Personally, Buckley was a mean-spirited and self-absorbed man. Politically, he was a blight on conservatism.
His attempted character assassination of Pat Buchanan and his vicious obituary of Murray Rothbard are particularly unforgivable.
Are you freaking kidding me? His calling out Pat Buchanan for the racist anti-Semite spade that he really is was probably the one decent thing he did over his long career.
Otherwise, yeah easy HP is easy HP.
Came here to say that. Well, that and disowning the Birchers, but kind of the same thing.
Otherwise, his coasting on a thesaurus and high-class accent as markers of intellectual gravitas, while threatening
actual violence against Gore Vidal in response to being bested in the ring of ideas... revealing how that behavior gets held up as an exemplar of American conservatism,
n'est-ce pas?