Christopher Buckley Comes Out of the Closet

I am so disappointed in Christopher Buckley's recent endorsement of BO that I nearly removed my link to the right, "My old man and the Sea". But I re-read it and enjoyed it all over again and am trying not to be petty.

I have read most of what CB has had to say since his endorsement and his - for whatever reason (fired? quit?) - no longer writing for National Review (the magazine his father founded).

From what I can gather, CB is voting for BO not because he believes in any of BO's plans or philosophies on the role of government; instead because he thinks BO has a "first class temperament and a first class intellect." CB is voting for BO hoping that he is smart enough to realize that none of his ideas or plans will be good for America and ... what? Change his mind, I guess. So for the first time I can remember, people are voting for a candidate hoping he DOESN'T keep his promises.

BO doesn't care whether or not his own plans will be good for America. His ideas and plans are held with a religious conviction that reality and evidence will have no hope of changing. While those of us on the right revere "freedom", BO reveres "fairness". You can't have both. BO considers it the role of government to impose fairness through the point of a gun. (If you think "point of a gun" is hyperbole, you haven't been audited lately.) BO believes in using the tax code to make rich people more poor, thereby imposing fairness.

Raising taxes on people and business owners who earn more than $250,000 will make rich people poorer, but will actually REDUCE tax revenue, so by no stretch of the imagination will it make poor people richer. I trust BO's first class intellect has already figured this out. Yet his mind remains unchanged.

But it's watching previously committed conservatives such as CB throw their vote to BO, I now understand why I still have a hard time pulling that lever for Republican and why my immigrant parents NEVER will.

It's that intellectual snobbery and elitism that people like my parents and me have a knee-jerk negative reaction to. With the rejection of Mac and SP by Christopher Buckley and voting instead for the candidate with the "first class intellect" I realize that he and his ilk value intellect over principles. There are only principled arguments, and certainly no intellectual reasons, to reject abortion, take care of old people beyond their usefullness and .... dare I say it, carry a Down Syndrome baby to term, so it's obvious to me that one's principles are more important than one's intellect.

In other words, I'd rather have a leader with principles against all the above than a leader described thusly by David Brooks of the New York Times, when fantasizing about a BO presidency: Though he is young, it is easy to imagine him at the Cabinet table, leading a subtle discussion of some long-term problem.

Frankly, I can't imagine Mac or SP leading any sort of discussion that is "subtle". But I have no problem imagining both of them doing their best to keep me and my family safe. And intuitively, Mac and SP both understand the following, written by one of America's favorite intellectuals:

To take from one, because it is thought that his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, ‘the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry, and the fruits acquired by it.’ (Thomas Jefferson)

From Thomas Jefferson to Joe the Plumber, Americans understand that the citizens of this great country are not only best equiped, but the only ones morally capable to "spread the wealth".