"Because there is no cosmic point to the life that each of us perceives on this distant bit of dust at galaxy's edge..."

"... all the more reason for us to maintain in proper balance what we have here. Because there is nothing else. No thing. This is it. And quite enough, all in all."

Wrote Gore Vidal, who reached the end of his enough yesterday. He was 86.

Here's a late interview (with al Jazeera), where he makes himself cry — at 2:23 — saying, about Americans — "They're the greatest nation in the world in the world." And then "Everybody says that, that's why they keep shooting us.... That's jealousy." And then recovers and says "This is irony, you know."



ADDED: Here he is calling William F. Buckley a "crypto Nazi"... and also:

Consider his "incorrigible" mother, a sometime actress who "failed a Paramount screen test because of the prominence of her manly mustache." Did you know that Eleanor Roosevelt had a mad Sapphic crush on Amelia Earhart and was "constantly proposing" that they fly around the country, "with Amelia at the controls"?....

Asked to define commercialism, Vidal remarks, "It's the ability to do well what ought not to be done at all." Bobby Kennedy had "aggressive non-charm." The '60s: "a decade stolen from those of us who were living in it." And he doesn't turn away from the wit of others. Like Tennessee Williams, who stares at Jack Kennedy and mutters, "That boy has a nice ass."

What's the story with Amelia Earhart? Vidal's Wikipedia page says: "according to biographer Susan Butler, was the great love of Amelia Earhart's life."

Oh! The travails of the lefty comedian! (Hey, did Rush Limbaugh set a trap?)

"Axelrod Cancels on Bill Maher — For Now."

Senior Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod has canceled an appearance on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher that was originally scheduled for later this month....

After the fallout from Rush Limbaugh’s crass insults of Georgetown Law student Sandra Fluke, conservatives began arguing that there was a double standard, with Democrats (and the media) far more tolerant when liberal media figures use crass words to describe Republican women, Maher being Exhibit A in their case....

[And] the comedian Louis CK recently pulled out as entertainer at the Radio-TV Correspondents Dinner. This followed criticisms... over the comedian’s past use of offensive language about former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.

And Maher gave $1 million to the pro-Obama Super-PAC.

Rush Limbaugh is a media genius, but I don't think he's enough of a genius to have laid this trap. It has worked as a trap. By going too far, on one well-chosen occasion — picking on a young woman about sex — he got an immense reaction from Rush haters, who smelled blood and imagined that they could use this incident to drive Rush off the air. In making their strong argument, Rush's opponents articulated a rule demonizing those who use offensive language to describe a woman.

Now, Rush is thoroughly familiar with Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals." Here's Rule 4 (pp. 128-129):

Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.

In this Fluke incident, many left-liberals have committed to a rule that can now be used to take out some of their most valuable speakers and media outlets.

Let's keep reading Alinsky:

The fourth rule carries within it the fifth rule: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage. 

We'll find out who the real masters of ridicule are. Rush has his material, and he's going to use it. Look for Maher to attempt counterattacks with witticisms like "fat fuck." (Which I would think violates a left-wing rule that lefties should be compelled to live up to. I mean, do they accept mocking a person for being overweight like that?)

More Alinsky:

The sixth rule is: A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.* If your people are not having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic. 

The asterisk points to a footnote that quotes — of all people — William F. Buckley, Jr.: "Alinsky takes the iconoclast’s pleasure in kicking the biggest behinds in town and the sport is not untempting …"

"Biggest behinds"... mocking the fat... hmmm... it is a tempting sport! Who will win?

Ron Paul, interviewed by William F. Buckley in 1988.

"The libertarian movement has come of age. We've been around for 15 years, and I think we're going to have a real impact...."

Via a reader who wanted me to know — after this — that Ron Paul's eyebrows are real.

And, by the way, I liked Ron Paul on yesterday's Meet the Press.

"Chomsky has achieved so much in linguistics and political commentary that it's easy to forget he also fathered Marty McFly....."

The top-rated comment on a video from 1969 titled "william buckley threatens to punch chomsky in the face."



Oh! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Maureen Dowd: "Perry told the students, 'God uses broken people to reach a broken world.' What does that even mean?"

That's in a column that's all about portraying Perry as the epitome of a special American-style of idiocy:

The Republicans are now the “How great is it to be stupid?” party. In perpetrating the idea that there’s no intellectual requirement for the office of the presidency, the right wing of the party offers a Farrelly Brothers “Dumb and Dumber” primary in which evolution is avant-garde.

Having grown up with a crush on William F. Buckley Jr. for his sesquipedalian facility, it’s hard for me to watch the right wing of the G.O.P. revel in anti-intellectualism and anti-science cant.

But if you're so smart, why can't you understand the poetically rich "God uses broken people to reach a broken world"? You think intelligence is demonstrated by the pompous overachiever's use of big words and long sentences?

Crisp aphorism marks the genius.

How to comment at Instapundit.

Vote in (or view) one of his polls. You can comment at the poll results page.

That link goes to today's GOP 2012 nominee poll. Yesterday, he had this poll, with fewer options. And tons of comments at the results page. 136 pages of comments! I was going to copy and paste Meade's comment... but it's too hard to find. He tells me he wrote "Jeb Bush/Rob Portman" with a link to this article by Juan Williams ("The Perfect GOP Ticket In 2012 Would Have Jeb Bush and Rob Portman's Names On It"):

Bush and Portman can’t be marginalized as Tea Party extremists but they can spout enough hot rhetoric to stir the base. They are also perfectly acceptable to the social, economic and foreign policy conservatives in the Republican camp. The Bush-Portman ticket would satisfy the William F. Buckley rule for Republican Primary voters — pick the most conservative candidate who can win.

"It's not that Obama can't speak clearly. It's that he employs the intellectual stammer."

"Not to be confused with a stutter, which the president decidedly does not have, the intellectual stammer signals a brain that is moving so fast that the mouth can't keep up. The stammer is commonly found among university professors, characters in Woody Allen movies and public thinkers of the sort that might appear on C-SPAN but not CNN. If you're a member or a fan of that subset, chances are the president's stammer doesn't bother you; in fact, you might even love him for it (he sounds just like your grad school roommate, especially when he drank too much Scotch and attempted to expound on the Hegelian dialectic!)."

Meghan Daum explains it in the LA Times. And, righties, quit mocking:

[T]he godfather of the intellectual stammer is arguably none other than the paterfamilias of the conservative movement, William F. Buckley Jr.... In fact, if the people critiquing Obama's meandering speech patterns were to see an old "Firing Line" segment, I daresay they would think Buckley was drunk or otherwise impaired.

"[William F.] Buckley was charming because he had to be."

"He got a lot of attention because it was a time when liberalism was at its zenith, and so was its control of the media. Liberals were secure enough to let guys like Buckley on, but only guys like Buckley, whose I’m-a-member-of-the-club aristocratic credentials made him seem safe. And only so long as he was sufficiently nonthreatening."

It doesn't work like that anymore. And by the way, as I remember it — and I watched "Firing Line" in the 60s — Buckley wasn't a charming, refined guy — or not just a charming, refined guy. There was something freakish and weird about him. I remember the exaggerated imitations of him emphasizing elaborate squirming in his seat, his tongue darting in and out of his mouth, the long pauses with abrupt spates of words, the crazy gesturing with a pencil, and the bizarre reaching for big words people had never heard before. Maybe upper class people and Yale graduates were able to perceive him as one of their own, but to average TV viewers, he was a big oddball.

***

Ah, yes! Here it is: Joe Flaherty's impersonation (the second character shown in the SCTV sketch).

"Then why don't you get William F. Buckley to kill the spider?"

I love this scene in "Annie Hall":



I was watching it this morning because I'd made an allusion to it in the comments over in the "Althouse in Washington" post — which, not too surprisingly, no one seemed to get. It wasn't the stuff about William F. Buckley. That's just the thing that makes me laugh the most — and also I thought I might be able to encourage my Woody Allen-o-phobic right-wing readers to go ahead and watch the clip.        

What?  Did you go to a rock concert?... Was it heavy?  Did it achieve total heavy-ocity?... Why don't you get the guy who took you to the rock concert, we'll call him and he can come over and kill the spider....

What is this?  What are you, since when do you read the "National Review"?  What are you turning in to?... Why don't you get William F. Buckley to kill the spider?...

Are you going with a right-wing rock-and roll star?  Is that possible?

IN THE COMMENTS: EDH not only identifies the allusion, he remembers this clip of me in "Annie Hall" mode:



My "where is the camera?" response is also like the lobster scene.

K-Lo leaves NRO and TBogg makes an anti-Hispanic joke about it.

That's the way I read this.

***

Gawker speculates that National Review is hurting for cash after the death of William F. Buckley.

***

Sadly, No! goes with the sexist approach to the news.

"How do I manage this, a weekend -- during the GOP convention -- with a Euro social democrat and Karl Popper's son? Avoidance? Giant underpants?"

Pogo has a political/etiquette question:

This weekend I will be hosting two couples. One is very far left, the other libertarian right. Me? Conservative, former lefty.

On the phone to the lefty last night the husband remarked about the DNC (we were not talking politics but food): "I hope someone in Minneapolis gets Bush and Cheney and strings them up."

My resonse was a silent "WTF?" I said. Uh ...yeah. Aannnnnyway, I'll bring the wine.

So my question, a serious one: How do I manage this, a weekend -- during the GOP convention- with a Euro social democrat and Karl Popper's son? Avoidance? Giant underpants? Drunkenness?

Bill Buckley was famous for getting along with ideological opposites. But it seems people are far more polarized and angry than in the past. I dunno. Maybe I shouldn't show up at all.

I'd go meta. Say you asked this very question on a somewhat popular blog, and it was what everyone was talking about last Thursday, and here are some of the cool things they said.

"I Am Lapidary But Not Eristic When I Use Big Words."

I said I was going to write about the use of the word "eristic," and the reason I wanted a whole separate post about the use of the word in the Mattathias Schwartz article discussed in the previous post is that I found this 1986 article — "I Am Lapidary But Not Eristic When I Use Big Words" — by William F. Buckley Jr.:

When is it O.K. to use an unfamiliar word? When is it not O.K.? - is endlessly argued, yet even so, sometimes, notwithstanding the debates' endlessness, fresh insights and original formulations are coined. One of these, I think, was Dwight Macdonald's distinction, made in his marvelous survey of Webster's Third for The New Yorker (March 10, 1962), between unusual words (O.K.) and words ''that belong in the zoo sections of the dictionary'' (not O.K.). I should think most people would agree, for instance, that arachibutyrophobia would be an example of the latter (the word defines the fear of peanut butter's sticking to the roof of your mouth). James Jackson Kilpatrick, in his book ''The Writer's Art,'' takes a position on the dogmatic side against the use of unfamiliar words and cites me, however kindly, as a prodigious offender (the Lord delivered Kilpo into my hands, because his proscriptive passage against long & unusual words contained four long & unusual words). Mr. Kilpatrick likes to quote Westbrook Pegler, who denounced the use of what he called ''out of town words.''

The tough — and subjective — question is: Which words are too annoyingly strange to use?

And was it eristic for Schwartz to use "eristic"?

''ERISTIC: (i ris/ tik) adj [ Gr. eristikos, d. erizein, to strive, dispute d. eris, strife ] of or provoking controversy, or given to sophistical argument and specious reasoning.''

If it was eristic to use "eristic," did Schwartz mean to offer word mavens a little inside joke, or — more amusingly — did he mean to send a secret signal to Buckley fans?

"I’m not really familiar with that."/“You don’t seem to be familiar with anything."

Dick Cavett encounters William F. Buckley.

"Well, there's something known as American conservatism, though it does not even call itself that."

"It's been calling itself  'voting Republican' or 'not liking the New Deal.' But it is a very American approach to life, and it has to do with knowing that the government is not your master, that America is good, that freedom is good and must be defended, and communism is very, very bad."

Peggy Noonan, paraphrasing William F. Buckley, Jr.

William F. Buckley, Jr. has died.

The NYT obit:

William F. Buckley Jr., who marshaled polysyllabic exuberance, famously arched eyebrows and a refined, perspicacious mind to elevate conservatism to the center of American political discourse, died Wednesday at his home in Stamford, Conn....

Mr. Buckley’s winningly capricious personality, replete with ten-dollar words and a darting tongue writers loved to compare with an anteater’s, hosted one of television’s longest-running programs, “Firing Line,” and founded and shepherded the influential conservative magazine, National Review.....

The liberal advance had begun with the New Deal, and so accelerated in the next generation that Lionel Trilling, one of America’s leading intellectuals, wrote in 1950: “In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.”

Mr. Buckley declared war on this liberal order, beginning with his blistering assault on Yale as a traitorous den of atheistic collectivism immediately after his graduation (with honors) from the university.

“All great biblical stories begin with Genesis,” George Will wrote in the National Review in 1980. “And before there was Ronald Reagan, there was Barry Goldwater, and before there was Barry Goldwater there was National Review, and before there was National Review there was Bill Buckley with a spark in his mind, and the spark in 1980 has become a conflagration.”

Lots of commentary at the National Review blog, The Corner.

I remember watching Buckley on "Firing Line" in the 1960s, before I went to college and learned that he was to be considered poison. What a great character with a great talk show. I should try to find some old video clips and add them to this post.

ADDED: Here he is interviewing Noam Chomsky in 1969: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5. Now that's television!

AND: More video. What election commentary was like in 1969: "And yet always there is a strange seriousness, something in the system that warns us, warns us that America had better strike out on a different course, rather than face another 4 years of asphixiation by liberal premises.... No, Nixon won't bring paradise, but he could bring a little more air to breathe."