"Totally Drunk Guy Is A Famous American Novelist Who Viewed Hippies With Disgust On National TV."

An incredibly stupid YouTube title for what is a fantastic episode of "Firing Line," from 1968, with William F. Buckley interacting with Jack Kerouac (and a sociology professor and Ed Sanders of The Fugs):

Kerouac died 7 months later. He may be drunk but every word he says has more value than anything that comes from the sociology professor. And nobody on the stage has much of a good word to say about hippies.

Speaking of death, Buckley opens the show with: "The topic tonight is the hippies an understanding of whom we must I guess acquire or die painfully...."

"Up until that point in my life, in conformance with King Frederick II’s proscription against inebriation among falconers, I had resolved..."

"... never to use drugs or alcohol. In fact, I hadn’t even tasted coffee. However, I had recently gathered from my favorite comic book, Turok, Son of Stone, that hallucinogens might allow me to see dinosaurs, which I greatly desired. [The person offering it] assured me that this was a near certainty, so I swallowed the LSD, which more than delivered on his promise. Buildings melted like wax candles; trees bowed and swayed on a windless night; bright lights with long comet tails lent Hyannisport the cheery aura of Christmas in July.... Still tripping, I rode into Hyannis with two older kids and struggled in a Main Street diner with a plate of lively white noodles that squirmed and squeaked as I stabbed at them with my fork. I became suddenly appreciative of the impossibly complex choreography of minute movements required by my mouth and its various parts in order to chew and swallow food. Abandoning that endeavor, I looked up to see a picture hanging behind the counter of my father, Uncle Jack, and Jesus. All of them had their hands folded in prayer.... Two days later I flew to South America.... I worked during July and August as a ranch hand in the Colombian llanos, returning that fall to Millbrook.... My generation was developing its own counterculture. That summer’s Woodstock concert—just across the Hudson from Millbrook—was our constitutional convention.... I... read underground newspapers and Mr. Natural comics.... I thought of drugs as the fuel of the insurrection...."

Writes Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in  "American Values/Lessons I Learned From My Family." 

It was the summer of '69. Perhaps you remember it. RFK Jr. was 15. 

Millbrook was the private boarding school RFK Jr. attended, chosen by him because "it operated a certified zoo and several of the boys practiced falconry." The place was the alma mater of William F. and James Buckley. James would go on, in 1970, to win the Senate seat that had belonged to RFK Sr.

This is a stick-up.

I'm reading "Like Marie Antoinette," a book review written by Mario Puzo in 1968 and published in the NYT. The book under review is "The Jeweler’s Eye," by William F. Buckley Jr. 

There are a lot of things I want to blog about this morning, so why am back in 1968? It's because of the first thing I wrote about this morning, the NYT obituary for Kathy Boudin. I was struck by the sentence, "During the stickup, the gunmen killed a security guard, Peter Paige." Stickup? That strikes me as gangster slang, lacking the formality I would expect from the NYT in the account of this event that took place 4 decades ago.

Does the NYT generally use "stickup" to describe serious matters? I searched its archive, and the Mario Puzo article caught my attention:

"And I do think — the Democrats, I think, have come to understand, they somehow got on the wrong side of order."

"And they got somehow attached, even though Biden is not actually attached to it, to the idea of defunding the police. And they need to somehow make some gesture to show they understand the insecurity of the American people. The country has been through an anxious time, with the pandemic, economic turmoil. There's just this great sense of fear, of fear and a sense of unsafety, physical unsafety, from the pandemic and everything else. And somehow they have to address that. Now, a lot of law and order talk is code word for racism. There's no question about that. But I think a lot of it is not. And I think Democrats would be making a mistake if they just said, oh, you're all just a bunch of cryptoracists. I think people have legitimate concerns about expressing their opinion safely, about living safely. And so I think Biden really would do well by himself to somehow address this issue and say, no, we're for policing, we want to reform policing, but we will keep you safe. This is just an elemental issue of politics stretching back 3,000 or 4,000 years...."

Said David Brooks (on PBS Newshour last night).

They need to somehow make some gesture....

They need more than some gesture! Show some leadership. Why should they be trusted when they've been running the cities with the worst problems with crime and the police?

"Cryptoracist" is a useful word. Reminiscent of "cryptofascist" (which which is what Gore Vidal said he meant to call William F. Buckley when he called him a "crypto-Nazi"). Brooks's use of "cryptoracist" is to mock the notion that there are lots of such people out there.

The OED has an entry for "crypto" as a free-standing word: "A person who secretly belongs to or supports a particular political group; esp. a crypto-communist." There's a Churchill quote: "Pacifists or ‘cryptos’, or that breed of degenerate intellectuals."

"Where Do Republicans Go From Here?/The party looks brain-dead at every spot Trump touches. But off in the corners, there’s a lot of intellectual ferment."

That's just the new David Brooks column, but I'm linking to it because it has a very cool illustration by Tim Enthoven. And I like that it fits so squarely into my tag "what Trump did to the GOP" which you might enjoy clicking on for a trip down memory lane.

Here's some Brooks:

If you came of age with conservative values and around Republican politics in the 1980s and 1990s, you lived within a certain Ronald Reagan-Margaret Thatcher paradigm. It was about limiting government, spreading democracy abroad, building dynamic free markets at home and cultivating people with vigorous virtues — people who are energetic, upright, entrepreneurial, independent-minded, loyal to friends and strong against foes....

But somehow that wasn't enough. Other Republicans offered other "paradigms." First on the list, Brooks himself!

On Sept. 15, 1997, William Kristol and I wrote a piece for The Wall Street Journal on what we called National Greatness Conservatism. We argued that the G.O.P. had become too anti-government.

They argued for "ambitious national projects, infrastructure, federal programs to increase social mobility." Brooks thinks John McCain, in 2000, represented their idea. George W. Bush, who won that year, had his own paradigm:  Compassionate Conservatism. That was, per Brooks, "an attempt to meld Catholic social teaching to conservatism." There were more paradigms offered up:

Sam’s Club Republicans, led by Reihan Salam and my Times colleague Ross Douthat, pointed a way to link the G.O.P. to working-class concerns. Front Porch Republicans celebrated small towns and local communities. The Reformicons tried to use government to build strong families and neighborhoods. The Niskanen Center is an entire think tank for people who have leapt from libertarianism.

William F. Buckley discusses hippies with Jack Kerouac, Ed Sanders (of The Fugs), and a sociologist named Lewis Yablonsky.

"Are you a hippie, Mr. Sanders, and if not, wherein not?"

The year is 1968, and I believe I watched this at the time:



If you're not watching the whole thing, please just watch these 13 seconds, where the sociologist is droning and Kerouac comes alive:



Cadre!

"Smollett—if he really did stage the attack—would have been acting out the black-American component in this eschatological configuration, the role of victim as a form of status."

"We are, within this hierarchy, persecuted prophets, ever attesting to the harm that white racism does to us and pointing to a future context in which our persecutors will be redeemed of the sin of having leveled that harm upon us. We are noble in our suffering."

Writes John McWhorter in "What the Jussie Smollett Story Reveals/It shows a peculiar aspect of 21st-century America: victimhood chic" (The Atlantic).

What is "this eschatological configuration"? The antecedent sentence is:

Racial politics today have become a kind of religion in which whites grapple with the original sin of privilege, converts tar questioners of the orthodoxy as “problematic” blasphemers, and everyone looks forward to a Judgment Day when America “comes to terms” with race.

Eschatology is — in my dictionary, the OED — "The department of theological science concerned with ‘the four last things: death, judgement, heaven, and hell'" or "In recent theological writing, esp. as ‘realized eschatology’ (see quot. 1957), the sense of this word has been modified to connote the present ‘realization’ and significance of the ‘last things’ in the Christian life." The etymology has roots for last + discourse. McWhorter is talking about "Judgment Day," so the word (the metaphor) is apt.

And here's the Wikipedia article "Immanentize the eschaton":

In political theory and theology, to immanentize the eschaton means trying to bring about the eschaton (the final, heaven-like stage of history) in the immanent world. In all these contexts it means "trying to make that which belongs to the afterlife happen here and now (on Earth)."...

Modern usage of the phrase started with Eric Voegelin in The New Science of Politics in 1952. Conservative spokesman William F. Buckley popularized Voegelin's phrase as "Don't immanentize the eschaton!" Buckley's version became a political slogan of Young Americans for Freedom during the 1960s and 1970s.

Voegelin identified a number of similarities between ancient Gnosticism and the beliefs held by a number of modern political theories, particularly Communism and Nazism....

Back to McWhorter. I'm skipping ahead now:

Notable in smollett’s [sic] account is that he sought to come off as an especially fierce kind of victim—the victim as hero, as cool. “I fought the fuck back,” he told ABC’s Robin Roberts in an interview. Smollett has long displayed a hankering for preacher status. His Twitter stream is replete with counsel about matters of spirit, skepticism, and persistence that sounds a tad self-satisfied from someone in his 30s. His mother associated with the Black Panthers and is friends with the activist Angela Davis, and in interviews Smollett has identified proudly with the activist tradition.

The problem is that amid the complexities of 2019 as opposed to 1969, keeping the Struggle [sic] going is more abstract, less dramatic, than it once was....

It is and should be a mistake to switch to fakery and overdramatizing to keep the Struggle going. There's no reason why we can't be empathetic and attentive to subtle things. Let's talk about what's really true and what matters. It may be hard to believe that anyone will care about less dramatic problems, but if you wreck your credibility, you'll have no way to talk to people anymore.

"The Radziwill-Capote friendship ended... They fell out when she refused to testify for Mr. Capote in a libel suit brought by Gore Vidal..."

"... over a Capote assertion, citing her as his source, that Mr. Vidal had been ejected drunk from the Kennedy White House. Mr. Vidal said he had merely been escorted to his hotel by friends after antagonizing Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Mr. Vidal won the suit and an apology."

From "Lee Radziwill, Ex-Princess and Sister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Dies at 85" (NYT).

I've never been interested in Princess Radziwill, but I'm thoroughly intrigued by the news that Vidal sued Truman Capote for saying that he was drunk when what he was really doing was antagonizing Robert Kennedy.

Here's an article from People from 1979: "Sued by Gore Vidal and Stung by Lee Radziwill, a Wounded Truman Capote Lashes Back at the Dastardly Duo." That's the way we talked back then, 40 years ago — "dastardly duo."

Says Capote of Vidal: “I’m always sad about Gore—very sad that he has to breathe every day.” Retorts Vidal: “Truman made lying an art form—a minor art form.”

Celebrities were so much better then — better at talking, I mean.

The spat, legal and otherwise, springs from a 1975 Playgirl interview in which Capote charged that Vidal had been bounced from a 1961 White House party because of drunken and obnoxious behavior. Should it ever come to trial, the case could feature cameo court appearances by such eminent eyewitnesses as John Kenneth Galbraith, George Plimpton, Arthur Schlesinger Jr.—and even Jackie O herself. Capote has given a preview of the fireworks-to-come in a withering blast at the guest of honor of that ill-starred Camelot bash—Jackie’s little sister, Princess Lee Radziwill, 46.f

It was Princess Lee, says Capote, who told him that Gore was tossed out of a White House function. Vidal’s alleged offenses: putting his arm around Jackie and insulting her mother, Mrs. Hugh D. Auchincloss. (Curiously, Gore’s mother was a previous Mrs. Hugh D. Auchincloss.[)]

Keeping up with the Auchinclosses.  By the way, "[)]" is not an emoji — what would it be an emoji for? — It's me providing the close-paren that People left out.

Guests at the party... deny that Vidal was forcibly ejected, though they confirm that he squabbled with Bobby. And Lee herself—on whose testimony Truman had counted—shocked him by signing an affidavit for Vidal. “I do not recall ever discussing with Truman Capote the incident or the evening,” she declared in the document. Replies Capote angrily: “She’s just a treacherous lady, and that’s the truth of it. She’s treacherous to absolutely everyone.”

What did the princess think of being caught in the quarrel? “We know what they are,” she told a New York gossip columnist. “They are two fags. It is just the most disgusting thing.”

Okay, the "treacherous lady" is dead now and so are Capote and Vidal, the men she called "two fags."  Capote fought back at the time:

“We all know a fag is a homosexual gentleman who has just left the room,” he said, and went on to define a Southern fag as “meaner than the meanest rattler you ever met.”... “I know that Lee wouldn’t want me tellin’ none of this,” he giggled, “but you know us Southern fags. We just can’t keep our mouths shut.”... 

“You know, she calls herself a princess,” he marveled in falsetto. “I always thought that a princess was the daughter of a king and a queen.” (Radziwill’s title dates back to her 1959 marriage to Polish Prince Stanislas Radziwill, whom she divorced in 1974.) ... He accused Lee of jealousy toward her sister (“The princess kind of had it in mind that she was going to marry Mr. Onassis herself”) and claimed she once tried to woo author William F. Buckley Jr. away from his wife....

“You know, I was placed in an impossible situation by this whole thing,” he says. “It wasn’t as though I sat down and was deliberately being vindictive. She simply didn’t tell the truth.” He accuses Radziwill of turning sister Jackie against him, then deserting him for Vidal during Capote’s lengthy struggle against liquor and pills. “I think she kind of thought I wasn’t going to pull myself out of that the way I did,” he surmises.

Opsimath.

"A person who begins to learn or study late in life" — OED.

1808   Gentleman’s Mag. June 480/2   From the dissipation and idleness of his earlier years, Mr. Fox in Greek and Roman Literature was necessarily an Opsimath....
1968   T. M. Disch Camp Concentration (1969) i. 58   ‘Opsi?’ I asked Mordecai. ‘Short for opsimath—one who begins to learn late in life. We're all opsimaths here.’
1992   W. F. Buckley WindFall xvii. 268   They took me thirty years to learn, opsimath that I am in so many matters....

This is a word I learned only because it came up in a NYT acrostic — "Late learner, like Grandma Moses." I searched the entire archive of the NYT and found not a single appearance of this word. Surely, it's a bit useful.

1. It's funny, like oopsy-daisy.

2. You might be a polysyllabic show-off like William F. Buckley.

3. You could be Thomas M. Disch, writing "Camp Concentration." I read that book (almost half a century ago (it came out in 1968)).

The emotional politics around the question whether Trump (and Clinton) are "qualified" to be President.

I'm reading a WaPo piece titled "Poll: Clinton, Trump in virtual dead heat on eve of first debate":

... 53 percent of registered voters say he is not qualified, 58 percent say he lacks the temperament to serve effectively....

Doubts about Trump’s qualifications have softened somewhat since midsummer, when 6 in 10 registered voters said he was not qualified....

Trump has the support of 88 percent of registered voters who say he is qualified, which is a high in Post-ABC polls. Among those who say he is not qualified, just 5 percent support him, no higher than before.

I'm not surprised at that high correspondence between responding yes to the is-he-qualified question and the plan to vote for him. His opponents have framed him as not even qualified, so those who are rejecting him are unusually likely to explain themselves in those terms.

My hypothesis is that people arrive at their connection to Trump through an emotional path, and then they address the question But is he qualified? Since they already want to vote for him, it affects their understanding of what it means to be "qualified" and it biases them toward saying he is.

A funny thing is those 5% of Trump supporters who will say "not qualified." What are those people thinking? Maybe it's something like what William F. Buckley had in mind when he said: "I would rather be governed by the first 2000 people in the Manhattan phone book than the entire faculty of Harvard."

WaPo continues:

On most of those measures, Clinton scores positively, with 57 percent of registered voters saying she is qualified to serve as president; 55 percent saying she has the right temperament....

You know, that's not that good. Clinton is touted as supremely qualified — even the most qualified person ever to run for President. How come only 57% of the respondents will give her the minimal status of "qualified"? Maybe the overuse has changed the meaning of the word, and the effort at excluding Trump from its scope has made it feel more restrictive.

"If we turn against each other based on divisions of race or religion, if we fall for a bunch of 'okey-doke,' just because it sounds funny or the tweets are provocative, then we're not going to build on the progress we started."

Said President Obama, doing a rally at Concord High School in Elkhart, Indiana.

Here's the video of it, which is at the top of Drudge right now with the headling "TRUMP TURNS OBAMA INTO STUTTERING MESS":



He does get hung up on the word "if," repeating it perhaps 10 times.

But I want to concentrate on "okey-doke." I knew I had an old post on that subject. Yes, here, from November 2014:

On "Meet the Press" this morning, Chuck Todd was talking to Secretary of Health and Human Services Sylvia Burwell, and he presented one of those amazing Jonathan Gruber clips like this: "This is how Gruber explained taxing high-end Cadillac health insurance plans and sort of doing a little 'okey-doke.'"

I had never heard "okey-doke" used like that. I only knew "okey-doke" as a cute/corny way to say "okay." I Googled and got to Ice Cube's "Don't Fade Me": "I don't fall for the okey-doke/And before I fall for the okey-doke/I let the pistol smoke." Rap Genius explains: "'Okey doke' is slang for pulling a trick on someone. Cube would rather commit murder than take care of a baby that isn’t his because the girl lied to him."

I read all the lyrics. They're pretty evil....

ADDED: Obama's style of stuttering is highly reminiscent of William F. Buckley. I think it's what happens when a man with a will to dominate feels feels utterly relaxed and confident and is enjoying the game.

The riveting dismal dark world of the GOP debate.

How the morning after looks on the front page of The Washington Post:



From Stephen Stromberg, it's "The dismal, dark, traitor-filled world Republican candidates inhabit." Stromberg cherry picked — cherries for anti-GOP-ers — the most negative statements. Things like:

"Our military is a disaster. Our healthcare is a horror show…. We have no borders. Our vets are being treated horribly. Illegal immigration is beyond belief. Our country is being run by incompetent people."

Is that dismal? It's a foundation for saying we need change. Somehow when Obama ran in 2008, the call for change was deemed optimistic by the Strombergs of the press.

The original meaning of "dismal" is literal — dies (days) mali (evil) — evil days. OED:

The dies mali, evil, unlucky or unpropitious days, of the mediæval calendar, called also dies Ægyptiaci, ‘Egipcian daies’... hence, by extension, Evil days (generally), days of disaster, gloom, or depression, the days of old age.

Today, it just means "depressing, wretched, miserable." I think Stromberg's point is people want optimism, so they don't want Republicans. Those horrible people are all doom and gloom. Stay away! Toxic! It's a warding-off that works on many, many people, probably most of the people I know in real life.

Jennifer Rubin has "The Charleston GOP debate: A series of riveting face-offs." She stresses the energy. "Rubio was noticeably energetic and on message." Except for "Kasich and Carson, who seemed to suck the energy out of the room with each answer." And she loathes Trump. ("He was set back on his heels briefly but got several minutes to talk about birtherism, which was probably what he wanted.") She focuses on "face-offs." They were "riveting."

On the birther issue, Cruz likely won on points, chiding Trump that he once dismissed the citizenship issue. “The Constitution hasn’t changed. But the poll numbers have,” he said to laughter and applause. “And I recognize that Donald is dismayed that his poll numbers are falling in Iowa.”

(Actually it is Cruz who is in trouble in Iowa). Cruz continued, suggesting that virtually everyone on the stage might have a challenge brought, even Trump, whose mother was Scottish.... Trump kept insisting that Cruz could not “do that to the party,” set the presidential ticket up for legal challenge, so any doubt about his eligibility was enough to worry. Unfortunately, this exchange was Cruz’s high-point.

Unfortunately, for Cruz, you mean. Cruz made a good point about "natural born" extremism. Some people think both parents ought to have been born in the United States, and that would disqualify Trump. (And also Obama.) But people that extreme don't matter much, it remains a fact that Cruz was born in Canada, and — who knows? — there's something lovely about a mother born in Scotland. (Trump's paternal grandfather and grandmother were also immigrants. They were from Germany.)

Rubin's next line, as she dismisses Cruz, is:

Rubio then stepped in, winning the moment by declaring, “I hate to interrupt this episode of Court TV,” and went onto a withering criticism of President Obama. It was a presidential-caliber moment.

Rubin also highlights the Cruz/Trump exchange about New York, which was for me the most memorable part of the debate:

However, on “New York values” Cruz landed with a thud, insisting no conservatives come from Manhattan and that New York is the bastion of liberalism and money (not mentioning Goldman Sachs). Here, Trump came back with a vengeance, dropping William F. Buckley Jr.’s name as a conservative New Yorker (he was actually from Connecticut) but then gave his best answer in a debate extolling the people of New York after 9/11, recalling the “smell of death.” Cruz had nothing to say in return.

Cruz must have thought the "New York values" theme would really hurt Trump, and I presume he had the attack worked out in advance.  Trump — who hadn't prepared — immediately, devastatingly flipped it. That was so good, so dramatic.

ADDED: Video and text of Trump's spontaneous paean to New York.

"The Last Time Conservatives Dismissed a Major Encyclical, It Ended Terribly for Them."

Jeet Heer in The New Republic writes about the Pope's new global-warming encyclical. The "last time" encyclical was the 1961 "Mater et Magistra" (Mother and Teacher), which embraced government welfare programs.

In an angry editorial, National Review described Mater et Magistra as a “venture in triviality.” The magazine also published a joking note saying “Going the rounds in Catholic conservative circles, ‘Mater Si, Magistra no.’” (The joke was first made by Garry Wills, who was playing off a slogan of the Cuban Revolution: “Cuba si, Yanqui no.”)

"The family of writer Gore Vidal has hinted he had sex with underage men in claims that have surfaced as they contest his $37 million will."

What's the connection between the validity of a man's will and evidence of criminal sexual behavior? Gore Vidal left all his money to Harvard University and the family is irked. Now — after it's too late to punish the man for any crimes he may have committed — they're leaking this material?

I would infer that he did not do the things the disappointed, would-be heirs are talking about. Wouldn't he have been more likely to leave them money if he'd had a motivation to shut them up? He left them pissed and litigious. That speaks of a clean conscience!

I'm noticing this story this morning because of the way it's trumpeted in The Daily News, but the source is this far more sedate article from 3 days ago in the NYT. The NYT begins with the news that Vidal kept a fire burning even on hot days, because he had a titanium knee and had experienced hypothermia in the Army in WWII. The second paragraph details the decor of his living room where he died. We learn about the chair where he, in his elderly weakness, peed.

A pissed and litigious disappointed would-be heir is described as "not angry... but... bruised and resigned." Vidal's gift to Harvard is portrayed as the product of dementia. I see that Vidal did not attend Harvard. He went into the Army instead and later quipped: "What was the point of going into another institution when I had already written my first novel?"

Eventually, you arrive at the material the Daily News cherry-picked, about a nephew Burr Steers and his mother, Vidal's half-sister Nina Straight. Straight claims to have paid a million unreimbursed dollars into Vidal's lawsuit against William F. Buckley. Buckley had called Vidal "a queer," but why sue when, in fact, one is homosexual? Truth is a defense to defamation, even if the truth is stated nastily. Here's the buried story:

What Justice Scalia really means when he says he believes in the Devil.

About halfway her wonderful interview with Justice Scalia, after some discussion of homosexuality in legal and in Catholic doctrine, Jennifer Senior pushes the old judge to worry about how history will look back on his era of the Court. The first prompt — "Justice ­Kennedy is now the Thurgood Marshall of gay rights" — gets merely a nod. She tries again, with another non-question: "I don’t know how, by your lights, that’s going to be regarded in 50 years." He says doesn't know and he doesn't care:

Maybe the world is spinning toward a wider acceptance of homosexual rights, and here’s Scalia, standing athwart it. 

Some might hear "standing athwart" homosexual rights and get an amusingly unintentionally sexual picture of Scalia straddling gay men. But I assume it's an allusion to William F. Buckley's famous 1955 mission statement for The National Review: "It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it." The topic was history, you know. And who else says "standing athwart"?

"In my mid-adolescence... I became obsessed with William F. Buckley."

"This makes more sense when you realize that we were living in Bible Belt farming country miles from civilization," said Malcolm Gladwell.

Buckley seemed impossibly exotic. We used to go into Toronto and prowl the used-book stores on Queen Street looking for rare first editions of “The Unmaking of a Mayor” and “God and Man at Yale.” To this day I know all the great Buckley lines. Upon coming to Canada for a speech, for example, he is asked at the border for the purpose of his visit:

Buckley: “I have come to rid Canada of the scourge of socialism.”

Guard: “How long do you intend to stay?”

Buckley: “24 hours.”

In southern Ontario farming country when I was growing up, we considered that kind of thing deeply hilarious.

Gladwell is doing an interview in the NYT, and the question was "Who was your literary hero [when you were young]?" I take it he told the truth when he said William F. Buckley, and then, thinking of the NYT reader, he quickly acknowledged how hard that would be to understand and went into that you-have-to-understand-this-was-Canada riff.

Rush Limbaugh calls Margaret Thatcher "one of the greatest Americans, quote, unquote, that I've ever met."

He describes a dinner party at which the hostess, Gay Gaines had seated him next to her longtime friend Margaret Thatcher and was urging him to talk about the latest political issue, which he said he was too tired to do. Thatcher said  "Gay, he doesn't wish to speak about politics. So let's talk of the rule of law" and, as Rush puts it:

... bam, there we are off on a discussion, the rule of law. She loved the founders. She absolutely thought they were the most brilliant people, 'cause they were Brits, don't forget. Our founders were British. She loved them.

She loved Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson was it. But she loved them all. She knew the history of this country better than most people in this country do, and she revered it. She was one of the greatest Americans, quote, unquote, that I've ever met.

What topic would you suggest if your tablemate said he was tired of talking about politics? The rule of law?! I'd hear a cue to go somewhere lighthearted. Perhaps something about pop culture.

Here's a "Firing Line" appearance from 1977 that's up at the Rush Limbaugh website:



That's a 15-minute clip, not all of which was played on yesterday's radio show, but here's one of the parts that was:

THATCHER: I think what we've learned in Britain is that we've gradually, over the last certainly 12 or 13 years, with perhaps a little interruption, gone slowly further and further away from the free society towards something else.... At the same time we've found -- I don't find it strange, but some other people do -- that we have stopped creating wealth. We've had a large number of increasing restrictions. And you've been finding two things: First, that we are more and more concentrating on redistributing the wealth we've got, rather than creating any more. To create more, you need a slightly freer society, and you need an incentive society. Naturally when I see that happening, I look with very great alarm to societies which have gone even further left. That is, they've tried to redistribute even more and haven't had the incentives for people working hard on their own account, doing well for their families and often then being able to create jobs for others, they've produced a much more prosperous society than we have. But by and large you've got the two broad, different economic and political approaches.

RUSH: Here we are, 1977, and again, the value here, not just an illustration of who Lady Thatcher was, for those who don't know, but rather in 1977 it was known what is known today. And it was being executed then, as it's being executed now. And in 1977 it failed, i.e., the redistribution of wealth, the stoppage and the creation of wealth, which happens at the same time. The moment a society becomes redistributive, it stops creating wealth. She was cataloging current circumstances in Britain in 1977. And this was, of course, to set up her eventual triumph as prime minister.

"Because there is no cosmic point to the life that each of us perceives on this distant bit of dust at galaxy's edge..."

"... all the more reason for us to maintain in proper balance what we have here. Because there is nothing else. No thing. This is it. And quite enough, all in all."

Wrote Gore Vidal, who reached the end of his enough yesterday. He was 86.

Here's a late interview (with al Jazeera), where he makes himself cry — at 2:23 — saying, about Americans — "They're the greatest nation in the world in the world." And then "Everybody says that, that's why they keep shooting us.... That's jealousy." And then recovers and says "This is irony, you know."



ADDED: Here he is calling William F. Buckley a "crypto Nazi"... and also:

Consider his "incorrigible" mother, a sometime actress who "failed a Paramount screen test because of the prominence of her manly mustache." Did you know that Eleanor Roosevelt had a mad Sapphic crush on Amelia Earhart and was "constantly proposing" that they fly around the country, "with Amelia at the controls"?....

Asked to define commercialism, Vidal remarks, "It's the ability to do well what ought not to be done at all." Bobby Kennedy had "aggressive non-charm." The '60s: "a decade stolen from those of us who were living in it." And he doesn't turn away from the wit of others. Like Tennessee Williams, who stares at Jack Kennedy and mutters, "That boy has a nice ass."

What's the story with Amelia Earhart? Vidal's Wikipedia page says: "according to biographer Susan Butler, was the great love of Amelia Earhart's life."

Oh! The travails of the lefty comedian! (Hey, did Rush Limbaugh set a trap?)

"Axelrod Cancels on Bill Maher — For Now."

Senior Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod has canceled an appearance on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher that was originally scheduled for later this month....

After the fallout from Rush Limbaugh’s crass insults of Georgetown Law student Sandra Fluke, conservatives began arguing that there was a double standard, with Democrats (and the media) far more tolerant when liberal media figures use crass words to describe Republican women, Maher being Exhibit A in their case....

[And] the comedian Louis CK recently pulled out as entertainer at the Radio-TV Correspondents Dinner. This followed criticisms... over the comedian’s past use of offensive language about former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.

And Maher gave $1 million to the pro-Obama Super-PAC.

Rush Limbaugh is a media genius, but I don't think he's enough of a genius to have laid this trap. It has worked as a trap. By going too far, on one well-chosen occasion — picking on a young woman about sex — he got an immense reaction from Rush haters, who smelled blood and imagined that they could use this incident to drive Rush off the air. In making their strong argument, Rush's opponents articulated a rule demonizing those who use offensive language to describe a woman.

Now, Rush is thoroughly familiar with Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals." Here's Rule 4 (pp. 128-129):

Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.

In this Fluke incident, many left-liberals have committed to a rule that can now be used to take out some of their most valuable speakers and media outlets.

Let's keep reading Alinsky:

The fourth rule carries within it the fifth rule: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage. 

We'll find out who the real masters of ridicule are. Rush has his material, and he's going to use it. Look for Maher to attempt counterattacks with witticisms like "fat fuck." (Which I would think violates a left-wing rule that lefties should be compelled to live up to. I mean, do they accept mocking a person for being overweight like that?)

More Alinsky:

The sixth rule is: A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.* If your people are not having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic. 

The asterisk points to a footnote that quotes — of all people — William F. Buckley, Jr.: "Alinsky takes the iconoclast’s pleasure in kicking the biggest behinds in town and the sport is not untempting …"

"Biggest behinds"... mocking the fat... hmmm... it is a tempting sport! Who will win?

Ron Paul, interviewed by William F. Buckley in 1988.

"The libertarian movement has come of age. We've been around for 15 years, and I think we're going to have a real impact...."

Via a reader who wanted me to know — after this — that Ron Paul's eyebrows are real.

And, by the way, I liked Ron Paul on yesterday's Meet the Press.