Mr. Roberts’ writings to which you linked are disappointing. I confess that I hadn’t seen those before. His arguments in the second piece seem to derive from a belief that the government is actually competent and its failures of competence need explanation; I never make such an assumption. I have assumed since the day it happened that all of it was proof that the government could not even perform its basic functions properly, so there is never any reason to assume anything sinister. For his part, Dr. Wilson makes two points that are eminently defensible: we don’t know everything about what happened in the attacks (and we don’t) and governments will deceive the public for the sake of power, which is always worth keeping in mind.

Even *if* Rothbard did what Buckley claimed, one mistake does not make an entire lifetime. Buckley’s obsession with this episode may be explained by this:

“Allitt’s discussion of Buckley helps clear up a mystery. In Buckley’s venomous obituary notice of Murray Rothbard, many readers will have found puzzling Buckley’s stress on Khrushchev’s visit to the United States in 1959. Why did Buckley dredge up this minor event of thirty-five years ago? As Allitt makes clear, the struggle against Khrushchev’s visit had the status of a crusade for Buckley and his National Review associates: to them Western Civilization was at stake (pp. 67-70). That Buckley became at the time overwrought is perhaps understandable; what is harder to fathom is that this “venture in triviality” remains for him a major incident in his life so many years later.”

http://www.mises.org/misesreview_detail.aspx?control=80

Here is an alternative account of the dispute:

“Unlike Buckley, who resigned himself to the expansion of the state as a means of countering the Soviet threat, Rothbard insisted that the Russians were not inherently aggressive. Prosecution of the Cold War, Rothbard warned, would magnify the power of the state beyond recognition. When Buckley protested Khrushchev’s 1959 visit, complaining that the general secretary might be sleeping in Lincoln’s bedroom, Rothbard shot back that this accommodation would be ‘more than apt, considering that Mr. K’s deeds in Hungary were precisely equivalent to Mr. Lincoln’s butchery in the South’ (p. 104). For these offenses and others, Buckley anathematized Rothbard.”

http://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?issueID=17&articleID=178

Rockwell writes on this point:

“This accusation circulated in the 1960s and resurfaced in Bill Buckley’s bitter and malevolent obituary of his old nemesis. “Rothbard physically applauded Khrushchev in his limousine as it passed by on the street,” wrote Buckley. Nonsense. What was at issue was Rothbard’s refusal to join the ridiculous National Review campaign to whip up a protest against Khrushchev’s visit to the US (taken, we now know, over the vociferous objections of hard-liners in the Kremlin). Raimondo quotes Rothbard noting that Buckley and Co. are always eager to extend their hand to any other “Bloody Butcher” in the world, including “Winston Churchill, Bloody Butcher of the refugees of Dresden, and countless others.” Rothbard refused to join Buckley’s call for “a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores” to fight the Cold War, and for that, Buckley never forgave him. (A must read: the epilogue skewering Buckley’s obit point by point.)”

And in his own words:

“Yes, yes, Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev is a Bloody Butcher. On the Day of Judgment he will answer for his crimes, and roast a thousand years in hellfire. But there are a lot of Bloody Butchers around; the world reeks with them, is universally run by them, has been run by them, more or less, for many centuries. Lord Acton, the great British libertarian historian, once said that the Muse of the historian is not Clio, but Rhadamanthus, the avenger of innocent blood. I agree. But, in the meanwhile before the millennium arrives, what do we do with these Bloody Butchers? Khrushchev is a Bloody Butcher, but so is Churchill, and DeGaulle, and Franco, and Chiang, and Ky, and countless other “bastions of the free world.” Why did these hypocritical moralists, who not only do not blanch at these people but rush to Shake Their Hand, suddenly balk at Nikita? Certainly, Winston Churchill slaughtered far more men in his lifetime than had Nikita. So did F.D.R. Harry S. Truman, Butcher of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is not far behind. Our task should be: to reduce the annual quantity of butchery as much as possible. How do we do this, we anti-Butchers? By reviling Khrushchev or Kosygin as much as possible, and thereby making a peaceful detente impossible, and nuclear extermination ever closer? Or by seeing to it that peace prevails, and that therefore there is no mass international butchery to worry about? The chief instrument of butchery by state rulers over innocent civilians is war; refrain from war, work for peace, and we shall have done our part in reducing butchery in the world. But, on the other hand, if we send H-bombs and missiles to Moscow as pique for past Muscovite butchery, we thereby add immeasurably to the total amount of butchery in the world.”

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard111.html

Incidentally, Raimondo, who has written a well-received biography of Rothbard, states that the supposed episode of applauding Kruschev never happened:

http://www.takimag.com/blogs#668

Roberts: http://mujca.com/debunking.htm Shorter version: Popular Mechanics must be lying because it is owned by the Hearst Corporation and has a cousin of Michael Chertoff as an editor! (In reality, the two men are distant cousins and have never met, but why let facts stand in the way of a good story?)

Roberts II (actually earlier in date): http://www.vdare.com/roberts/060914_evidence.htm

Wilson (who demurely takes a “Golly Gee, how can we possibly know what happened?” attitude and condescends to the sane an sensible as not being sufficiently distrustful of power): http://www.lewrockwell.com/wilson/wilson26.html

Actually, Ron Paul’s failure to fully and manfully disassociate himself from the 9/11 truthers has dampened my once-ardent enthusiasm for his candidacy. Why does he continue to make appearances on the Alex Jones show? Why did he give a laudatory eulogy at the funeral of a prominent 9/11 truther?

I don’t know enough about Rothbard’s life to judge the truth of Buckley’s statements about him. If he did not really applaud Nikita Khrushchev, Buckley has told a disgusting lie; but if he did, Rothbard himself is beneath contempt. I suppose it is interesting variety to have a paleoconservative hero to be an admire of Nat Turner rather than a neo-Confederate, but I wonder how well that opinion went over at Chronicles.

Raimondo has argued that Israeli intelligence had advance knowledge about the attacks.

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j100402.html

In this article, he recounts news accounts of Israeli espionage in the U.S., and relates accounts that Israeli intelligence knew of some of the hijackers. Some of the news accounts in the article state that they warned U.S. officials. Raimondo pushes the evidence a bit and speculates, but does he commit an “offense against truth”? Not really. Come to think of it, *our* intelligence services did have advance warnings of what was coming, at least in piecemeal form. As we all do know, the warnings were not passed along or acted on expeditiously because of the problems in inter-agency communication and coordination, etc. Intelligence services are in the business of having advance knowledge of things, and to say that such-and-such a state has advance knowledge does not necessarily mean complicity in the event.

If it was such an “offense against truth” to talk about this, then FoxNews is also guilty:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWpWc_suPWo

And http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ci-tkaPrMA4&mode=related&search=

Read Buckley’s obituary of Rothbard and see what you make of it:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/is_n2_v47/ai_16448375

if the choice is really supposed to be between associating with “neo-Luddite” greens who favour decentralisation and secession or going over to the side of godless warmongers for empire, give me some more neo-Luddites and be quick about it!

Oh, definitely, agreed. I agree too with the efforts to find allies on the left. There are more than a few leftists from whom we paleocons can learn. And I do think Hawkins was rather overwrought, bordering on hysterical, much in the manner of nearly everything that goes on Horowitz’s site. I just think that he’s right about Sale’s hostility to nearly everything we as conservatives should wish to conserve, even if he is right about the war. It’s a minor point.

As for the Rothbard-bashing in the piece, I for one am tired of the argument that says traditional conservatives should write off allies because they were on the supposedly “wrong” side of the Vietnam debate, or any Cold War-era dispute, when it seems clear to me that many of the interventions of the Cold War were unnecessary and not in our interest to do. So much of hostility in the piece towards Rothbard is just visceral and unthinking, which is something I think we’ve seen too much of in recent years.

Even granting that Mr. Hawkins has fairly characterised Mr. Sale’s views in his citations (which, given his treatment of others in this article, I tend to doubt), the core of his argument, if I understand him correctly, is that traditional conservatives should live in an intellectual ghetto in which we do not speak or associate with anyone who holds *any* different assumptions about the world, lest we be tainted by their presence. One would certainly want to draw limits somewhere, of course, but if the choice is really supposed to be between associating with “neo-Luddite” greens who favour decentralisation and secession or going over to the side of godless warmongers for empire, give me some more neo-Luddites and be quick about it!

My remark about Loyalists as the root of North American conservatism was a bit imprecise. They were the root of Canadian conservatism, which George Grant believed to have been the only real conservatism in North America, and he has something of a point. In George Grant’s view, American conservatives weren’t really conservatives, and by the standards he was using he was right. If I understand him correctly, he was speaking specifically of a conscious political conservatism of the kind that emerged in Britain and Canada and a conservatism that stressed social solidarity, rather than a conservative mindset and conservative attachment to our constitutional republican system. I admire and respect the Old Whigs, and I can find a lot of common ground with the Old Whigs through the Country tradition of which they were a part. To the extent that the Loyalists were not part of the Country tradition, I would be willing to agree that they are in some sense less conservative. But that is to define conservatism in a peculiarly hybrid Bolingbrokean-Jeffersonian way.

It shouldn’t surprise you all that much. I don’t always agree with everyone or everything they promote, and I don’t see much productive coming from the “tantrums” you describe (though I have been known to go on rants and launch polemics and don’t hold it against someone for arguing passionately for or against something). In any case, I have linked to and supported Antiwar since I started blogging.

The people at Antiwar are a diverse bunch. Some of them are as excitable and a little too selective in their evidence-gathering at times as you say, and others are quite good. Jim Lobe and Ivan Eland, for example, are pretty sober-minded, and William Lind and Leon Hadar are regular contributors there. Hadar offers some of the best foreign policy commentary around. Antiwar Radio brings in a number of excellent, respected people for interviews.

I also disagree the Tories were the real conservatives or its foundation. What of Washington, Adams, Dickenson, and other champions of the restrained Old Whig tradition?