Buckley's Rancid Career
Dennis Perrin
Huffington Post
"Oh Bill, you're so extraordinary."
So quipped Gore Vidal, after being told by William F. Buckley, Jr. that if he didn't stop calling the effete reactionary a crypto-Nazi, the "queer" would get socked "in the goddamned face." Vidal's response was lost in the din caused by ABC news anchor Howard K. Smith trying to restore what decorum existed, but it illustrated how little Vidal thought of Buckley.
"A right wing clown act," he said in a 1969 Playboy interview. Despite many of his own faults, Vidal absolutely nailed Buckley's public essence. A right wing clown act, indeed.
Vidal later complained about how his name was always linked to Buckley, whose family he described as "the sick Kennedys," but Gore has no one but himself to blame for that. He willingly appeared alongside Buckley on ABC during the 1968 Republican and Democratic conventions, providing, if not sustained intellectual discourse, then certainly entertaining TV, decades before flinging physical threats and nasty putdowns became a permanent feature of the medium.
WFB was a reactionary that elite liberals loved. The New York Times' multimedia tribute to him is not surprising, glossing over Buckley's less attractive stances in his long public career. But that was Buckley's true talent: making reprehensible opinions palatable to liberal tastes. He was much smoother than Ann Coulter, but not that different in ideological outlook. Coulter crashes into rooms, yelling, spitting bile in all directions. WFB slid in almost silently, his bouncing eyebrows the sole evidence of his presence -- until he spoke, that is -- and even then, bullshit oozed from his mouth in polysyllabic strips, with liberals like John Kenneth Galbraith and Murray Kempton eagerly lapping up his crap.
(The film clips are here.)
Huffington Post
"Oh Bill, you're so extraordinary."
So quipped Gore Vidal, after being told by William F. Buckley, Jr. that if he didn't stop calling the effete reactionary a crypto-Nazi, the "queer" would get socked "in the goddamned face." Vidal's response was lost in the din caused by ABC news anchor Howard K. Smith trying to restore what decorum existed, but it illustrated how little Vidal thought of Buckley.
"A right wing clown act," he said in a 1969 Playboy interview. Despite many of his own faults, Vidal absolutely nailed Buckley's public essence. A right wing clown act, indeed.
Vidal later complained about how his name was always linked to Buckley, whose family he described as "the sick Kennedys," but Gore has no one but himself to blame for that. He willingly appeared alongside Buckley on ABC during the 1968 Republican and Democratic conventions, providing, if not sustained intellectual discourse, then certainly entertaining TV, decades before flinging physical threats and nasty putdowns became a permanent feature of the medium.
WFB was a reactionary that elite liberals loved. The New York Times' multimedia tribute to him is not surprising, glossing over Buckley's less attractive stances in his long public career. But that was Buckley's true talent: making reprehensible opinions palatable to liberal tastes. He was much smoother than Ann Coulter, but not that different in ideological outlook. Coulter crashes into rooms, yelling, spitting bile in all directions. WFB slid in almost silently, his bouncing eyebrows the sole evidence of his presence -- until he spoke, that is -- and even then, bullshit oozed from his mouth in polysyllabic strips, with liberals like John Kenneth Galbraith and Murray Kempton eagerly lapping up his crap.
(The film clips are here.)
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