Sorry Chris Buckley...Your Dad Would Hurl

Chris Buckley, son of the late Wiliam F. Buckley, the founder of the National Review wrote a column in something called the Daily Beast entitled `Sorry, Dad, I'm voting for Obama'.

Buckley's reasons, neatly summarized, go something like this; Sarah Palin is a redneck yahoo breeder who represents a kook fringe in America, and John McCain is a nice guy but he was ape poopy to pick her as his vice president:

"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.” {...}

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.(...)

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?"

He then goes on to refer to Obama as having first class temperament and intellect.

Let me make this as plain as possible. Buckley's entitled to vote for anyone he pleases. And as a matter of fact, I agree with his characterization of McCain as making some unrealistic promises - the word pander comes to mind - and changing his positions in an unseemly way...but is he seriously trying to suggest that Obama hasn't been guilty of the same things, only more so? And to underline Buckley's intellectual dishonesty, he as much as admits that in the last part of his piece.

Nah...for Buckley, it's all about Sarah Palin.

I expect Chris Buckley doesn't remember this, since he was probably quite young or perhaps merely a future event at the time, but Bill Buckley's chief achievement in 'separating the Right from kooks', as he puts it, was to drum racists and Jew haters out of the conservative movement and to marginalize them. William F. Buckley acknowledged that goal on a number of occasions, and had the courage to make it happen. That's an historical part of what the National Review was all about, back at its' beginnings.

And yet, Chris Buckley is proud to endorse a man who sat in a racist and anti-Semitic church for two decades without saying a word, who's hero was the arch anti-Semite Malcolm X,who participated in the Nation of Islam's Million Man march and said nothing while Louis Farakhan demonized Jews from the stage? Somebody with long standing connections to the Nation of Islam and the Saudis?

And he has the nerve to accuse Sarah Palin of being part of the 'kook fringe?'

My, my. Such sloppy, biased thinking.

Mr. Buckley, your late father would be embarrassed for you.I know I am.