This Just In Conservatives Are Insane!

I once saw a street corner shouter in the University District in Seattle screaming to everyone within earshot about UFO’s, the CIA, and something called “symptomatic nerve gas.” I stuck around for awhile waiting for him to wind down a bit because I wanted to ask him more about the “symptomatic nerve gas” deal. It was a great phrase and I thought I could use it in a story. I’m always open for background material … even from crazy people. But before I could talk to the street shouter … the cops came and took him away.

Another time I ran into a guy I hadn’t seen in a couple of years in a bar. Since he was buying I sat down while he filled me in on what he’d been doing. He started off normally enough but soon his voice dropped as if he didn’t want to be overheard. He was talking so softly I could barely understand what he was saying. But I could see his face getting a sweat-glaze while his unblinking eyes burned into mine. His speech was getting more and more emphatic, though still at almost a whisper, as he started ripping up his cocktail napkin into Very. Small. Pieces. Abruptly he stood up, said he had to go meet some people, threw some money on the table, and left. Hunter S. Thompson was right. There are some people you shouldn’t drink with … even if they have money.

Just last year I was introduced to some people who told me about a global conspiracy so vast, and the people behind it were so powerful, they couldn’t get their story out. If they tried sending email, their computers fried. So would I help them? They droned on for over an hour. I still don’t have any idea what they were talking about. To quote SpongeBob SquarePants, “I don’t understand those words in that order.”

I could go on … but to sum up … I’ve met my share of crazies. After years of encountering The Insane … it’s not that hard to pick them out.

Just this morning I came across a quote from a well-known American some hold in high regard. He’s been described as “arguably the most important public intellectual in the United States in the past half century.”

And if I may add, one of the craziest bull-goose loonies ever to caper about The American Scene.

47 years ago this guy said that if defeating communism entailed nuclear annihilation … the achievement would be worth the price.

He wrote, “If it is right that a single man be prepared to die for a just cause, it is right that an entire civilization be prepared to die for a just cause.”

The scope of that kind of insanity is beyond my comprehension. This guy thinks that all of mankind should link arms and gleefully jump into the fire for some trumped up principle. The principle of destroying the village to save it … or the sort of thing that might have been uttered by Jim Jones while his zombies passed out paper cups full of cyanide-laced Flavor Aid. Or, if you believe the government’s story, by religious extremists as they plowed hijacked planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

This wasn’t written by a guy holed up in his dimly lit garage clacking away on a blog only he will read. This lunatic founded a biweekly magazine, was its editor in chief for 35 years, hosted his own television program for 33 years, and was a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist.

The name of this Prominent American Screwball?

William F. Buckley Jr. Ex-CIA spook and Crazy as a Loon.

“If it is right that a single man be prepared to die for a just cause, it is right that an entire civilization be prepared to die for a just cause.”

Jeezus Christ … How crazy do you have to be to even think up stuff like that?

Five years before exhorting the incineration of civilization, Bug-Eyed-Bill wrote, “… the central question that emerges… is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where it does not predominate numerically. The sobering answer is Yes – the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.”

You’d have to be crazy to publish gibberish like that. Or Bill Buckley.

He later backed off being a crazy racist in the late 60’s and returned to being just plain crazy. A lot of people think Buckley was a pretty smart guy because of his command of the language. He talked as if he memorized a dictionary and a thesaurus. Big Deal. Dustin Hoffman’s character in Rain Man knew how many toothpicks spilled onto the floor. If Buckley were really intelligent … and sane … he wouldn’t have spent his entire life fine-tuning a narrow-minded ideology that in its essence is simply … inhumane.

Buckley was great pals with Barry Goldwater and supported him in his bid for the presidency in 1964. Regarding Vietnam Goldwater once said, “I could have ended the war in a month. I could have made North Vietnam look like a mud puddle.”

Let me get this straight … The United States set up a puppet government in South Vietnam … then invaded and waged an illegal war against the North Vietnamese … and slaughtered millions of people. But Goldwater … leader of the “Modern Conservative Movement,” by his own words, would have killed millions more. Y’know … I always thought of him as a really scary dude but not so much now over the last ten years … because he’s dead.

Today Buckley and Goldwater are viewed as “Moderate” Republicans … by other Republicans. I think Republicans who think Buckley and Goldwater were “Moderates” are … “Psychotic.”

George H. Nash, a historian of the modern American conservative movement wrote, “For an entire generation [Buckley] was the preeminent voice of American conservatism and its first great ecumenical figure.”

Members of the Republican political establishment paid tribute to Buckley after his death in February 2008. Newt Gingrich said, ” … Buckley began what led to Senator Barry Goldwater and his Conscience of a Conservative that led to the seizing of power by the conservatives from the moderate establishment within the Republican Party.”

So Crazy Ol’ Bill Buckley was instrumental in taking over the Republican Party that recently gave us Sarah Palin, Joe The Plumber, Tea-Baggers, Deathers, Birthers, and other flavors of The Deranged. Not surprising at all. The only difference between William Buckley and his unhinged political progeny was … style. His insanity was refined. He came from money and married into more money. His ideological descendants are of a cruder sort … and stridently anti-intellectual.

According to Jeffrey Hart, writing in The American Conservative, Buckley had a “tragic” view of the Iraq war: he “saw it as a disaster and thought that the conservative movement he had created had in effect committed intellectual suicide by failing to maintain critical distance from the Bush administration … At the end of his life, Buckley believed the movement he made had destroyed itself by supporting the war in Iraq.”

Yeah well … Victor Frankenstein wasn’t too happy about how his monster turned out either.

The Corporatocracy happily uses these pinheads to stifle any semblance of rational political discourse or progress. But Not to Worry … they just control everything.

Thanks Bill. We wouldn’t be here without your invaluable contribution of insanity. We should all be relieved that you never had your fingers anywhere near The Button.

To paraphrase a song from a Betty Boop cartoon, “I’m so glad you’re dead, you rascal, you.”

This Just In Conservatives Are Insane! September 11, 2009