You're not being serious about that last statement, are you, Paul?

Buckley jumped the shark early when he chose to defend Joseph McCarthy and the practice named after him.

Hard not to see his death as a metaphor. As the conservative movement chokes itself into a frail old age, it can once again look to Buckley as a role model for a timely demise.

Are you kidding me?

Aren't we currently living in Buckley's sadistic, hellish vision for America? He was BFFs with Reagan, you know.

Speaking of, I'd say Reagan's 15 year decent into Alzheimer's induced madness would be by far the worst way to go, and at least the evil old fascist got what he deserved.

Well, mackro mackro, maybe having my face humped off by an orangutan. How about: "I can't imagine a worse way for him to go out?

Their go my wishes that an asteroid hits him ...

@5: !!! Paul, do you, uh, know of anyone who has died from a fatal facial orangutan hump-off?

OK Seriously. Dying of Alzheimer's or emphezema is horrible, no matter how much you like or dislike the sufferer. For that alone (the latter in this case), I do feel bad for Buckley as I would any human.

Paul, I'm guessing you were referring to the idealogical death that came with this. Now while I never studied Buckley that closely, he was much more of a pushover than Goldwater. I still feel far worse about Goldwater no longer being around than I ever will for Buckley. Wasn't Buckley towing the meddling neo-con line just as of a few days ago? I don't think he died thinking his intellectual heirs were primal pawns, although one never knows.

I do know that he wasn't happy about GWB as president, once the dust from 9/11 settled, and I think that he was terribly unhappy with the Repub presidential prospects for 08. I think that, yes, ideologically, he died a painful death.

Problematic, "dying from Alzeimer's"; the sufferers, as they worsen, don't seem to be aware of their decline, but their caregivers certainly are. So it's as if the people around them are suffering from the dying, too, especially if they're family members. I'm speaking from personal experience, taking care of a declining parent.
Reagan may have not have suffered at all.
Buckley - Glad he's gone, one down, but many of his spawn to go.

Buckley, proponent of the AIDS tattoo -- in 2005

Perhaps rhetorical, but nonetheless excellent fodder for your Huckanauts.

Buckley's physical death: painful and horrifying - I feel bad when anyone dies that way.

Buckley's ideological death: glorious.

Now this is an excuse for a party! Maybe things will turn out all right after all.

@8 - it's harder on the caregivers and the relatives, true.

But it depends on the exact progression of the disease, some people have visual and auditory hallucinations, and some of the other effects are not very fun.

Buckley dying is the signal for the conservatives that they need to go into the wilderness for the next 40 years - and we won't miss them here in America, that's for sure.

Vidal lives! The following from the 1968 Democratic National Convention wherein Buckley calls Vidal a queer in contradiction that Buckley was one of the most epicene commentators ever.

http://www.pitt.edu/~kloman/debates.html

Personally, I will miss being able to read his columns, which I often did just for the language he used (it was vastly superior to that being used by anyone else writing today). It seems fitting that his last column focused in part on Fowler’s Modern English Usage and Buckley's “serious wish that students of the English language would themselves take the initiative of familiarizing themselves with the profundities and niceties of the points being made by Mr. Fowler.” Even if you didn’t agree with what he said, you have to agree that he said it well. That’s something in its self these days. We are rapidly running out of writers, speakers and thinkers who are even remotely aware of, much less interested in or familiar with, the profundities and niceties of the English language. He was one of the last.

History has proved Vidal right Buckley was a crypto-fascist

Who the fuck fucking cares? Please. This is embarrassing.

I always liked listening to Buckley talk.

He got back what he put out.

But only embarrassing if - lacking knowledge - you have nothing to say.

And now he gets to roast in Hell with Jerry Falwell while they wait for Fred Phelps.

@21, when has a lack of knowledge or anything to say stopped Mr. Poe from, nonetheless, posting whatever vacuous thoughts he has?

I still like to believe that Buckley died knowing that the Republican party had fallen so far that either a woman or a black man was a shoe-in to be elected President.

Buckley was ideologically appalling, it is true. But he hated what "conservatism" became: he never had any truck with the neanderthals who speak for "conservatism" today. He was appalled by the Iraq war, for instance; he was never an adventurer. GWB is in that respect the least conservative president we have ever had. Paul's right: Buckley went out knowing that the movement he created had been taken over by baboons.

Though of course I disagreed with him about nearly everything, I always thought Buckley was one of the most erudite and eloquent people I've ever heard/read. He must have cringed to listen to our chimp-in-chief mangle the English language.

@23

No shit.

I've noticed two things about ideology since about, say, the 1960s (though maybe throughout all of human history).

One is that, as time goes on, old conservatism starts to look rational, sensible, and even downright humanitarian compared to new conservatism.

The other is that old liberalism becomes unarguable common sense.

Here's the TNR article by Johann Hari about the National Review cruise where Norman Podhoretz screamed at Buckley because Buckley's kind of conservatism isn't eager to start more wars:

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=0d96c2b6-3723-4560-a3c0-fcccce2891f2

you people are scumbag liberal facists Long live Bill Buckley!

If Bill Buckley stood for anything, it was proper punctuation and capitalization, "steve" darling.

Just so your educated, Fascism is an invention of the LEFT and calling WFB a crypto fascist is like calling a horse a pig. But you pigs are free to keep squealing until McCains win the Presidency.

Jean @ 32, kind of a weak troll, with the intentional misspellings a particularly glaring over-reach. I give it a three out of ten; but keep trying, you're cute.

Bill Buckley - the Marie Antoinette of American politics - as opined by Mario Puzo back in 1968:

http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/07/16/specials/buckley-eye.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

I couldn't have been more opposed to his philosophies, but he was an oddly compelling TV personality.

I wonder how much good his money is doing him in Hades right now?

Although I appreciate Buckley's tone over the bloviation that typically comes with a conservative point of view, I will always remember him as an early proponent of regrettable notion that the war on terrorism should lead to Baghdad. He happily conflated Bin Laden and Hussein.

That kind of deceipt is low, and I don't think he gets a "Go Straight To Heaven" card for his role in the debacle.

a pure shit head. thanks god, for his death.

It's too bad poor old Emmett Watson is dead...he missed one last time to trot out the well-worn legend of how lefty UW history professor Giovanni Costigan kicked Buckley's ass in a debate about Vietnam.

In the past twelve hours we've been talking about him, William F. Buckley has grown twelve hours deader.

Here's to you Bill Buckley, may you grow even deader, moment by moment, until at last you are indistinguishable from dust!