National Review on line is joining in the eulogizing of Nelson Mandela.
This reminds me once more of the differences between mainstream conservatives and the Tea Party. The former are not impervious to facts, and they strive for intellectual consistency.
You would not see mainstream conservatives saying the POTUS should be impeached if he raised the congressional debt ceiling by executive fiat and he should also be impeached if he did not pay the nation's debts.
It was mainstream Republicans who voted with mainstream Democrats to break the Dixiecrat filibuster and pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
I joined in ridiculing William F. Buckley when he took his yacht outside of US territorial waters for the purpose of trying marijuana (and deciding it was no big deal), but he was being consistent in trying to obey the law (he was opposed to civil disobedience) and being relatively open-minded in being willing to toke up.
Founding Editor Buckley would not object to National Review's apologies for being on the wrong side of history in South Africa.
It was also Buckley who read the John Birch Society out of the Republican Party. The Birchers got their funding from the Koch Brothers' daddy and represented exactly the same politics that the Tea Party has come to adopt.
Finally, Buckley valued literacy, and would have sneered where we snicker at the misspelled signs at Tea Party rallies. He was a bit snobbish about his Ivy education, although his first book was a criticism of Yale for insufficient attention to monotheistic, patriarchal desert cults.
I'm not afraid of engaging conservative ideas. I know history is on my side and economics is on my side.
But this Tea Party brand of conservatism that wants to shoot holes in the boat if they can't drive it is something entirely different. I don't see them threatening my political desires as much as threatening the country itself, the ability to get plain vanilla governance tasks done in a timely manner.