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Entry: William F. Buckley Jr. as I Knew Him Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/william_f_buckley_as_i_knew_him#18278 Post contents: I wonder if we Joe Sobran will be allowed to eulogize WFB at the upcoming funeral. Somewhow I don't think that this is going to happen. Sobran was one of the the first writers to comprehensively detail a criticsm we so often hear today: how those that we now call neocons were twisting America's foreign policy in order to benefit Israel. Not only was Sobran fired fron National review for these "unsavory" opinions, WFB then took upon himself to appease his masters by devoting almost an entire issue of NR to detail the the inherent anti-semititism of the right. This cowardly mea culpa essentially contributed to Sobran being totally blacklisted and unemployable,a blacklist that he was never able to escape from up to this current day. In fact, the blacklist was so widespread and complete that even those who secretly shared his opinions at places like Cato or antiwar.com have continued to shun him like a leper. WFB's apology for Sobran's heresy was so cringing that it made one think of similar apologies extracted from defendants during the purge trials of the USSR in the late 1930's. It also reminded one of Billy Graham's similar level of groveling before the minions of The Lobby after the discovery was made of the recordings made by Nixon in which Graham made his fears known about the power of The Lobby in the USA. The funny thing is that WFB as editor/publisher of NR could have just as easily have censored Sobran's columns before they were published, thereby preventing any of the the furor that arose once they appeared. I can only think that the reason this didn't happen was because WFB approved of Sobran's opinionsand let them be printed as a sort of trial ballon. When The Lobby voiced its displeasure, WFB let Sobran entirely to take the fall. This sort of cowardice has always made me wonder what groups in fact were the source of NR's mysterious funding. Whoever they were, they definitely didn't want to read in print what what Sobran had to say. Another thing. WFB only came to oppose the Iraq War when it became apparent that the US was losing. When the war originally started he was an enthusiastic supporter. WFB was also an enthusiastic supporter of Bush Senior's Iraq War One, a conflict whose justifications were as fraudulent as those given for Bush junior's present forays into the middle east. Whenever I think of WFB's legacy one person sticks in my mind, his political scion, the particularly odious Joe Lieberman. Whatever virtues WFB might have had were completely overshadowed by the support he gave to advance the career of this incredibily repulsive and reptilian senator from Conneticut. Apparently WFB was so ignorant of Lieberman's true character that he actually believed that Lowell Wiecker, the senatorial incumbent who Lieberman ultimately defeated, presented more of a threat to our republic than his Israel first successor. Sent at: 2008 07 20