William F. Buckley has been praised for his wit, charm and erudition. He was exposed to an excellent education. But, it's easy to see that the wit, charm and erudition was a facade and the exposure to education did not educate.
The most obvious thing that his education did not teach him was to look around him and see that there are other people, lots of other people, in the world who are not like himself. Buckley's background, being brought up with privilege, isolation and exclusivity produced a man in the same way that the poisonous mushrooms are produced: only under special, unnatural, sheltered conditions. And, Buckley was no less deadly and dangerous than those mushrooms.
Buckley must have been awfully proud to see his years of preaching the discredited, hard-right, conservative ideology come to fruition, an ideology that he clung to as the ultimate and only solution as to how to run the world, in spite of the fact that there was not, is not, and never will be, any evidence to support it.
That fruition came about with the apotheosis of all things Buckley believed in, the ultimate representation of conservative Republican hopes and dreams, the disastrous, the arrogant, the ignorant, the delusional, George Bush.
George Bush fulfilled all the expectations of Buckley's conservative agenda, the autocratic style, the disregard for anyone not conservative Republican, the disdain for the Constitution, the perversion of the law to fit the politicizing of the government in favor of Republicans, and the ultimate economic principle of: Them As Got, Gets.
There are many who are erudite, well read and have an extensive vocabulary. However, the proper use of those meager talents is to further and support the purpose of humanity, to the benefit of all. The two best examples of soaring, rhetorical literacy are the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, examples to which Buckley's ideology of conservatism was antithetical. (You see, Bill, it's not that hard.)
The thing that Buckley has to answer for is that he used his talents to pervert the purpose of humanity to his own and his fellow conservative Republican's selfish ends.
Listening to Buckley and dissecting what he said was a lot like reading Joyce's gibberish and Faulkner's insertion of fifty cent words he found in the dictionary so that he could build a two page paragraph around them. I'm surprised that Buckley didn't get a Nobel Prize for his Faulkneresque illiteracy.
Yes, we can be thankful for William Buckley. He finally got what he wanted in George Bush and thereby proved the fallacy that brought about the denouement of his conservative ideology. At last. Indubitably, as the literate Buckley would say. Big time, as the Cheney illiterates say.
