Through the Looking Glass II

Christopher Buckley son of the founder of the National Review, William F. Buckley Jr., apologizes to his father's memory and then jumps into the tank with us. In an endorsement on Tina Brown's newly launched Daily Beast, Buckley says, "As for Senator Obama: He has exhibited throughout a "first-class temperament," pace Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.'s famous comment about FDR...I've read Obama's books, and they are first-rate. He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books. Imagine... Obama has in him—I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy "We are the people we have been waiting for" silly rhetoric—the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for. So, I wish him all the best. We are all in this together. Necessity is the mother of bipartisanship. And so, for the first time in my life, I'll be pulling the Democratic lever in November."

Buckley also notes dryly that his father once said to him, "after a right-winger who fancied himself a WFB protégé had said something transcendently and provocatively cretinous, 'You know, I've spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks.'" Too bad Bill, you lost on that score.

Speaking of the kooks, from the Times Union: "Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's last name is spelled "Osama" on hundreds of absentee ballots mailed out this week to voters in Rensselaer County.The misspelling, which elections officials on both sides of the aisle insist was simply a typo, is causing embarrassment for the county." Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I say this is no "accident."