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-ces pas?
Gore Vidal was being an insufferable ahole at the time, in the way only he can be, when he wants to. Anyway, Buckley was terrible and insensitive on Civil Rights (he once said black African nations deserved independence when they stopped being cannibals), and thought property rights trumped the basic civil liberties of black Americans. But he was good about helping to exorcise Jew hating out of the American intellectual conservative lexicon. But yes, he was intellectually lazy, although I did enjoy his vocabulary, and learned a lot of words from him, like eristic and sciolistic.
Buckley died a very unhappy and lonely man, and longed for death. I think he became disillusioned with his faith, and with the direction American conservatism was taking. He opposed Dubya's invasion of Iraq.
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