Buckley questions GOP survival

30 April 2007 |permalink | email article

The political problem of the Bush administration “is grave, possibly beyond the point of rescue,” William F. Buckley Jr. writes April 28 in the National Review Online.

Buckley, founder of the magazine and editor at large, is the patron saint and eminence grise of American conservative politics. Friends and foes take his insights seriously.

The essay, provocative and timely, raises an extraordinary dilemma for his party because ten candidates vying for the Republican presidential nomination will participate in their first televised debate Thursday night at the Reagan Presidential Library in Southern California.

The Politico is a co-host of the debate – along with the Reagan Library and MSNBC – and readers of the online publication will have a opportunity to put their questions, like those raised by Buckley, to candidates in three rapid-fire interactive rounds.

Candidates accepting Nancy Reagan’s invitation are Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Tommy Thompson, Sam Brownback, Jim Gilmore, Mike Huckabee, Duncan Hunter, Ron Paul and Tom Tancredo

Buckley questions what George Bush is going to do beyond affirming his executive supremacy in war.

“It is simply untrue that we are making decisive progress in Iraq. The indicators rise and fall from day to day, week to week, month to month. In South Vietnam there was a clearly organized enemy.”

“What can a ‘surge,’ of the kind we are now relying upon, do to cope with endemic disease?”

Calling General Petraeus a wonderfully commanding figure. Buckley suggests that “if the enemy is in the nature of a disease, he cannot win against it.”

Students of politics, he writes, then ask the derivative question: “How can the Republican party, headed by a president determined on a war he can’t see an end to, attract the support of the majority of the voters?”

My question is whether Dick Cheney, the architect-in-chief of the war well before 9/11, dares to accuse Buckley of giving aid and comfort to an amorphous enemy.

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