Christopher Buckley Endorses Obama

Conservative humor guy and son of the late Bill Buckley, Christopher Buckley, has taken his life in his hands (if the McCain Mob gets to him) and endorsed Barack Obama:

I have known John McCain personally since 1982...

...He told me across a lunch table, “The Keating business was much worse than my five and a half years in Hanoi, because I at least walked away from that with my honor.” Your heart went out to the guy. I thought at the time, God, this guy should be president someday.

John McCain has changed. He said, famously, apropos the Republican debacle post-1994, “We came to Washington to change it, and Washington changed us.” This campaign has changed John McCain. 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. 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?

I’ve read Obama’s books, and they are first-rate. He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books. Imagine. He is also a lefty. I am not. I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets. On abortion, gay marriage, et al, I’m libertarian. I believe with my sage and epigrammatic friend P.J. O’Rourke that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.

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.

So, I wish him all the best. We are all in this together. Necessity is the mother of bipartisanship. And so, for the first time in my life, I’ll be pulling the Democratic lever in November.

Some comments on that bastion of intelligent discourse, Free Republic, regarding Mr. Buckley's endorsement:

As someone said earlier re Buckley the younger, the apple sometimes falls far from the tree then rolls away.

This apple hit the ground and immediately rotted.

Young Mr. Buckley is a weasel, isn’t he?

Christopher Buckley... you will regret your action.

Chris, come out of the closet already.

RETARDED, STUPID, IGNORANT, PRETENTIOUS, DUMB, STUPID, INEPT, INCOMPETENT, FRICKING MORON!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm making a mental list of all these turncoats

why don’t you tell my son, who is entering the Marine Corps this November, why you’re voting for a frickin’ communist.

When he was born, they threw away the baby and kept the afterbirth.

I didn’t realize William F. had a gay son.

Reagan had one too... and he is voting for osamabama.