Bill,
This will be brief, more or less as a placeholder and evidence of intent than a real entry, which I will try to do this afternoon–whether or not you reply in the interim. You have been a yeoman about this filing schedule.
Re Hillary. As it happens I believe in the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, I’m sorry to tell you. Or at least I believe that the right is far more proficient than the left at creating and coordinating a network of think tanks, journalists, politicians, and strategists and using it to do three things: 1) conceive, nurture, and develop ideas all the way from abstract scholarship to items on the political agenda; 2) mobilize resources, from deepest academia through shallowest PR, in response to issues that come along unplanned; and 3) propagate and enforce a party line (now known as “message discipline”) that would have been the envy of the Comintern in its heyday. (WARNING: exaggeration.)
How do they do it? I’m afraid I even tend toward the crude Marxist view that having more money helps a lot. Any journalist on the receiving end of the Heritage Foundation machine alone can testify that nothing on the left can compare. But I would also give some credit to the fact–I think it’s a fact, though if so an odd one–that conservatives on average seem to feel more passionately that something important is at stake. Or at least they’re more disciplined about it. Another communist analogy: Communists were said to carry the day in various factional disputes because they had stronger bladders and would out-sit anyone else in a meeting. Metaphorically something similar is true of conservative activists today, I think.
It’s ironic, since conservatives ought logically to think less is at stake in the details of government policy, not more. It’s ironic, too, because the VRWC now supports a whole army of full-time apparatchiks who praise private enterprise and the capitalist system but live in a world more like privately financed socialism. But it’s effective in advancing the conservative agenda.
True, it didn’t get Bill Clinton over Monica, but it may have gotten him in the end after all. In any case, he certainly has given the VRWC aid and comfort–and lots of material to work with. If, as many say, Hillary was Bill’s enabler, maybe Bill was the VRWC’s enabler–always giving it just enough real basis for outrage to feed its psychotic excesses (Vince Foster, etc.).
So all these years I thought your “X” sign-off meant “Love.” What does it really mean? “Exeunt”? (Which you of course know from speaking Latin around your real breakfast table and others know from its use as a stage direction, means, “They exit.”)
This may be my last posting after all. If so, thanks again, Bill (or B or Mr. Buckley) for joining in. I enjoyed it and hope you did, too.
Exeunt
