WILLIAM BUCKLEY, NEMESIS OF LIBERALS
William Buckley, one of the most sophisticated conservatives of the last half century is dead. Buckley was famous for delivering death blows to liberals and using big and rare words on his long-running show Firing Line. The NYT has an obituary and there's also an informative piece on the Omnivoracious blog. While Buckley was one clever weasel, what I admire about him was that he was extremely intelligent and articulate, and at least appeared to possess a fair amount of sophistication. Something that's utterly lacking in today's chest-thumping conservative yokels. As a tribute to him, I am posting a link to a debate he had with Noam Chomsky on Firing Line. Chomsky prevails in the end, but we can challenge any of today's so-called conservatives to be half as obnoxiously erudite.
posted by Wavefunction at 3:03 PM
2 Comments:
What I love about this debate is how civilised it is. Compare this with the debate Buckley had with Gore Vidal called him and crypto-Nazi and Buckley threatened to knock Vidal out in retaliation.
Interestingly, not quite. While most of it is definitely civilised compared to the Buckley-Vidal debate, if you Youtube "chomsky buckley" you can see one portion of the debate where Buckley says to Chomsky, almost certainly only half-jokingly, "I would have socked your goddamn face in" or something like that.
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