Two of Buckley's recent opinions on NRO are illuminating, and disturbing.

First, Buckly writes in his Mar 17 column:

It has become open-and-shut. There are many voters who do not want simply to drop the curtain on Iraq. But the number displaying acquiescence, let alone enthusiasm, for more of the same is approaching zero.

And this:

I think there is a sense in the land that the Iraqi people are not doing their part. It's true that Mr. al-Maliki has several times insisted on sharing the security burden more rigorously. And it is true that the Iraqi people are suffering mortally. The people who get killed every day by those insurgents are here and there an American soldier, an average of three per day. Mostly, though, the people who are getting killed are Iraqis. An estimated 1.8 million Iraqis have left their homes and fled the country, exiled by the war. One cannot count that less than a major sacrifice.

From Buckley's own words it is clear that he recognizes two things - one, the American public is no longer behind the Iraq war, and two, the Iraqi's have paid the far higher price for this Bush adventure. Even if he is loath to point fingers at Bush and conservatism in general, he has read the tea leaves accurately. He ends that piece with the following:

A better formula than that of Sen. McCain is needed. We have our republic — if, as Benjamin Franklincautioned at the close of the Constitutional Convention, we can keep it. The Constitution is a pretty orderly counting-house specifying jurisdictions, privileges and limitations. We have in the past six years fairly thoroughly rung up the presumptive authority of the chief executive to exercise the power of the military

But there comes a time when rearward legions of a republic feel the need to assert their residual dominance, and we're getting very close to the moment when the people, surveying the policy, weighing its prospects, considering its benefits, step forward with their ultimate supremacy — we are a republic. Scorning revolution, they do so gradually, but definitively.

The voters express themselves in manifold ways. Their representatives are taking small steps toward dissociation from the war, but warning of major steps. We have one-half of U.S. senators disposed to say that in their judgment the time is up. The only quarrel now is jurisdictional, not popular. The authority of the republic needs from time to time to be asserted. Not with the consent of everyone, but with the consent of everyone who accepts the rule of the people.

How much clearer can he be? We have counted up Bush's presumptive unitary authority, and found it wanting. Although he lacks the courage to say so bluntly.

Yet 5 days earlier he argues for a pardon for Libby because Libby is a good and smart man - meaning he couldn't have lied - by comparing the Simpson trial to Libby's trial. He finishes up with this:

How will that change? Mr. Libby was free to lie for his country up until his experience with justice at the hands of an inflamed prosecutor. How much will it cost the country to encourage the isolation of the class of governors from the class of inquiring journalists?

On the question, Should Libby be pardoned? surely the answer is yes, since it was wrong in the first place to prosecute him, whose principal crime was to rely on atrophied conventions.

Just how much non-propoganda was passed by anyone in this administration? What happened when real facts were passed to the press? The whole rwnm, including the administration, screamed for the heads of the traitors!! So just how is it going to be worse now?

No. Libby DID lie. There is no comparison between Simpson and Libby - the jury in Simpson's trial essentially found the prosecutors guilty of conspiring to frame a guilty man. Libby's prosecutors did their job, no more, and the jury reached a conclusion supported by the facts presented them. Simpson was found not guilty because he had the best defense team money could buy, and Libby was found guilty in spite of the best defense team money could buy. THAT is a more telling fact than any supposition about Libby's smarts.

Not to mention, anyone working directly for Cheney is in fact and practice a lying sob.

How does Buckley justify, if only to himself, continued support for the individuals in this administration while at the same time arguing that the policies of those individuals is flawed and harmful to the republic? What kind of twisted rationalization does he use? It has to be better than weed, whatever it is.

I have heard it said that the best and brightest are the least likely to learn from experience - too good at self serving rationalization. Buckley is proof.

Jake