I couldn't let this post at We Who Are About To Die go by without posting in response my own personal William F. Buckley clip, which might actually be close to my favorite moment in television history (or at least running a close second to Krystle and Alexis in the lily pond.)
"Now listen you queer. Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll sock you in the goddamn face and you'll stay plastered. Let the author of Myra Breckenridge go back to his pornography and stop making any illusions of Nazism."
And we get Glenn Fucking Beck with his Blackboard of Psychosis and the flailing manner of a hyperactive, secretly alcoholic junior high school teacher trying desperately to teach his class that "Math is FUN!"
Look, Buckley was in many ways a repellent human. But he makes the art fags among us understand aspirational conservatism in a way a thousand Sarah Palins in gifted Valentino shantung never can.
And let us not forget Gore Vidal's last word on the matter, which he uttered shortly after W. F. Buckley's death in 2008, when asked by the New York Times: "How did you feel when you heard Buckley had died earlier this year?"
Gore replied: "I thought hell is bound to be a livelier place, as he joins forever those he served in life, applauding their prejudices and fanning their hatred."
By the way, in Gore Vidal's "A Christmas Carol," the holiday pageant I am currently writing with my dear friend, the estimable Peter James Cook, Buckley will be playing the role of Marley to Vidal's Scrooge.