Word: buckley
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...founder of the National Review, Buckley lent an intellectual conscience and a new energy to a conservative movement that had long been wallowing in dour irrelevance. His greatest achievement was to serve as the demiurgic force behind the emerging conservative coalition of the 1960s and 70s, unifying Goldwater libertarianism with ardent anti-communism and the remnants of the conservative old guard. The crowning achievement of his project, of course, was the messianic rise and eventual election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency...
William F. Buckley, the majestic patriarch of modern American conservatism, died yesterday at the genteel old age of 82. He was one of the last truly charismatic public intellectuals—and in this sense his passing should be lamented by anyone nostalgic for those days when ideas and the “life-of-the-mind” still mattered. Buckley was certainly an artifact of this dwindling era: He famously lost his temper on national television and blustered, in his droll blue-blood Connecticut brogue, “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi...
...many years to come, Gore Vidal, an equally dazzling writer and social critic. Watching their strangely genteel 1968 scuffle on YouTube, we are reminded of the sorry spectacle that intellectual life has become today, polluted by such loutish mediocrities as Christopher Hitchens and Ann Coulter. Unlike the latter, Buckley had a unique talent for making even bigotry seem courteous...
...while Buckley’s anti-elitism was charming because of its element of ironic self-awareness, today’s conservatives, admittedly attempting to follow his lead, have lapsed either into a reflexive philistinism or George Will’s poseurish pomposity. Buckley only could maintain this balance because he understood that one must first have the benefit of intelligence before maligning the intelligent. As for elitism, he was an aristocrat par excellence, fond of Bach and sailing, and is rumored to have taken his yacht outside of U.S. waters so that he could smoke pot while preserving...
Mughniyah also was the mastermind of several other savage hijackings and the taking of Western hostages, including a former colleague, CIA station chief Bill Buckley. All of these attacks were carried out at the behest of Iran...