No room for thinking here

NRO: More Buckley than Buckley

The National Review accepted the resignation of columnist Christopher Buckley last week, shortly after the humorist and editor — son of the conservative biweekly’s late founder, William F. Buckley Jr. — endorsed Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, Mr. Buckley said Tuesday.

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Some readers were outraged by the apostasy. So Mr. Buckley offered his resignation, and Editor Rich Lowry and Publisher Jack Fowler immediately accepted.

"I think they wanted to put as much daylight between Christopher Buckley and themselves as they could," Mr. Buckley said Tuesday, after publishing news of his resignation on The Daily Beast. "It’s an odd situation, when the founder’s son has suddenly become the turd in the punch bowl."

Mr. Lowry didn’t return calls for comment, but he posted a statement on the magazine’s Web site implying that Mr. Buckley was grandstanding — that he was merely a temporary fill-in as columnist and that the volume of mail from National Review readers angry at Mr. Buckley’s endorsement was far less than the "tsunami" Mr. Buckley had suggested.

Mr. Buckley didn’t return calls for comment after Mr. Lowry posted that statement.

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"We seem to be living in a time of arteriosclerotic orthodoxy," Mr. Buckley said. "A lot of the fun has gone out of it. I mean, gee whiz."

Gee whiz, indeed.

This is what Mr. Lowry has to say about the situation:

Over the weekend, Chris wrote us a jaunty e-mail with the subject line ‘A Sincere Offer,’ in which he offered to resign his column on NR’s back page and said that if we accepted, there ‘would be no hard feelings, only warmest regards and understanding.’ We took the offer sincerely. Chris had done us the favor of writing the column beginning seven issues ago on a ‘trial basis’ (his words), while our regular back-page columnist, Mark Steyn, was on hiatus. Now, Mark is back to writing again, and—I’m delighted to say—will be on NR’s back-page in the new issue.

Lest we forget, some of the National Review’s readership had issues with Buckley Senior when he was still with us

"Aren’t you embarrassed by the absence of these weapons?" Buckley snaps at Podhoretz. He has just explained that he supported the war reluctantly, because Dick Cheney convinced him Saddam Hussein had WMD primed to be fired. "No," Podhoretz replies. "As I say, they were shipped to Syria. During Gulf war one, the entire Iraqi air force was hidden in the deserts in Iran." He says he is "heartbroken" by this "rise of defeatism on the right." He adds, apropos of nothing, "There was nobody better than Don Rumsfeld. This defeatist talk only contributes to the impression we are losing, when I think we’re winning."

The audience cheers Podhoretz. The nuanced doubts of Bill Buckley leave them confused. Doesn’t he sound like the liberal media? Later, over dinner, a tablemate from Denver calls Buckley "a coward." His wife nods and says, "Buckley’s an old man," tapping her head with her finger to suggest dementia.

Buckley fils seems to be controlling his dismay

Mr. Buckley said he had “been effectively fatwahed by the conservative movement” after endorsing Barack Obama in a blog posting on TheDailyBeast.com; since then, he said he has been blanketed with hate mail at the blog and at the National Review, where he has written a column.

As a result, he wrote to Richard Lowry, the editor of the National Review, and its publisher, Jack Fowler, offering to resign, and “this offer was rather briskly accepted,” Mr. Buckley said.

Mr. Buckley said he did not understand the sense of betrayal that some of his conservative colleagues felt, but said that the fury and ugly comments his endorsement generated is “part of
the calcification of modern discourse. It’s so angry.” Paraphrasing Ronald Reagan’s quote about the Democrats, Mr. Buckley added, “I haven’t left the Republican Party. It left me.”