AddieStan

He didn't do us much by way of favors, as the sage Hans Johnson points out: Let it not be lost in his death that Buckley, like most in the right-wing cohort he anchored from mid-century onward, was quite familiar and at times reliant on gay people in his career. He wrestled with homophobia. Mostly he lost. CLICK HERE TO READ JOHNSON'S ESSAY ON BUCKLEY AND GAYS

When your blogstress was a little girl, her father would make her read a newspaper column that ran regularly in the Elizabeth Daily Journal , the afternoon paper then published in Elizabeth, New Jersey. The column was called "On the Right," and it was written by one William F. Buckley, Jr. "Good for your vocabulary," said le père de votre net-tête . The veritable inventor of the the modern conservative movement, Buckley delighted in penning arguments in the code of the erudite; so much so that for a child who crawled out of the primordial ethnic soup that is New Jersey, a dictionary was a mandatory companion to Buckley's weekly reader. The Buckley exercise missed the desired effect: Your Webwench forgot most of the words she learned from the columns and became a liberal. However, she cannot discount the influence of Buckley on your cybertrix's ambition to become a columnist . CLICK HERE TO READ THE NEW YORK TIMES OBITUARY