Christopher Buckley, the son of National Review founder William F. Buckley, endorsed Barack Obama on Friday:

Let me be the latest conservative/libertarian/whatever to leap onto the Barack Obama bandwagon. It’s a good thing my dear old mum and pup are no longer alive. They’d cut off my allowance.

Or would they?*

Here’s why he wrote this for Tina Brown’s online startup rather than share with the discerning readers of NRO:

I am—drum roll, please, cue trumpets—making this announcement in the cyberpages of The Daily Beast (what joy to be writing for a publication so named!) rather than in the pages of National Review, where I write the back-page column. My colleague, the superb and very dishy Kathleen Parker, recently wrote in National Review Online a column stating what John Cleese as Basil Fawlty would call “the bleeding obvious”: namely, that Sarah Palin is an embarrassment, and a dangerous one at that. She’s not exactly alone. New York Times columnist David Brooks, who began his career at NR, just called Governor Palin “a cancer on the Republican Party.”

As for Kathleen, she has to date received 12,000 (quite literally) foam-at-the-mouth hate-emails. One correspondent, if that’s quite the right word, suggested that Kathleen’s mother should have aborted her and tossed the fetus into a Dumpster…

At any rate, I don’t have the kidney at the moment for 12,000 emails saying how good it is he’s no longer alive to see his Judas of a son endorse for the presidency a covert Muslim who pals around with the Weather Underground. 

Judging, though, by the comments at the Daily Beast (to give you the flavor of them, here’s a bit of the first)

How liberating. Both the parents dead. The inheritance securely probated. Finally. The chance to show one’s bona fides around the Manhattan salons.  

and what Wonkette found at das frei republik

  • What a sad testament to his parents. He obviously didn’t really even know them or what they stood for.
  • The apple sometimes falls far from the tree then rolls away.
  • Or the best parts was left as a stain on the bedsheet……………
  • Christopher Buckley… you will regret your action.
  • Chris, come out of the closet already.
  • Follow the link and check out the photo of this peter-puffing little fruitcake. I think he has homo-erotic thoughts about Obama. I KNOW he does.
  • I didn’t realize William F. had a gay son.

He’s going to get those e-mails anyway. Well, at least they won’t burden the National Review servers. After all, Buckley is on the Board of Trustees of his father’s iconic conservative magazine. He has to watch out for that sort of thing.

If you’re interested in hearing more about his reasons, he discusses them (as well as why he refused to vote for GWB in ‘04) here.

—–

*Probably not. This is what Buckley pere had to say about the president John McCain voted with 90% of the time

"I think Mr. Bush faces a singular problem best defined, I think, as the absence of effective conservative ideology — with the result that he ended up being very extravagant in domestic spending, extremely tolerant of excesses by Congress," Buckley says. "And in respect of foreign policy, incapable of bringing together such forces as apparently were necessary to conclude the Iraq challenge."

Of those few small spaces where Senator McCain acted like a maverick, let’s just say that the Supreme Court case which established campaign money as a form of constitutionally-protected free speech was called Buckley (his brother James) v. Valeo.

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