I don't see ice outside, but apparently

baklawa

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hell has frozen over.

A Buckley Endorses Obama

(CNN) ? Christopher Buckley, the son of the late conservative icon William F. Buckley, said Friday he's decided to back Barack Obama's White House bid, the first time in his life he will vote Democrat.

?It?s a good thing my dear old mum and pup [sic] are no longer alive. They?d cut off my allowance," Buckley, a columnist for the conservative National Review, wrote on the Web site The Daily Beast Friday.

Buckley, who praised McCain in a New York Times Op-Ed earlier this year and defended the Arizona senator's conservative credentials against wary talk-radio hosts, said McCain is no longer the ?real? and ?unconventional? man he once admired.

"This campaign has changed John McCain," Buckley wrote. "It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget 'by the end of my first term.' Who, really, believes that?

"Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis," Buckley added. "His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?"


But Buckley made clear he's not just voting against McCain, praising Obama for his "first-class temperament and first-class intellect.

"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," Buckley wrote.
 
Well that didn't take long.  A mere four days after he posted this on a blog, Christopher Buckley is forced to leave National Review, and possibly, the Republican Party.  Like rats fleeing a sinking ship.


October 14, 2008, 2:16 PM
Buckley?s Son Leaves National Review

Christopher Buckley, the author and son of the late conservative mainstay William F. Buckley, said in a telephone interview that he has resigned from the National Review, the political journal his father founded in 1955.

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.? Quoting Ronald Reagan, he added, ?I haven?t left the Republican Party. It left me.?

Mr. Buckley has joined a growing list of conservatives who have either endorsed Mr. Obama or questioned whether McCain now stands any chance of being elected. On Monday, the writer Christopher Hitchens (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/13/christopher-hitchens-obam_n_134234.html) also endorsed the Democratic ticket.

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/14/buckleys-son-leaves-national-review/?pagemode=print


 
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