Some Things You Blog Just for the Buckley Quotes

From a WSJ interview with William F. Buckley (subscription required, I think):

“My view is unorthodox,” Mr. Buckley says of the violence roiling the French suburbs. “It seems to me that a very hard dose of market discipline would distract the attention of the young revolutionaries from their frolics, traditional and otherwise, and my sense is that if they had to worry about how to eat, and buy food, they would stop screwing around and face reality. If these people didn’t wake up in the morning thinking about what cars to burn — instead of work — they might not be having these problems.”

A few more on George Bush’s conservatism and the future of conservatism, below the fold:

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On the war in Iraq:

“Conservatism,” he says, “except when it is expressed as pure idealism, takes into account reality, and the reality of the situation is that missions abroad to effect regime change in countries without a bill of rights or democratic tradition are terribly arduous. This isn’t to say that the war is wrong, or that history will judge it to be wrong. But it is absolutely to say that conservatism implies a certain submission to reality; and this war has an unrealistic frank and is being conscripted by events.”

On George Bush’s conservatism:

“Bush is conservative, but he is not a conservative.” The distinction is not unimportant; it suggests a way of approaching the world with a conservative disposition but having devoted no particularly methodical thought to the subject — perhaps a bit too in thrall to the formalisms of Republican discourse. “There’s a certain” — Mr. Buckley pauses mischievously — “wholesomeness to the Republican Party.”