William F. Buckley Jr. - 1925-2008

The leader of modern conservative thinking has passed away.

He died while at work; if he had been given a choice on how to depart this world, I suspect that would have been exactly it. At home, still devoted to the war of ideas.

And what a warrior he was. See him slay the dragon of "too much conservatism is a bad thing":

Now, David Gergen was the Director of Communications at the White House for several years before pulling out a few months ago to return to private life. You will not be surprised to learn that he thinks Mr. Reagan needs to bring "new energy and ideas into a second term." You will not be surprised that new ideas always, but always, involve more social spending at home together with more regulation; and, abroad, more appeasement.

...

But the zinger is the foreign-policy plank for the New Reagan. You've guessed it? right. He must turn his "creative energies to building a different, closer relationship with Moscow." Why not a "Soviet specialist" to advise him? Say, Richard Barnet from the Institute for Policy Studies. Can't "more heavyweight strategic thinkers be found to come into the Administration in a second term"? Somebody like, oh, Herbert Scoville? You will notice that the softer you are, in that world, the heavier you are. Churchill would have been such a lightweight he'd have floated.

What Mr. Gergen has in mind for President Reagan's second term is that he should ignore conservative thought domestically and, abroad, revise weakward our policy of resistance to Soviet encroachment. Not bad, this agenda, for one man. It calls merely for undoing the Federalist Papers, and unliving Lenin. And progressing into history with the force and personality of a vanilla milkshake.

Or read his incredulity as bad weather and poor responses become the fault of the Bush Administration.

"As the water recedes," Dowd explains, "more and more decaying bodies will testify to the callous and stumblebum administration response to Katrina's rout of 90,000 square miles of the South." Another planted axiom. It is that the Bush Administration, to return to the language of Mr. Friedman, "has engaged in a tax giveaway since 9/11 that has had one underlying assumption: There will never be another rainy day."

The gravamen against Bush becomes plain: The Bush administration insisted "on cutting more taxes, even when that has contributed to incomplete levees and too small an army to deal with Katrina, Osama, and Saddam at the same time.”

The proposition that the Federal Government under George W. Bush has been shortchanging welfare is in astonishing conflict with the figures. Under Bush, federal spending increases have been at the fastest rate in 30 years. Non-defense discretionary spending under Bush has grown by 35.7 percent, the highest rate of federal government growth since the presidencies of Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson.

Again, the planted axiom is that the New Orleans levee has been for years a national pustule that George Bush refused to lance because he didn't want to drain the money needed by Dick Cheney to buy his waterfront estate. If New Orleans was conspicuous for its vulnerability, why hadn't the city’s articulate mayor, or his fellow Democrat the articulate governor, said something about it? Why did it not figure in the demands of the Democratic party at its convention in Boston? How explain the silence on the subject of candidate John Kerry?

You can read much more at the National Review Online archives of Mr. Buckley's writings.