William F. Buckley, Jr., And Ayn Rand Made Fascism Popular In GOP

It is all emotional with them, which they ascribe to "Reason". It is a legacy of Ayn Rand, who inverted values around to suit her vision of the world. Where Marx declared he was going to stand Hegel on his head, Rand goes about standing everybody on their heads. She mistook the Pucker Factor for the Categorical Imperative as the organizing principle of Reason, which is why you are always dealing with a moving target in any dialogue with conservatives.

Which is a long way of agreeing with you

One of the "tells" that you are dealing with a conservative is the use of the word "brilliant" in describing sophist bullshit, a term often assigned to Scalia's opinions. Like William F. Buckley, Scalia isn't interested in Truth: he uses the law to demonstrate how clever he is in constructing a rationale for his personal tastes and prejudices as revealed truth. He did this in Citizens United when he created a corporate person (which, conceptualclarity, is a fascist construct) and in his 2nd Amendment opinion regarding hand guns. All these opinions have been variously described as "brilliant" in much the same context as conceptualclarity's citation of Liberal Fascism.

And, just for the record, the Students for a Democratic Society, engaged in Liberal Fascism. but if you have to choose, go with liberal fascism over conservative fascism, which is generally based on altruism versus greed and selfishness.

Jonah Goldberg is one of Cheney's Chicken Hawks and he and his mother spewed fascist drivel as cheerleaders for impeaching Clinton for sex and running American over the cliff and into Iraq.

I voted for Ronald Reagan twice. His New Federalism was half of a good idea that, if it had been underwritten by more than pixie dust and the wishful thinking of conservatism, would have won him a Nobel Prize in Economics. Instead, it was seen as a pretext for looting the middle class and sabotaging the federal government.

Reagan should have shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Gorbachev for his supporting role in the transformation of Russia from Soviet communism to a market economy. Instead, Don Regan, who had his own agenda to accelerate the transfer of wealth from the middle class to the Hunt brothers, sabotaged the representations Reagan had made to Gorbachev in Reykjavik. We don't know what those were because they became lost in Reagan's Alzheimer's as soon as he left the room, but Gorbachev almost canceled his trip to Washington when he found out Reagan's agenda was being corrupted by Regan.

Which is why Nancy Reagan fired his ***. Regan was running his own agenda out of the Oval Office and that was essentially the same fascist agenda which led to the economic crises in 2008 and the was reflected in the monumental incompetence of the Bush administration in the occupation of Iraq, to say nothing of the bogus WMD pretext for invading in the first place.

Like Nixon, Reagan was surrounded by noble creatures and fascist black guards. Colin Powell was the first Ranger qualified soldier to rise to the role of Chairman, JCS, which fulfilled an agenda that my father help set into motion to effect the transformation of the Army from the pre-1947 3rd Wave High Performance organizational paradigm to the post-1947 5th Wave High Performance organizational paradigm. Joe McCarthy, another bully with fascist tendencies, nearly de-railed this agenda with his witch hunts, which operated very much like the cheer your buddy Goldberg was engaged with the Clinton impeachment and the invasion of Iraq.

It is hard to isolate any event or episode in America political history since the end of WWII where the fascist wing of the body politic actually contributed anything constructive to the national dialogue or enterprise. Everything these people touch turns to ****.

Clinton was impeached for perjury. And supporting war to overthrow Saddam Hussein does not make anybody a "fascist." Calling people false names like that only undermines your credibility. And William F. Buckley was an incomparably nobler soul than you.

First of all, Clinton didn’t commit perjury. He may have been impeached for it, but, if you have the intellectual honesty to review the video, you will observe that the judge restricted the definition of “sexual relations” to mean “sexual intercourse” that is, penile insertion into the vagina, which did not occur in the Clinton-Lewinsky relationship. It is clear to me that Clinton and Lewinsky agreed to define “sexual relations” in this manner and to avoid the act in order to be able to honestly state that they did not have sexual relations if the subject came up. This is why Clinton emphasized the term in that famous sound bite. Clinton was a better lawyer than the Paula Jones lawyers trying to spring a perjury trap.

Secondly, even Lindsey Graham voted against obstruction of justice in the House committee vote, because it is not obstruction of justice to defend yourself with competence and imagination. The fascists in the GOP spent 6 years and millions of dollars trying to get the goods on the Bill and Hillary and, in the final analysis, it came down to sex.

As far as removing Hussein, we killed a lot more people and destroyed a lot more property to accomplish what could have been accomplished through the United Nations, but oil was the motivating factor in the invasion and Cheney wanted to hand his cronies at Haliburton etc the Iraq oil patch.

The idea that this wasn’t about oil is purely a product of conservative propaganda: even Vietnam was about this oil. The Bush administration came to town looking for an excuse to invade Iraq and Bill Kristol’s neo-imperialistic Project for the New American Century provided an ideological framework under the pretext of spreading democracy while sanctioning out-right theft. Fascism is, ultimately, idolatry, and idolatry is the embrace of false values. This pretty well fits conservatism.

As for Buckley, he was a lovely man, no question. He is a shining example of the efficacy of the 7 “P”s of Free Market economics: Picking Parents Properly Prevents Post-Partum Poverty. He could afford to be a dilettante and, like Antonin Scalia, he had the intellectual agility necessary to elevate his vices to virtues and then congratulate himself on his righteousness.

Gore Vidal got it exactly correct: he was a crypto-Nazi and congenital racist with a life-style gilded by the predations of his ancestors. He made Fascism attractive to neurotic middleclass white boys who largely avoided military service during the Vietnam era. Who wouldn’t want to be William F. Buckley? It’s like being Mitt Romney without all the church lady stuff.

And, just for the record, I'm not running for noble soul. My hands have become a bit too soiled dealing with creatures like you.