Buckley's gone

William F Buckley:

He wasn't cut from the same cloth as the sociopathic war criminals now in power, but he was another of those Yalie Skull-and-Bones ex-spooks (like this guy) who thought that power should be passed down hereditarily in patrician families, and he had the classic arrogance of a quasi-intellectual who, because of his accent and Old School tie, thought he had the right (or even the ability) to lay down the law to all of us irrelevant plebes. He made Ronald Reagan possible, and he provided an intellectual veneer that attempted to legitimize the greed, cynicism, and criminal neglect of the balance of his Grand Old Party. I was brought up in that same goddamned Connecticut/Massachusetts prep-school and Ivy environment with a lot of (potential) access to the same Privilege. He could have walked away from it--he could have become a Jack Kennedy or a John Kenneth Galbraith, or, hell, my own Big Brother, and he didn't: he sat up there with the rest of the goddamned toga'd Senate and dispensed from On High.