United Liberty

For all the fondness I tended to have for Christopher Buckley, it’s beginning to evaporate.

Take this excerpt of a review by Thomas Mallon in the New York Times book about Buckley’s parents:

William F. Buckley’s physical decline seems to have been, in its way, as prodigious as all the activity and achievements preceding it. Emphysema was his principal difficulty, and Christopher Buckley, author of the satiric novel “Thank You for Smoking” (1994), does not skimp on the ravages of all his father’s ailments. We witness his “sort of mad-professor look,” his pill-popping, his habit of uninhibited urination upon opening the car door. During one hospitalization “the most articulate man in America was speaking gibberish”; when back home he mistook the DVD player for a thermostat.

The son of William F. Buckley supports Obama.

During an interview on the San Francisco NPR station KQED’s program “Forum,” author Christopher Buckley, the son of National Review founder William F. Buckley, said he is likely to vote for Obama. Pointing out that Obama is “left wing,” while he is a conservative, he stated that with the current economic turmoil President Bush is looking like “Herbert Hoover 2” and that McCain would be a continuation of Bush Administration policies.

For the first book review here at United Liberty, I picked Christopher Buckley’s new book Boomsday.

The protagonist of Boomsday, Cassandra Devine, in many ways bares similarities to our own fiscal hawk, Shana Kluck. A young, female political activist and blogger, Cass (as she is called for most of the book), takes the dry issue of Social Security reform and spices it up with a controversial proposal: tax breaks for families of retirees who commit suicide.

Neo-conservative and Iraq war architect William Kristol has had a regular spot as a columnist in the New York Times op-ed page for a few months now. Announced in late 2007, it got alot of people on the Left angry. His latest column, “Will Russia Get Away With It?” suggests that he would like the US to put its resources into putting Russia in its place.

Each time I see Kristol’s name in the Times, I have to wonder why he’s there. If the New York Times noticed that it was becoming the journal of choice for Moveon.org members, then they could picked from numerous conservatives with ideas that are based on destruction. Here’s a short list:

Patrick J. Buchanan - MSNBC has made him a regular commentator, so Buchanan knows how to work in left-wing environments. Buchanan already writes regular columns, so it wouldn’t be hard. They could just republish those.