Ten Myths Conservatives Believe About Progressives

Sara Robinson wrote a wonderful article at Campaign for America's Future:

Talking Turkey: Ten Myths Conservatives Believe About Progressives

Highly recommended.

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Palin Rape Kit Commercial

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No More Clowns

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Celebration!

Love, American Style

Today, I am happy.

I am happy because I get to write. I love to write.

I am happy because it is Friday, the Fourth of July, and I am an American thru and thru.

I am happy because that fuck, Jesse Helms is dead.

And tonight, there are fireworks over the lake.

It is July 4, Independence Day.

If you haven't kicked in to our fundraiser yet (which runs through July 15) won't you consider doing so today?

Just take a moment and use PayPal, a credit or debit card, or even a personal check; we take them all. Helping GNB be independent would be a great Independence Day gift. This is the only fundraiser for ourselves we're going to do for quite a while, so every dollar really matters.

PayPal or credit card:

Group News Blog
PO Box 809
Bellevue WA 98009

We're not like the right-wing. We don't have crony-scholarship gigs and bullshit think-tanks which support J-students just out of school with endless conservative media dollars.

We have you.

No kidding, I celebrate how this works. I celebrate you. Your donations allow us to go our own way, to be, well, us.

When you donate, that tells us -- Love, American Style -- you like the job we're doing. Money talks and bullshit walks.

It is July 4 and I am happy.

If you've donated already, thank you for doing so. If you're going to donate today, thank you. And if you're not donating today, thank you for thinking about it. Where ever you are and whatever your finances allow, thank you for being part of the GNB family. We honor and respect you and appreciate your readership.

Have fun, and be careful (says the retired medic) with fireworks.

CELEBRATE!!!

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Learning From The Cultural Conservatives (Again)

Sara Robinson has Part III of Learning From The Cultural Conservatives up at Campaign for American's Future.

Learning From The Cultural Conservatives,
Part III: Taking It To The Street

If you missed them the first time, here are Parts I & II:

Learning From The Cultural Conservatives,
Part I: Messing With Their Minds
Part II: Talking Up The Worldview

Want to know how the conservatives have been -- literally -- changing the way in which you and I can think, what we are capable of thinking, using a highly sophisticated understanding of biology, history, linguistics, psychology, and science? It's all right here.

Highly Recommended.

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Learning From The Cultural Conservatives

Sara Robinson in addition to a vacation and her normal writing at Orcinus, is half-way through a quarter-long gig writing at Campaign for American's Future.

Rarely is something so good, I say to drop everything and go read.

“Drop everything and go read.”

Learning From The Cultural Conservatives,
Part I: Messing With Their Minds
Part II: Talking Up The Worldview
Part III: Taking It To The Street

Part III will be up next Monday. I'll update this page, and post separately. (Note: Part III added above on Mar 11.)

Campaign for America's Future is doing rich, deep, thoughtful work, the kind which holds the keys to our future as progressives. Highly recommended.

I can't say enough about Sara's work. She is a world-class intellect at work.

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Passing

William F. Buckley Jr. Dies at 82

The Associated Press has the story.

Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — William F. Buckley Jr., the erudite Ivy Leaguer and conservative herald who showered huge and scornful words on liberalism as he observed, abetted and cheered on the right's post-World War II rise from the fringes to the White House, died Wednesday. He was 82.

His assistant Linda Bridges said Buckley was found dead by his cook at his home in Stamford, Conn. The cause of death was unknown, but he had been ill with emphysema, she said.

Editor, columnist, novelist, debater, TV talk show star of "Firing Line," harpsichordist, transoceanic sailor and even a good-natured loser in a New York mayor's race, Buckley worked at a daunting pace, taking as little as 20 minutes to write a column for his magazine, the National Review.

Yet on the platform, he was all handsome, reptilian languor, flexing his imposing vocabulary ever so slowly, accenting each point with an arched brow or rolling tongue and savoring an opponent's discomfort with wide-eyed glee.

"I am, I fully grant, a phenomenon, but not because of any speed in composition," he wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 1986. "I asked myself the other day, `Who else, on so many issues, has been so right so much of the time?' I couldn't think of anyone."

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William F. Buckley Jr., Hotel Vancouver, Vancouver. 1980s. photo Alex Waterhouse-Hayward.

The progressive blogosphere's Rick Perlstein writes a beautiful obituary.

Blog for Our Future

Why William F. Buckley Was My Role Model
By Rick Perlstein

William F. Buckley was my friend.

I'm hard on conservatives. I get harder on them just about every day. I call them "con men." I do so without apology. And I cannot deny that William F. Buckley said and did many things over the course of his career that were disgusting as well. I've written about some of them. But this is not the time to go into all that. My friend just passed away at the age of 82. He was a good and decent man. He knew exactly what my politics were about—he knew I was an implacable ideological adversary—yet he offered his friendship to me nonetheless. He did the honor of respecting his ideological adversaries, without covering up the adversarial nature of the relationship in false bonhommie. A remarkable quality, all too rare in an era of the false fetishization of "post-partisanship" and Broderism and go-along-to-get-along. He was friends with those he fought. He fought with friends. These are the highest civic ideals to which an American patriot can aspire.

I first met Bill in 1997. When I contacted his assistant to ask for an interview for a book I was writing about Barry Goldwater, Buckley was immediately accommodating, though I had very little public reputation at the time. He was, simply, generous with people who cared to learn about conservatism. I sat with him for a good half hour in National Review's offices on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan, and he answered every damned question I asked, in searching detail, and then answered a few I hadn't even asked. He also opened his papers to me at Yale University without hesitation. Would that all conservatives honored these ideals of intellectual transparency.

When my Goldwater book came out, he was generous in his praise of it—again, acknowledging all the while that we were ideological adversaries.

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The model here is Steve.

Buckley was an out and out Conservative. He was for conservative ideals. In his time, he was for bombing China, segregation, against the Freedom March on Washington, against African self-government. He was Conservative. Gilliard was Progressive. Gillard's ideas are and were as offensive to a solid third of the country as Buckley's ideas were and are to our third of the country.

No matter how strongly anyone believes their beliefs to be "the truth," any hope for true change, for genuine reconciliation between red and blue America, does not start with attacking the memory of a man who has just died.

With the exception of the Freepers and a few genuinely disgusting people, friends and enemies alike came together to acknowledge Steve Gilliard as a liberal lion. Let people be as unstinting in their praise of William Buckley as people were in their praise of Steven Gilliard. Death is no respecter of politics; she comes for all of us, one death per life.

I didn't agree with William F. Buckley's politics, but I admired his spirit. He was a genuine conservative, a person unafraid to disagree with you politically, without needing to attack you personally, threaten your family, or resort to name-calling or insults.

He was, an old-fashioned gentleman.

Rest well, William F. Buckley Jr.

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