Quote of the day - Joe Sobran

If you reject a political claim made in the name of any category of people, you can expect to be accused of hating all the people in that category.

Joe Sobran

Quote of the day - Joe Sobran [Nero, gay marriage]

PIONEER: The self-contradictory concept of same-sex
marriage has caught on in the decadent West with amazing
rapidity. About the only precedent I can find for it is
inauspicious: hostile chroniclers report that the Roman
emperor Nero "married" a boy (who, however, had been
surgically, er, altered for the purpose) and in later
marriage took the role of bride himself (though without
alteration). Usually dismissed as demented, it appears
that Nero was merely ahead of his time.

Joe Sobran - January 2004

Quote of the day - Joe Sobran [socialism, Francois Mitterand]

I recall a news item about an indignant middle-
class Frenchwoman some years ago, during the presidency
of the Socialist Francois Mitterand. "Mitterand told us
he was going to tax the rich," she complained. "Now he
tells us that we are the rich!" It's called the
"slippery slope," madame. If you set fire to your
neighbor's house, the flames may spread to your own home.
And once you support violations of your neighbor's
rights, your own rights may become the next target.

Joe Sobran

Quote of the day - Joe Sobran [change]

At bottom, “change” usually signifies an increase in the power of the centralized state over the decentralized private sphere of life, with a consequent decrease of freedom. But politicians prefer to keep their rhetoric lofty and their meaning vague, so the word sounds like a harmless and benign aspiration. And the state keeps growing.

Joe Sobran - September 9, 1999

William F. Buckley, 1925-2008

National Review founder William Buckley died today.

Buckley was a throwback to the era when the MSM/DNC enjoyed a virtual monopoly on information. I first discovered Buckley in the early 1980's. At that time, I was treated to an almost non-stop barrage of twisted news presentations, distorted facts, repeats of Democrat talking points, etc. from the nightly news and the pages of newspapers. Once a week, William Buckley (and a very few others) would have one chance to rebut the entire MSM/DNC in the confined space of an opinion column on the editorial page of some newspapers. Even though it was hardly a fair fight, Buckley's (and others') few inches of weekly space was more than a match for the daily rants of the NYT, AP, WaPo, John Chancellor, Walter Cronkite, etc. Buckley kept the conservative light glowing until the New Media could begin fanning the flames at the end of the 1980's.

Conservatives born after 1975 cannot fully appreciate what it was like to live in the era before the New Media existed. Buckley was one voice that helped make that era bearable.
















Ann Coulter posts some anecdotes and quotes here, including Buckley's references to Gore Vidal as a "queer" and a "fag."

Michelle Malkin posts more detail.

Joe Sobran shared his memories in May, 2006, when Buckley's emphysema was announced:

Over the years I came to know another side of Bill. When I had serious troubles, he was a generous friend who did everything he could to help me without being asked. And I wasn’t the only one. I gradually learned of many others he’d quietly rescued from adversity. He’d supported a once-noted libertarian in his destitute old age, when others had forgotten him. He’d helped two pals of mine out of financial difficulties. And on and on. Everyone seemed to have a story of Bill’s solicitude. When you told your own story to a friend, you’d hear one from him. It was as if we were all Bill Buckley’s children.

It went far beyond sharing his money. One of Bill’s best friends was Hugh Kenner, the great critic who died two years ago. Hugh was hard of hearing, and once, after a 1964 dinner with Hugh and Charlie Chaplin, Bill scolded Hugh for being too stubborn to use a hearing aid. Here were the greatest comedian of the age and the greatest student of comedy, and Hugh had missed much of the conversation! Later Hugh’s wife told me how grateful Hugh had been for that scolding. Nobody else would have dared speak to her husband that way. Only a true friend would. If Bill saw you needed a little hard truth, he’d tell you, even if it pained him to say it.

I once spent a long evening with one of Bill’s old friends from Yale, whose name I won’t mention. He told me movingly how Bill stayed with him to comfort him when his little girl died of brain cancer. If Bill was your friend, he’d share your suffering when others just couldn’t bear to. What a great heart — eager to spread joy, and ready to share grief!

In another recent column, Sobran compared the careers of Buckley and Ayn Rand (and even Garet Garrett). While I disagree with much of what Sobran has written in recent years (especially about the war), his comparison in that article is interesting to every student of the history of the conservative and libertarian movements:

When Soviet Communism finally collapsed in 1991,
NATIONAL REVIEW felt that its mission was accomplished.
It didn't notice that the America it had set out to save
from Communism no longer existed. Say what you will about
Ayn Rand, I can't imagine her making such a mistake.

This Sobran column contains more details on Buckleys disputes with other conservatives in later years.

I have read several Buckley books over the years, the following of which I endorse:



Ann Coulter has written that this book "proved that normal people didn't have to wait for the Venona Papers to be declassified to see that the Democratic Party was collaborating with fascists. The book -- and the left's reaction thereto -- demonstrated that liberals could tolerate a communist sympathizer, but never a Joe McCarthy sympathizer."



I read "God and Man at Yale" while in college, before I could run to the New Media as a refuge from campus leftism. This book probably provided generations of pre-New Media students with the reinforcement they needed to withstand the barrage of leftism from their college professors.



Many conservatives await a new Reagan to rescue the Republican party from the moderates that now ignore and do not understand capitalism, history, freedom, the rule of law, etc. Before a new Reagan can emerge, I believe we will need a new Buckley - one who will be willing to maintain conservative principles in the absence of access to power and who can energize a new generation of intellectuals to resist the pressure of the modern leftward movement in all major institutions.

The William Buckley that wrote books and published NR in the wilderness in the years before the election of Ronald Reagan provided empowerment is the example that I fear modern conservatives will have to follow in the coming decades.

Quote of the day - Joe Sobran

Ordinary conservatives will stick with Bush, of course.
Their battle cry is, as ever, "Let's support the lesser evil!
We're realists! We've got nowhere else to go!" And they will
wind up, as ever, gaining nothing. Backing the "lesser evil"
means only delaying defeat. It never means victory. A string
of "lesser evils" going back to Richard Nixon has only
resulted in entrenched tyranny. Liberals haven't had to settle
for lesser evils, so they've gotten what they want from the
Democrats. Where is it written that a surrendering
conservative is better than a conquering liberal?

Joe Sobran - April 2000

Quote of the day - Joe Sobran [John McCain]

McCain, who claims to be "pro-life," says he's
never voted for experimentation on aborted children. But TIME
reports that he did so three times -- in 1992, 1993, and 1997.
He says his religion is "between me and my family." So is his
voting record, I guess.

Joe Sobran - March 2000

[See Michelle Malkin today for a preview of the fall campaign.]

----------
update - we appear headed to make an echo instead of having a choice.

Quote of the day - Joe Sobran [Al Gore, Juanita Broaddrick]

Speaking of which, Al Gore was asked in New
Hampshire whether he believed Clinton had raped Juanita
Broaddrick. Any previous vice president (supposing the
question could have arisen about any previous president)
would have bellowed an indignant denial. Gore, however,
stammered a long, noncommittal answer and spoke of
"mistakes [Clinton] made in his personal life." Get that:
if your state's attorney general rapes a woman, he's just
making a mistake in his personal life.

Joe Sobran - January 2000

Quote of the day - Joe Sobran [Bill Clinton, Joseph Stalin, C.S. Lewis]

INSIGHT OF THE CENTURY: I often think that in our
time the Devil has finally gotten his act together.
After dabbling with huge wars and monstrous tyrannies --
very successful but short-lived in their violence -- he
has found a stabler long-term strategy: the more
peaceful tyranny of the appetites in a mass society,
catered to by mediocre rulers like Bill Clinton. In C.S.
Lewis's classic The Screwtape Letters, the senior devil
counsels his younger colleague that for purposes of
damnation, murder may be no better than playing cards,
if cards will do the trick. From that point of view,
Stalin may be no better than Clinton.

Joe Sobran - December 1999

C.S. Lewis

Quote of the day - Joe Sobran

The free use of private property has lost its status as an important human right. In the Soviet Union it was abolished wholesale; in the Western democracies it has been nibbled away by taxes, regulation, and the alleged “rights” of people who make claims on others’ wealth and possessions.

Quote - Joe Sobran

Quote of the day - Joe Sobran [Peter Benchley, Great White Sharks]

A contrite Peter Benchley now says: "I couldn't
write JAWS today." He's learned a lot about sharks
lately, and he feels they're misunderstood: "Except in
the rarest of instances, great white shark attacks are
mistakes." Spoken like a true liberal, Benchley. Soon
Steven Spielberg will reach the sorrowful conclusion that
tyrannosaurus rex was more sinned against than sinning.
How do some people manage to get more naive with age?

Joe Sobran

Quote of the day - Joe Sobran

One of the marks of sound constitutional law is that it doesn’t always give you what you want. A justice whose “interpretations” regularly coincide with his policy preferences is cheating.

Quote of the day - Joe Sobran

Quote of the day - Joe Sobran

The Pope's [John Paul II] condemnation of stem-cell research on
human embryos was greeted by the usual derision,
sophisticated and otherwise. While the prestige news
media cited polls showing that even most Catholics favor
such research (see?), callers to C-SPAN emitted a
ceaseless flow of ignorantly anti-Catholic sentiment. You
had to hear it to believe it: the Pope has no moral
authority because other popes have had girlfriends and
taught that the earth was flat and failed to condemn the
Holocaust, so there. As Lewis Carroll's Humpty Dumpty
says, after a similar exercise in ratiocination, "That's
logic." It's also a reflection of American education,
state-run and, alas, Catholic.

Joe Sobran (2001)

Quote of the day - Joe Sobran

An agenda of power underlies -- and belies -- most rhetorical appeals for variety. If we really want "diversity," centralizing power and outlawing local differences are the worst ways to achieve it. But the same people who most loudly insist on diversity usually want forced busing, race and sex quotas, compulsory integration and bureaucratic supervision to ensure hair-splitting "equality" in every facet of life. They are suspicious of -- no, downright hostile to -- private property, state and local government, popular traditions and, above all, religion.

Joe Sobran

Quote of the day - Joe Sobran

Recent events in Genoa remind us, once again, that
the "international community" comprises more
organizations than you can shake a stick at: the United
Nations, NATO, the G-8 nations, the International
Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the European Union, et
cetera. Can anyone keep track of them all, or follow
their workings? Clearly we are inching toward world
government of some sort; and just as clearly, we aren't
meant to understand it. We won't know just who our rulers
are, or who (if anyone) elected them; in most cases they
will be, for all practical purposes, unelected. Under
"globalization," it appears that self-government,
democracy, national sovereignty, and constitutional law
will all become tenuous, problematic, and eventually
meaningless. The old story will be recapitulated: what
begins as loose federation will end in centralized,
anonymous rule, which it would be rude and benighted to
call tyranny.

How eerie, to covet power without glory! The Roman
emperors expected deification; it was part of the job
description. Today's rulers don't want us to know who
they are. What terrifying pusillanimity!

Joe Sobran - September 2001

Quote of the day - Joe Sobran [Katherine Graham]

Katherine Graham








The death of Katharine Graham, publisher of the
WASHINGTON POST, was bound to test the nation's capital's
capacity for fulsome praise. And to be sure, obsequies
have seldom been so obsequious. Kay Graham, a hostess
rather than a journalist, was the very personification of
the Establishment. Well, someone has to be, and we can't
hold that against her. But her eulogists insisted on
turning the grande dame into a rebel: she had "no sacred
cows," she "inspired" younger women by her example, she
"shook the establishment," she was even, according to the
ancient doyen of Washington courtiers, Arthur Schlesinger
Jr., "a quiet revolutionary." Yes, just like that old
Bastille-stormer Queen Victoria. Meaning no disrespect,
the surest proof of Mrs. Graham's mediocrity is that
nobody hated her.

Joe Sobran - 2001

Quote of the day - Joe Sobran

Spring is here, and baseball has come back
to Washington, D.C., in more ways than one: The city
again has a major-league baseball team and Congress has
held hearings on steroid abuse. It's clear that all the
slugging records of recent years are highly dubious, and
the sport will never be the same.

Joe Sobran - Spring 2005

Quote of the day - Joe Sobran - "Patients rights"

THE RIGHTS EXPLOSION: So now we are getting "patients'
rights." The very phrase makes one cringe. Without even
knowing the details, we know that the more state-
proclaimed "rights" we are given, the fewer freedoms we
have left.

Joe Sobran (September 2001)

Quote of the day - Joe Sobran

THE COMEBACK KID: Bill Clinton has finally opened his new
office in Harlem. In what amounted to the inaugural
address of his ex-presidency, he announced that his new
mission will include fighting AIDS. Most of us would be
satisfied if he just refrained from transmitting it.

Joe Sobran (September 2001)

HIV - tcells - H/T Wellesley. edu

Quote of the day - Joe Sobran

"OOPS! Asked about her plans for 2004, Hillary Clinton
assured the National Press Club that "I'm having a great
time being presi -- being a first-time senator." What an
arrogant bi -- I mean, what an arrogant woman."

Joe Sobran - Spetember 2001