One of my favourite writers, William F. Buckley Jr, died yesterday at the age of 82. The founder, more than half a century ago, of the National Review, Buckley was a cheerful wit, an astute intellectual, a shrewd commentator and an articulate writer. The scourge of leftish sympathies in academia, elite society and the mainstream media, Buckley was a thinking conservative in the classical liberal tradition. He shunned the lunatic fringes of isolationism and protectionism, abhorred communism and totalitarianism, and espoused individual liberty and economic freedom. His passion and popularity made him perhaps the most influential post-war conservative of all, building an intellectual basis that would find its apogee only in the 1980s.

Ronald Reagan once asked Buckley what position he might like in the administration. Deadpan, he replied, “ventriloquist”. I think he got the job.

Other than the original announcement in the National Review, linked to above, notable obituaries and reactions include:

Up from Liberalism, on the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page.

William F. Buckley Jr. Is Dead at 82, by Douglas Martin at the New York Times.

William F. Buckley Jr., in The Times Online.

Conrad Black on William F. Buckley Jr., by, ahem, Conrad Black, in the National Post.

A remarkable man, by Joe Lieberman.

Shades of gray and Blackie, by Mark Steyn.

Bill was a great American, by John McCain.

But perhaps he is best remembered in his own words:

“Though liberals do a great deal of talking about hearing other points of view, it sometimes shocks them to learn that there are other points of view.”

“The best defense against usurpatory government is an assertive citizenry.”

“I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.”

“Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality, the costs become prohibitive.”

“Government can’t do anything for you except in proportion as it can do something to you.”

And finally, what more can a mere mortal say about Buckley, when he said it all himself in a New York Times Book Review article on writing speedily? “I am, I fully grant, a phenomenon, but not because of any speed in composition,” he declared modestly. “I asked myself the other day, ‘Who else, on so many issues, has been so right so much of the time?’ I couldn’t think of anyone.”

And neither can I. As the WSJ said, Ave atque vale, Bill Buckley. Hail and farewell.

Mark Helprin has written an excellent piece on the opposition to John McCain from right-wing talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, and other thorns in the liberal side, such as Ann Coulter. The latter has threatened to campaign for Hillary Clinton if McCain wins the nomination, a show for which I want front-row tickets.

His writing is sparkling — note the line about “bloody ink of a dying industry” — but the most intriguing of his points concerns the ratings boost that would come from bitching about a Democratic presidency, as compared to relentless defence of all things Bush. I fail to see how campaining for Romney or Huckabee gibes with such a motivation. Either way, that allegation is also the point that Michelle Malkin takes the most exception to.

Here’s a cut version of Helprin’s column, followed by Malkin’s rebuttal. Great reading, on both counts. Now, where were the claims of some monolithic right-wing dogma, or some vast right-wing conspiracy?

What a kerfuffle! Half a dozen talk-radio hosts whose major talent is that, like hairdressers, they can talk all day long to one client after another as they snip, have decided that the presumptive Republican nominee does not hew sufficiently close to their gospel.

As anyone who has listened to them knows, the depth of their thought is truly Oprah-like. And if a great institution of the left can weigh-in as it does in the choice of a nominee, why not its fraternal twins on the right? It doesn’t matter that Mitt Romney, suddenly their Reagan, became a conservative in a flash of light sometime last year, or that their other champion, a populist theocrat, is in many ways as conservative as Vladimir Lenin. The task is to stop the devil McCain.

As a mere print person whose words are not electrified and shot through walls, automobiles, pine trees, and brains, I realize that what I write in the bloody ink of a dying industry may be irrelevant. But from my antiquated perspective, something is very wrong.

Ostracism following tests of “right thinking” is a specialty of the left. Not that it doesn’t exist on the right, blooming with great malice especially on the radio. But in light of their prospects, conservatives have no room for it. For by their neglectful forfeit they have lost the battles of culture and education, and to remain other than an occult force they must express their beliefs through politics, from which, after November, they may be for a time excluded.

[…]

[The protracted Iraq war] and the economy threaten to throw the conservative enterprise back to where it was before Ronald Reagan or even William F. Buckley. Along comes John McCain, who has an 80% positive rating from the American Conservative Union but who as a truly independent soul does not fit, at the margins, some of the transient notions of what makes a conservative. Because of his independence and flexibility, he is the only Republican candidate who has a chance of winning, and thus preserving the core principles of conservatism, in relation to which he is unimpeachable. They are national security (in particular the strength of the military after Iraq and vis-à-vis China and a resurgent Russia), Constitutionalism (as in individual vs. collective rights), and the economy (free markets vs. government industrial policy).

One can agree or disagree with his peripheral positions, but political orthodoxy is political death. If those who are in a hissy fit about Sen. McCain would rather have Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, they will get Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton … and they will wake up to a great regret, as if in their drunkenness they had taken Shrek to bed.

But, guess what? Even if, as the country veers left, living conservatives gnash their teeth and dead ones spin in their graves, a small class of conservatives will benefit. And who might they be? They might be those whose influence and coffers swell on discontent, and who find attacking a president easier and more sensational than the dreary business of defending one. They rose during the Clinton years. Perhaps they are nostalgic. It isn’t worth it, however, for the rest of us.

So, rather than playing recklessly with electoral politics by sabotaging their own party ostensibly for its impurity but equally for the sake of their self-indulgent pique, each of these compulsive talkers might be a tad less self-righteous, look to the long run, discipline himself, suck it up, and be a man. And that would apply equally as well to the gorgeous Laura Ingraham and the relentlessly crocodilian Ann Coulter.

And from RealClearPolitics, parts of Malkin’s response:

The most anti-conservative rhetoric against conservative talk radio these days is coming from supposedly free-market conservatives. It’s disgusting.

[…]

It’s one thing to hear such petty snark coming from the left. Outraged that conservative talk radio has succeeded in the marketplace while liberals have bombed, and unnerved that new media outlets have upended mainstream journalism’s monopoly apple cart, liberals have long crusaded against the medium. […]

But now, we have establishment Republicans parroting liberal ad hominem rhetoric: Talk-radio hosts are talentless blabbermouths. Their listeners are mind-numbed robots. Or, as supposed free-market conservative and McCain supporter Phil Gramm put it in his broadside against talk radio in the Washington Post last week: “They say they have principles, but some of it is their ego and power, too. They’re well-known, and they’re used to having power.”

Funny. These trash-talking GOP politicians and pundits had no problem when conservative talk-radio hosts used their “ego and power” to help kill Hillary Clinton’s massive government health care takeover in 1994. They had no problem when conservative talk-radio hosts used their “ego and power” to galvanize support for the Republican revolution, two Bush presidential campaigns and the war in Iraq.

[…]

Helprin accuses conservative talkers who oppose McCain of rooting for a liberal presidency because their “influence and coffers swell on discontent” and they are “nostalgic” for the Clinton years. Translation: They’re all just greedy self-promoters who care more about themselves than the good of the country. Gramm leveled the same attack: “They’re people who put their dogma in front of the interests of the country.”

Cocooned conservative establishment snobs denigrate talk-radio hosts for preaching to the choir. But these same critics have no problem using the medium to market their own work. Ask their publicists. The message of the anti-conservative conservatives dissing talk radio: Self-interest for me, but not for thee.

No need to wait for a Clinton to take the White House. Clintonism is alive and well among conservative talk-radio haters on both sides of the aisle.

Excuse me while I fetch the popcorn.

I’ll admit, I follow US politics about as closely as a foreign amateur can sanely follow it. Okay, delete “sanely”. I deserve a free anorak. But this I don’t get.

Hillary Clinton has lent her campaign $5 million.

No, seriously. This is her campaign. But she wants her money back. Nevermind that a champion of the working class, campaigning against the filthy rich conservative capitalist scum with tax breaks, happens to have $5 million in spare change lying around idle. Why didn’t she send that to the IRS to fund universal healthcare?

But seriously, how do you lend money to a campaign? To your own campaign, of all things? Most people “donate” to a campaign. Isn’t she willing to donate? Doesn’t she have enough faith in the campaign? Does she expect to get the money back from suckers who have the conviction to donate in future?

And does this suggest that the GOP isn’t going to get the dream opponent, the one they’ve always wanted to beat just for the personal satisfaction of watching a Clinton go down, in the same way the Democrats would have loved to run against, say, Jeb Bush?

Does this suggest that Barack Obama, the rookie, has more money than the venerable matriarch of the Clinton dynasty? That she’s the underdog now?

John McCain took out a loan to finance his campaign. This makes sense. He’s going to have to pay it back, win or lose. But is Clinton’s campaign going to have to repay her if she wins? Even if she loses? This boggles the mind. It’s not like campaigns are for-profit companies. What sort of organisation is left to repay the debt if she loses? Did McCain even think to consider this eventuality when he sponsored McCain-Feingold?

I mean, how do you lend money to yourself to finance your own career?

I sure hope, if she wins, she’ll tell the rest of us this trick. It sure sounds wonderfully useful. “Look how much money I’m willing to lend myself! Surely, Mr Angel Ventura, if I trust myself this much, you can fund my idea for a non-lethal light-sabre design — named Taser-B-Gone — that I can sell by the gross to police forces around the world?”

Update: Al Giordano reasons that the money is already spent, that the Clinton campaign now faces a major budget deficit (making a mockery of her “fiscal responsibility” claims even before she can prove it to be empty rhetoric as president), and that she is running a “match the Clinton campaign” advert in which she describes the loan as a gift from Hillary and Bill. Whether that’s true depends on what the definition of “give” is, I guess.

Update: Tim Dickinson, writing for Rolling Stone, points out that Bill Clinton said this kind of self-financing “clearly violates the spirit of campaign finance reform”. Far be it from me to defend American campaign finance rules, of course, but if the Clintons want to use it as a club against political opponents, they should wield it more carefully, lest they accidentally bop themselves on the head.

With Fred Thompson having dropped out of the race, it’s time to weigh up the alternatives for the Republican nomination, from my perch on the southern end of Africa. What matters to me in an American president is foreign policy, of course, and economic policy. Bonus points for not being a bigot, a prig, a whinger or a preacher, but as I’ve written before, whether Americans permit gays to be married, guns to be carried or God to be harried, is really up to them.

Mitt Romney looks like a conservative Bill Clinton. He’s trying to be all things to all people, and that’s going to make him the lowest-common-denominator in office. I don’t trust the fellow. Mike Huckabee is a social conservative, not an economic conservative, and I’m looking for the exact opposite. Besides, I can’t take someone endorsed by Chuck Norris seriously.

John McCain is likeable enough, but neither his individual freedom record, nor his economic policy, appeal that much. He’s also lent his name to a heavy-handed and misguided campaign-finance law, and thinks government-enforced cap-and-trade schemes are just great. He’s great on foreign policy, perhaps, and might be able to appeal to the broad centre, but those are qualities that aren’t unique to him, and the rest of his positions are not what a classical liberal would want.

Which leaves Rudy Giuliani. He’s worked successfully with Democrats. He cleaned up New York, which used to be a poster city for crime, decadence and decay. He impressed on 9/11. He’s not going to surrender the free world to radicals and extremists and terrorists and fascists. And he doesn’t whine all the time about attacks from the vicious and vast left-wing wopist conspiracy.

But the clincher, for me, is set out in an excellent article on his tax plan by Steve Forbes, publisher of Forbes magazine and one-time candidate for president famous for his radical flat-tax proposals. Read it, and then tell me why Giuliani shouldn’t be the GOP nominee.

It is true that the Republicans, in the US, haven’t had a stellar record on government spending since 2000. It has a high standard to meet, if it is to match its own rhetoric. It has been vulnerable to attack over profligacy, and in particular over Bush’s refusal to veto fat-laden bills. (Or rather, his inability to do so in practice because he has no line-item veto.)

It’s got so bad, I’m told, that the Democrats are now the party of fiscal responsibility, and if I’m a small-government libertarian, I should prefer to see Democrats in charge in the US.

Luckily, some people keep track of these things. Witness the House and Senate “RePORK Cards”, published by the Club for Growth, for example. It ranks senators and members of Congress on their voting record against pork barrel spending. These votes all involve amendments to bills aimed at removing discretionary spending earmarks on totally unrelated items.

Some highlights from the Senate, where 15 anti-pork measures came to a vote:

• Only three senators received a perfect score of 100% (and were present for a majority of the votes). All three are Republicans. A fourth, John McCain (R-AZ), was only present for two votes.
• Thirty-six senators scored below 10%. Of those, two are independents, the other 34 are Democrats.
• Next lowest on the list, at 11%, is the junior senator from New York, Hillary Clinton, who voted for one anti-pork amendments out of the nine for which she was present. Barack Obama scored 33%, or two out of six.
• Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) scored a 53%; Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) scored a 7%, voting for only one amendment.
• The average Republican score was 59%; the average Democratic score was 12%.
• Thanks to this dismal voting record, only two amendments were successful: one to cut funding for spinach growers from the Iraq Supplemental Bill, the other not to spend $1 million on a museum dedicated to the Woodstock Festival. Those that failed included funding a visitors’ center in Louisiana instead of providing shelter for victims of Hurricane Katrina (and they bash Bush over Katrina?), millions of dollars for bicycle paths instead of using the funds to improve bridge safety, and $100 million for the 2008 Republican and Democratic nominating conventions (go figure).

In Congress, where 50 anti-pork amendments were considered, these figures stood out:

• Sixteen members scored 100%. All of them are Republicans.
• The average Republican score was 43%. The average Democratic score was 2% — on average, Democrats voted for one anti-pork measure out of 50!
• The only Democrat to score over 20% was Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN) who received an admirable 98% grade.
• 105 congressmen scored a round zero, voting against every single amendment. The “Pork Hall of Shame” includes 81 Democrats and 24 Republicans.
• The Democratic Freshmen — the new blood that was going to restore fiscal responsibility to Congress — scored an abysmal average of 2%. Their Republican counterparts scored 78% on average.

Let nobody ever again tell me (a) to support a Democrat for their spending restraint, and (b) to believe Democrats when they promise to clean up Congress. The only positive from this report is that Americans can hold their representatives accountable for their wasteful spending. Let’s hope they do so.

One often hears, from moderate, socially-conscious capitalists such as John McCain, why climate change — or at least the emissions they think might cause climate change — can be dealt with most effectively using “market oriented” means, such as a cap-and-trade system. The idea has merit, in that the market will indeed most efficiently allocate the government-mandated cuts in emissions. I’ve always been uncomfortable with the idea, however, since the cap is not imposed by the market, but rather by politicians. It’s a bit like imposing price controls not directly, but by requiring a given average price from all producers. It’s better than capping all prices, but it’s still price control.

Harvard economics professor Greg Mankiw takes McCain to task on exactly this issue. McCain favours cap-and-trade, but disfavours carbon taxes. Mankiw clearly and concisely points out that there is no economic difference between the two policies, other than that taxes raise revenue for the state.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s talk at Columbia University was a wonderful comedy show. But while his reception at Columbia is one thing, the respect the United Nations accords him is quite another.

He started with a pathetic complaint about being treated rudely, because Columbia’s president, Lee Bollinger, introduced him by reading his CV. It includes such items as the imprisonment of journalists, sponsoring terror, executing children, threatening the destruction of a nation-state, fighting a proxy war against the United States and hosting a Holocaust denial conference. A rush transcript of the introduction, the speech, and the Q&A session is here.

Ahmadinejad proceeded with his usual deranged notions about global politics and made an asinine appeal to fellow academics for further research into the veracity of the Holocaust. He points out that, “the key to the understanding of the realities around us rests in the hands of the researchers, those who seek to undiscover (sic) areas that are hidden, the unknown sciences.” Here’s to undiscovery, indeed. Perhaps if we undiscover the Holocaust, or Apartheid, or the Inquisition, or the Crusades, or the present Jihad, they will never have happened. Wouldn’t that be nice?

He tells us, “Nobody should interfere in the affairs of the Palestinian nation. Nobody should sow the seeds of discord. Nobody should spend tens of billions of dollars equipping and arming one group there.” Something about a mote and a splinter comes to mind — I’m sure our Hizbollah-sponsoring friend knows the holy texts well enough to understand.

He used this rhetorical trick of inversion often. If such tactics fooled anyone (and judging by the applause in the audience it did), he finished with an enlightening flourish: there are no homosexuals in Iran. Granted, in a country where homosexuality is punishable by lashes or execution, I guess gay pride marches, burlesque cabaret and rainbow bumper stickers aren’t really all that popular.

Perhaps his Columbia address, as Bollinger said he hoped, brings home to a few naïve listeners the absurd regime over which he presides, and the nature of the enemy that faces those who love freedom and cherish civilisation.

What is less easy to accept is that this man remains — along with dozens of other leaders of unfree countries — a respected member of the United Nations. An excellent editorial at Investor’s Business Daily points this out, and calls for the failed global body to be closed for good.

The World Stage: Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denies the Holocaust, sponsors terrorism and colludes in the murder of American troops. So why is he given the honor of addressing the United Nations on U.S. soil?

To us, the answer is clear. The U.N. is as corrupt, brutal and morally compromised as Ahmadinejad himself. In its many affronts to civilization and decency, the U.N. has long since outlived its usefulness and reason for being. Time to shut it down.

Sounds harsh, we know. Isn’t it better, you ask, to have a place where people can peaceably gather and talk out their problems?

Sad as it is to say, the answer is no. For the U.N. has been hijacked by a rather diverse group of kleptocrats, dictators and fanatics who have successfully used it to their own rather nefarious ends.

An old proposal, put forward by Sen. John McCain a while back, would scrap the U.N. and replace it with a “league of democracies.” Great idea. Let that be the starting point for reform talks. Given the U.N.’s abysmal record and its epic depravity, there is no choice.

It cites numbers specific reasons, including the perversity that the worst tyrants and kleptocrats in the world get to chair commissions on human rights, nuclear disarmament and sustainable development.

It revives an excellent proposal by McCain, to establish a club of free nations. Membership would be by invitation only, and would be subject to adherence to minimum standards of liberty, democracy and human rights. Member countries would agree a common defence and military support arrangement, much like the North-Atlantic Treaty Organisation. As an inducement to non-members, member countries would agree to dismantle all trade barriers among them, but would not be so bound vis-a-vis non-members.

It is a capital solution to a huge and expensive problem the world has created in the U.N. It was created for a different world. Its costs, morally and financially, far outweigh the limited benefits it has brought in that time. It’s time to end the perverse charade.