those who disagreed with you, and dared be part of a different group. Don’t worry, though: it’s okay because they’re hardly human.
#9 by Dan M. at February 27th, 2008
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Yeah, KTK is a bit of a goul, but he’s really quite funny when he is.
But really, there’s no polite way to say “The world is better off with this guy dead.”, so what exactly are folks like SU and SD hoping for?
#10 by workinwifdakids at February 28th, 2008
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The Democrats’ tolerant discourse is getting to me.
#11 by Stormy Dragon at February 28th, 2008
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>so what exactly are folks like SU and SD hoping for?
Discussion. Which is impossible to have with people who want you dead. But you’re right, that is a silly thing for me to hope for.
#12 by Morris at February 28th, 2008
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KTK, as usual, shows himself to be a lowlife to the nth degree. What a jerk! The world will long remember Bill Buckley; no one will remember KTK.
I wish to defeat liberals, but I don’t rejoice in their deaths, especially considering their likely fate (and I’m not joking).
#13 by Dr. Skillet at June 20th, 2008
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There’s a special place in hell for George Will.