'He Was Out to Get Me From the Very Beginning'

The only thing worse than a bitter old man is a paranoid bitter old man.

Less loving is Gore Vidal, who can't drop his decades-long feud even now that Buckley is dead. "He was out to get me from the very beginning," Vidal told VF.

"He wanted me to write for his little magazine. I spurned him, and he didn't like that. Bear in mind that this was a very stupid guy who never read any of those books he referred to and that Americans, being such hicks, thought he was a great nobleman and a real gentleman. I never heard such trash as when he cooled it."

Classy.

RIP, William F. Buckley

A giant in the conservative movement has passed away.

Via (where else?) but The Corner.

I’m devastated to report that our dear friend, mentor, leader, and founder William F. Buckley Jr., died overnight in his study in Stamford, Connecticut.
After year of illness, he died while at work; if he had been given a choice on how to depart this world, I suspect that would have been exactly it. At home, still devoted to the war of ideas.

Buckley was an intellectual titan and will be greatly missed.

Hot Air is already firing up the videos.

Update: LGF notes the Huffington Post, in a rare bout of sanity, has closed off comments.

Assorted reaction via Memeorandum.

Don Surber: God needed some intelligent conversation.

Naturally, the KosKids are gleeful (h/t SecretInternetDoucheBag).

Considering what Buckley meant to conservatives, I tried to think of pioneers of today's liberal movement: A regular pantheon of allstars.

Goracle's Global Goofiness

Let's hope a lot more guys like Bob Murray step forward and tell it like it is.

"Some wealthy elitists in our country," he told the audience, "who cannot tell fact from fiction, can afford an Olympian detachment from the impacts of draconian climate change policy. For them, the jobs and dreams destroyed as a result will be nothing more than statistics and the cares of other people. These consequences are abstractions to them, but they are not to me, as I can name many of the thousands of the American citizens whose lives will be destroyed by these elitists' ill-conceived ‘global goofiness' campaigns."

William F. Buckley calls this nonsense an inquisition.

The whole business is eerily religious in feel. Back in the 15th century, the question was: Do you believe in Christ? It was required in Spain by the Inquisition that the answer should be affirmative, leaving to one side subsidiary specifications.

It is required today to believe that carbon-dioxide emissions threaten the basic ecological balance. The assumption then is that inasmuch as a large proportion of the damage is man-made, man-made solutions are necessary. But it is easy to see, right away, that there is a problem in devising appropriate solutions, and in allocating responsibility for them.

To speak in very general terms, the United States is easily the principal offender, given the size of our country and the intensity of our use of fossil-fuel energy. But even accepting the high per-capita rate of consumption in the United States, we face the terrible inadequacy of ameliorative resources. If the United States were (we are dealing in hypotheses) to eliminate the use of oil or gas for power, would that forfeiture be decisive?

Well, no. It would produce about 23 percent global relief, and at a devastating cost to our economy.

Read the rest of both.

We need more free speech and less eco-babble.