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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Knighty Tin who wrote (111819)	2/29/2008 7:16:47 PM
From: Knighty Tin	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 132070

William F. Buckley died yesterday. He was a right winger and I sometimes felt like wringing his neck. But he was clever, often funny, and his first novels were pretty good. The one that won all the awards, "Stained Glass", was boring, but "Saving The Queen" and "See You Later, Alligator," about Che Guevara, were great beach reading. WFB was the closest American Conservatives have had to an intellectual. He was a great debater. I saw him debate with and defeat some people who were much more correct, but not nearly as sure of their facts as Buckley was of his (twisted and warped though they were). The only time I saw him crushed in a debate was against the late socialist, Michael Harrington. Oddly enough, both Harrington and Buckley had attended Yale and both had been devout Catholics, though Harrington later became an atheist. Buckley's on air sparring with Gore Vidal also sparked a lot of controversy, especially when he called Vidal a "faggot" during prime time. That usually loses you some points is a scored debate. <G> He published "The National Review," which became semi-respectable after some rancid decades. To his credit, he did fire Ann Coulter as a writer and has hired some reporters who are not knuckle draggers. Not enough, but some. Firing Line was a great PBS show. I used to love watching Buckley take notes on his yellow pad, then, 10, 20, 30 or 40 minutes later, flipping through the notes to catch a guest in a lie or a misstatement. Professors who taught him must have hated him. I've never known any profs who enjoyed being corrected. <G> Yes, he was a skull and bones military/industrial complexer and an opponent of every step forward America made in the second half of the 20th Century. But he seemed to be having fun and his friends tended to be left wingers who also liked to have fun. And the right is going to have a problem finding another witty, sophisticated spokesman. Today's model are blowholes like Limbaugh and Hannity, not thinkers like Buckley.