BUCKLEY SAYS PINOCHET SHOULD HAVE BEEN TURNED OVER TO LEFTISTS | 2000-04-22
On April 8, in "Respectable Conservatives Line Up Against Flag," I showed how respectable conservatives earn their "respectable" title by knifing other rightists in the back. My specific example was NATIONAL REVIEW, which is answering liberal cries to help them against our Confederate flag in South Carolina.
William Buckley, who owns NATIONAL REVIEW, might be called the founder of modern respectable conservatism.
The publisher of NATIONAL REVIEW, William Rusher, did the Foreword to my first book, A Plague on Both Your Houses. In that Foreword he had to separate himself from my nasty remarks about Buckley. Since then, Buckley has continued to earn my attacks and liberal applause.
Buckley's latest offering was one of his daily columns reprinted in the April 3 edition of his magazine. In it he says that Chile's Pinochet should have been arrested while in England and sent for trial to Spain (Please see November 13, 1999, "Another European Government Kidnaps a Foreign Rightist" for background).
Buckley freely admits that no leftist, specifically no Castro or Gorbachev or the like would ever be tried in this way for any crimes, no matter how extreme.
Buckley freely admits that the only reason Pinochet was singled out was because he was a rightist who pushed the Communist government out of Chile. If it had been the other way around, Buckley admits, there would be no question of a trial, much less of extradition. To her credit, Margaret Thatcher backed Pinochet while he was in Britain and raised Cain about the British government's attempt to extradite him to Spain, saying it was "an act worthy of a totalitarian state."
But Buckley, as a respectable conservative, says Spanish leftists should have been allowed to try Pinochet. Buckley is right in there with the leftists demanding that rightists they don't approve of should be tried.
This is a typical respectable conservative performance. He states that the left is doing this, and that they would never do it to a leftist. So far, so good, he sounds like a conservative. But in the end, he comes down on the side of the leftist, with the knife stuck firmly in the back of the rightist. That is what respectable conservatives routinely do. Their bottom line is what the leftists want. When you need them most, they're on the other side.