'Your papers, please' must never be heard in America
Recently, an alarming trend has been unfolding among members of the Republican Party: More and more Republican candidates, super PACs and members of the GOP are hanging on to the coattails of Ronald Reagan's legacy, while simultaneously silencing and dismantling his three-legged stool of coalitions: social, foreign policy and economic conservatives, what Reagan called "complete conservatism."
A bristling group of 25 traditional conservatives are out to protect one of their own in a new push against the "establishment Republicans" of Karl Rove's American Crossroads.
War? What war? It's just business as usual at the Conservative Victory Fund, an emerging super PAC that has vexed fierce conservatives and tea partyers convinced that the organization is undermining Republican chances of a win in the 2014 midterm elections by abandoning conservative principles and backing moderate candidates.
Chilton Williamson Jr., once the book review editor at National Review, worked in a great tradition, his predecessors being Frank Meyer, who ran the book section from Woodstock, N.Y., and then George Will, who ran it from Washington. When George Will left National Review for more lucrative pastures, William F. Buckley chose Mr. Williamson, then a young editor at St. Martin's Press, to succeed him.
Charles R. Kesler is a nationally renowned professor of politics who has benefited from the tutelage of some great teachers. William F. Buckley is said to have discovered Mr. Kesler at the tender political age of 16, when the teen sent a well-beyond-his-years letter to the flame-spotting editor.
Gore Vidal, the author, playwright, politician and commentator whose novels, essays, plays and opinions were stamped by his immodest wit and unconventional wisdom, died Tuesday, his nephew said.
"They love him, gentlemen, and they respect him, not only for himself, but for his character, for his integrity and his iron will, but they love him most for the enemies he has made."
Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum caused a bit of a stir last month when he labeled college campuses "indoctrination mills" that enforce a strict adherence to "politically correct left doctrine." For conservatives, Mr. Santorum might as well have called the sky blue. But from the way the media and liberal pundits pounced on his remarks, you'd think he had said something profoundly indecent.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg likes the Indian Healthcare Improvement Act and other ingredients of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. Why, she asked toward the end of three days of hearings, shouldn't the court keep the good stuff in Obamacare and just dump the unconstitutional bits?
Sam Vaughan, a longtime editor and publisher at Random House and Doubleday who worked with Dwight D. Eisenhower, Duke Ellington and many others has died. He was 83.
Give the late William F. Buckley credit: The witty conservative writer, editor, talk-show host, debater and bon vivant was unafraid to allow liberal biographers extensive access to his life and private papers. In 1988, socialist true-believer John B. Judis published his wide-ranging, well-researched "William F. Buckley Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives."
Texas Gov. Rick Perry, the longest-serving governor in state history, is a constitutional scholar, a defender of free enterprise, a champion of states' rights and the 10th Amendment and a polemicist of the first order - all qualities evident in this strongly written and persuasively argued book.
When the New York Times reviewed William F. Buckley Jr.'s "Nearer, My God" in 1997, the reviewer described it as an " 'autobiography of faith,' a personal topic [in which] Buckley considers the political to be separate from the personal." In his nugget of a book, Jeremy Lott makes a case for the exact opposite: Buckley's powerful and influential political views were informed by his personal faith, not separate from it.
Kelsey Grammer is an investor and public face supporting a new network that launched Wednesday with entertainment designed to appeal to political conservatives.
Kelsey Grammer is an investor and public face supporting a network that launched Wednesday with entertainment designed to appeal to political conservatives.
to lean too hard on Buckley's religion as an explanation for why he argued 'X' or did 'Y.'
As he did to many accusations, Buckley responded with piercing drollness, chalking it up to familial duty, saying that's where he had to write if he wanted his son - Christopher, a teenager at the time - to read him.
