No tears here.

Well, maybe a few for the sad spectacle of the hagiographies issuing from so many progressive voices on the occasion of William F. Buckley's death. Jane Hamsher, for instance, "hazily" remembers the fabled Buckley-Vidal debate of '68 as "charged and relevant." It might have seemed so to a 9 year old, but I was 17 and anticipating the draft or enlistment during a shooting war, so I was paying pretty close attention. It's not by accident that the most memorable exchange of two of the most putatively erudite commentators of their generation were ad hominem attacks. While "Nazi" and "queer" were certainly "charged" enough, their relevance, or their relative superiority to contemporary discourse, eludes me. (Not that Buckley couldn't change with the times. By 1985 his judgment of Vidal had made the shift from "queer" to "fag.")

Ad hominem arguments, of course, were standard practice for Buckley. Even his "friend," Rick Perlstein, admits that "...William F. Buckley said and did many things over the course of his career that were disgusting." Still, Perlstein submits, "He was a good and decent man." This, of course, begs the question of just how many disgusting things one may say and do as a matter of vocation without eroding one's decency. The answer, I suspect, is somewhat less than the total to which Buckley is entitled.

(Perlstein's friendship with Buckley began when "I sat with him for a good half hour in National Review's offices on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan, " writes Perlstein "and he answered every damned question I asked, in searching detail, and then answered a few I hadn't even asked." This, of course, gives rise to the question of just how many questions can be answered in "searching detail" in thirty minutes, no matter how gracious the interviewee might prove to be.)

Jesse Wendel makes a fair point...

No matter how strongly anyone believes their beliefs to be "the truth," any hope for true change, for genuine reconciliation between red and blue America, does not start with attacking the memory of a man who has just died.

He takes a step too far, though, when he invokes the memory of Steve Gilliard in defense of Buckley...

With the exception of the Freepers and a few genuinely disgusting people, friends and enemies alike came together to acknowledge Steve Gilliard as a liberal lion. Let people be as unstinting in their praise of William Buckley as people were in their praise of Steven Gilliard.

I'm sorry, but I'm simply unaware of Steve Gilliard writing in defense off, for instance, white racial supremacy, political witch hunts or sundry fascist regimes. On those points alone, the comparison simply fails. On this...

I didn't agree with William F. Buckley's politics, but I admired his spirit. He was a genuine conservative, a person unafraid to disagree with you politically, without needing to attack you personally, threaten your family, or resort to name-calling or insults.

Well, Jesse's simply wrong. Personal attacks, name-calling and insults - delivered, admittedly, with a certain personal flair and an expansive vocabulary - were among the primary tools of Buckley's trade.

William F. Buckley was a racist, a tireless class warrior on behalf of entrenched wealth and, if not a "crypto Nazi," as Vidal claimed, a man with a soft spot for the kind of right wing militarism typically thought of as fascist.

Those are not the qualities of a good and decent man, and I shed not a tear at his passing.