Those were the words of Benjamin Franklin, quoted from the 1787 Constitutional Convention, when a woman asked him what sort of country the new Americans would have. In 2007, the late William F. Buckley, Jr. used those words as the the title of an article which deserves to be read by everyone. In it, Buckley critiques the War in Iraq, going against the grain of the Conservative Movement he helped create. He took a lot of quiet and not-so-quiet flack for this in conservative circles, accused of being old, irrelevant or both. Jeffrey Hart says that Buckley was Right at the End, and I tend to agree.
One almost feels sorry for Buckley and the old guard of the conservatives. They built a powerful movement, but in the process of doing so, they brought people into the fold that would destroy the movement from within. In the end, all it took was one, small group of singularly misguided and criminal people only seven years to bring down all Buckley & Co. had created.
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