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SicEmBaylor
10/14/2008, 04:14 PM
In case you don't know, Chris Buckley is the son of William F. Buckley. If you don't know who William F. Buckley is then you need to skip the political threads and head to the Alien thread instead.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2008-10-10/the-conservative-case-for-obama


Let me be the latest conservative/libertarian/whatever to leap onto the Barack Obama bandwagon. It’s a good thing my dear old mum and pup are no longer alive. They’d cut off my allowance.
Or would they? But let’s get that part out of the way. The only reason my vote would be of any interest to anyone is that my last name happens to be Buckley—a name I inherited. So in the event anyone notices or cares, the headline will be: “William F. Buckley’s Son Says He Is Pro-Obama.” I know, I know: It lacks the throw-weight of “Ron Reagan Jr. to Address Democratic Convention,” but it’ll have to do.
_____

I am—drum roll, please, cue trumpets—making this announcement in the cyberpages of The Daily Beast (what joy to be writing for a publication so named!) rather than in the pages of National Review, where I write the back-page column. For a reason: My colleague, the superb and very dishy Kathleen Parker, recently wrote in National Review Online a column stating what John Cleese as Basil Fawlty would call “the bleeding obvious”: namely, that Sarah Palin is an embarrassment, and a dangerous one at that. She’s not exactly alone. New York Times columnist David Brooks, who began his career at NR, just called Governor Palin “a cancer on the Republican Party.”
As for Kathleen, she has to date received 12,000 (quite literally) foam-at-the-mouth hate-emails. One correspondent, if that’s quite the right word, suggested that Kathleen’s mother should have aborted her and tossed the fetus into a Dumpster. There’s Socratic dialogue for you. Dear Pup once said to me sighfully after a right-winger who fancied himself a WFB protégé had said something transcendently and provocatively cretinous, “You know, I’ve spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks.” Well, the dear man did his best. At any rate, I don’t have the kidney at the moment for 12,000 emails saying how good it is he’s no longer alive to see his Judas of a son endorse for the presidency a covert Muslim who pals around with the Weather Underground. So, you’re reading it here first.
As to the particulars, assuming anyone gives a fig, here goes:
I have known John McCain personally since 1982. I wrote a well-received speech for him. Earlier this year, I wrote in The New York Times—I’m beginning to sound like Paul Krugman, who cannot begin a column without saying, “As I warned the world in my last column...”—a highly favorable Op-Ed about McCain, taking Rush Limbaugh and the others in the Right Wing Sanhedrin to task for going after McCain for being insufficiently conservative. I don’t—still—doubt that McCain’s instincts remain fundamentally conservative. But the problem is otherwise.
McCain rose to power on his personality and biography. He was authentic. He spoke truth to power. He told the media they were “jerks” (a sure sign of authenticity, to say nothing of good taste; we are jerks). He was real. He was unconventional. He embraced former anti-war leaders. He brought resolution to the awful missing-POW business. He brought about normalization with Vietnam—his former torturers! Yes, he erred in accepting plane rides and vacations from Charles Keating, but then, having been cleared on technicalities, groveled in apology before the nation. He told me across a lunch table, “The Keating business was much worse than my five and a half years in Hanoi, because I at least walked away from that with my honor.” Your heart went out to the guy. I thought at the time, God, this guy should be president someday.
A year ago, when everyone, including the man I’m about to endorse, was caterwauling to get out of Iraq on the next available flight, John McCain, practically alone, said no, no—bad move. Surge. It seemed a suicidal position to take, an act of political bravery of the kind you don’t see a whole lot of anymore.
But that was—sigh—then. John McCain has changed. He said, famously, apropos the Republican debacle post-1994, “We came to Washington to change it, and Washington changed us.” This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget “by the end of my first term.” Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?
All this is genuinely saddening, and for the country is perhaps even tragic, for America ought, really, to be governed by men like John McCain—who have spent their entire lives in its service, even willing to give the last full measure of their devotion to it. If he goes out losing ugly, it will be beyond tragic, graffiti on a marble bust.
As for Senator Obama: He has exhibited throughout a “first-class temperament,” pace Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s famous comment about FDR. As for his intellect, well, he’s a Harvard man, though that’s sure as heck no guarantee of anything, these days. Vietnam was brought to you by Harvard and (one or two) Yale men. As for our current adventure in Mesopotamia, consider this lustrous alumni roster. Bush 43: Yale. Rumsfeld: Princeton. Paul Bremer: Yale and Harvard. What do they all have in common? Andover! The best and the brightest.
I’ve read Obama’s books, and they are first-rate. He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books. Imagine. He is also a lefty. I am not. I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets. On abortion, gay marriage, et al, I’m libertarian. I believe with my sage and epigrammatic friend P.J. O’Rourke that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.
But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren’t going to get us out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves. If he raises taxes and throws up tariff walls and opens the coffers of the DNC to bribe-money from the special interest groups against whom he has (somewhat disingenuously) railed during the campaign trail, then he will almost certainly reap a whirlwind that will make Katrina look like a balmy summer zephyr.
Obama has in him—I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy “We are the people we have been waiting for” silly rhetoric—the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for.
So, I wish him all the best. We are all in this together. Necessity is the mother of bipartisanship. And so, for the first time in my life, I’ll be pulling the Democratic lever in November. As the saying goes, God save the United States of America.

Forgive the formatting, I'm too lazy to fix the copy/paste.

SoonerInKCMO
10/14/2008, 04:25 PM
I don't know if I can agree with that guy. I mean, Kathleen Parker "dishy"? Maybe if you're looking at an extremely soft-focused picture from 10 years ago.

SicEmBaylor
10/14/2008, 04:27 PM
I don't know if I can agree with that guy. I mean, Kathleen Parker "dishy"? Maybe if you're looking at an extremely soft-focused picture from 10 years ago.

Heh. I know, right?

GrapevineSooner
10/14/2008, 04:28 PM
I suspect there's plenty of other fiscal conservatives/true libertarians that feel the same way.

And I'll admit that deep in my political soul, I wouldn't regard an Obama win to be the worst thing to happen to the GOP or Conservatism in general.

SicEmBaylor
10/14/2008, 04:29 PM
I suspect there's plenty of other fiscal conservatives/true libertarians that feel the same way.
I'm exactly that sort and agree to a point. I'm voting for Barr but I heartily concur with your next statement.


And I'll admit that deep in my political soul, I wouldn't regard an Obama win to be the worst thing to happen to the GOP or Conservatism in general.

Yep.

NYC Poke
10/14/2008, 04:30 PM
And the fallout:


October 14, 2008, 2:16 pm
Buckley’s Son Leaves National Review
By Patricia Cohen

Christopher Buckley, the author and son of the late conservative mainstay William F. Buckley, said in a telephone interview that he has resigned from the National Review, the political journal his father founded in 1955.

Mr. Buckley said he had “been effectively fatwahed by the conservative movement” after endorsing Barack Obama in a blog posting on TheDailyBeast.com; since then, he said he has been blanketed with hate mail at the blog and at the National Review, where he has written a column.

As a result, he wrote to Richard Lowry, the editor of the National Review, and its publisher, Jack Fowler, offering to resign, and “this offer was rather briskly accepted,” Mr. Buckley said.

Mr. Buckley said he did not understand the sense of betrayal that some of his conservative colleagues felt, but said that the fury and ugly comments his endorsement generated is “part of the calcification of modern discourse. It’s so angry.” Paraphrasing Ronald Reagan’s quote about the Democrats, Mr. Buckley added, “I haven’t left the Republican Party. It left me.”

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/14/buckleys-son-leaves-national-review/

Viking Kitten
10/14/2008, 04:30 PM
Politics aside, his Brit-wannabe writing style is super annoying. He's like the Madonna of the written word.

Frozen Sooner
10/14/2008, 04:32 PM
Cristopher Hitchens has endorsed Obama as well, FWIW.

NYC Poke
10/14/2008, 04:32 PM
Thank You For Smoking was funny, though.

SicEmBaylor
10/14/2008, 04:34 PM
Politics aside, his Brit-wannabe writing style is super annoying. He's like the Madonna of the written word.

I love it. That's why I loved reading and listening to his father.

LosAngelesSooner
10/14/2008, 04:37 PM
This kind of lock-step blind loyalty that's taken hold of the party is exactly what's been driving it into the ground. It's pathetic.

Viking Kitten
10/14/2008, 04:37 PM
I love it. That's why I loved reading and listening to his father.
But see, it's pretentious and gay.

AlbqSooner
10/14/2008, 04:46 PM
Politics aside, his Brit-wannabe writing style is super annoying. He's like the Madonna of the written word.

He comes by it honestly. His father both wrote AND spoke in that fashion.

Although I pray it doesn't happen, it almost seems that an Obama presidency might be the best thing to happen to the Republican party. Give them a reason to return to the values of the GOP of years gone by and unite them in the future. Also, swell the ranks of their membership once the people see how a Democratic party in charge of all of government works out.

royalfan5
10/14/2008, 04:55 PM
I bet he regrets getting his **** off tattoo removed now. It could have been useful in this situation.

LosAngelesSooner
10/14/2008, 04:56 PM
Although I pray it doesn't happen, it almost seems that another Bush presidency might be the best thing to happen to the Democratic party. Give them a reason to return to the values of the Democratic Party of years gone by and unite them in the future. Also, swell the ranks of their membership once the people see how a Republican party in charge of all of government works out.Fixed to show you what so many Democrats were saying a short 4 years ago.

Just for gut wrenching perspective.

AlbqSooner
10/14/2008, 05:00 PM
Fixed to show you what so many Democrats were saying a short 4 years ago.

Just for gut wrenching perspective.

Have you ever had an original thought?

LosAngelesSooner
10/14/2008, 05:03 PM
Have you ever had an original thought?I hit a little too close to home, eh?

soonerscuba
10/14/2008, 05:08 PM
Boomsday was unadulterated, pure awesome satire. Chris Buckley isn't his father, but he is very talented within his own ventures. Good on him.

royalfan5
10/14/2008, 05:13 PM
Boomsday was unadulterated, pure awesome satire. Chris Buckley isn't his father, but he is very talented within his own ventures. Good on him.

Boomsday is pretty awesome. Florence of Arabia is pretty decent too.

Frozen Sooner
10/14/2008, 08:58 PM
I love it. That's why I loved reading and listening to his father.


But see, it's pretentious and gay.

[William Buckley]You realize to whom you addressed this bon mot, yes?[/William Buckley]