Buckley Says Bush Will Be Judged on Iraq War, Now a "Failure"
     Bloomberg       31 March 2006          William F. Buckley Jr., 
the longtime conservative writer and leader, said George W. Bush's 
presidency will be judged entirely by the outcome of a war in Iraq 
that is now a failure.          "Mr. Bush is in the hands of a 
fortune that will be unremitting on the point of Iraq," Buckley said 
in an interview that will air on Bloomberg Television this weekend. 
"If he'd invented the Bill of Rights it wouldn't get him out of his 
jam."          Buckley said he doesn't have a formula for getting out 
of Iraq, though he said "it's important that we acknowledge in the 
inner councils of state that it (the war) has failed, so that we 
should look for opportunities to cope with that 
failure."          The 80-year-old Buckley is among a handful of 
prominent conservatives who are criticizing the war. Asked who is to 
blame for what he deems a failure, Buckley said, "the president," 
adding that "he doesn't hesitate to accept responsibility."
  Buckley called Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a longtime 
friend, "a failed executor" of the war. And Vice President Dick 
Cheney "was flatly misled," Buckley said. "He believed the business 
about the weapons of mass destruction."          National 
Review       Buckley, often called the father of contemporary 
conservatism in America, articulated his beliefs in National Review 
magazine, which he founded in 1955. His conservatism calls for small 
government, low taxes and a strong defense. Both Ronald Reagan and 
Barry Goldwater said they got their inspiration from the 
magazine.          In the interview, Buckley criticized the so-called 
neo- conservatives who enthusiastically embraced the Iraq invasion 
and the spreading of American values around the world.          "The 
neoconservative hubris, which sort of assigns to America some kind of 
geo-strategic responsibility for maximizing democracy, overstretches 
the resources of a free country," Buckley said.          While
  praising Bush as "really a conservative," he was critical of the 
president for allowing expansion of the federal government and never 
vetoing a spending bill.          The president's "concern has been 
so completely on the international scope that he can be said to have 
neglected conservatism" on the fiscal level, Buckley 
said.          Appraising Presidents       Buckley also offered his 
perspectives on other recent presidents:
    Richard Nixon "was one of the brightest people who ever occupied 
the White House," he said, "but he suffered from basic derangements," 
which precipitated his own downfall.


    Ronald Reagan "confounded the intellectual class, which disdained 
him." Every year though, Buckley said, "there is more and more 
evidence of his ingenuity, of his historical intelligence."

    Bill Clinton "is the most gifted politician of, certainly my 
time," Buckley said. "He generates a kind of a vibrant goodwill with 
a capacity for mischief which is very, very American." He doubted 
that "anyone could begin to write a textbook that explicates his 
(Clinton's) political philosophy because he doesn't really have one."
       Buckley exalted in what he sees as the conservative success 
stemming from his call a half century ago in the National Review to 
"stand athwart history and yell stop."          That, he remembered, 
was when Marxism was widely considered "an absolute irreversible call 
of history." The folly of that notion was demonstrated by the demise 
of communism a decade and a half ago, he said.
       Buckley said he had a few regrets, most notably his magazine's 
opposition to civil rights legislation in the 1960s. "I think that 
the impact of that bill should have been
   welcomed by us," he said. 

-----------------------

To change your mail settings or leave the C-PALSY list, go here:

http://listserv.icors.org/SCRIPTS/WA-ICORS.EXE?SUBED1=c-palsy