Hi
Buckley has been a very articulate spokesman for many causes.To post this heated exchange as if it represents even a electrons worth of data on his life is a shame. Besides I could not have said it better myself.
Best
Joe Peterson
Village Voice reader

I am so glad to see that the VV found the footage that will forever define the legacy of of W. Buckley. He was an intelligent, although not brilliant, man who was at his core...rotten! I think that he has gone to hell with gasoline pants on. This video says it all...hateful, demeaning and unsophisticated. The conservative movement is following his path today, right to the boneyard.

Channeling Bette Davis: They say you should only say good things about the dead. William Buckley is dead. Good!

Use of the term "queer" aside (and to paraphrase Flannery O'Conner), somebody should have been there to say this to the annoying Gore Vidal every single day of his life.

As an old Beatles and William F. Buckley fan, I find the focus on Buckley's disdain for Beatle music unfortunate.

While I loved a lot of Beatle music and it was a substantial bit of the backdrop to my early life, Buckley was a studied musician and musicologist of an earlier age.

While Beatle music was a common and usually upbeat common cultural touchstone, it is silly to argue that it was on an equal structural plain with earlier music compositions that transcended provincial time.

Were John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison accomplished composers and instrumentalists? Of course. Could they have composed a classical symphony or even a big band standard? Probably not, else they likely would have.

In any case, this is an intellectually thin matter to focus on upon the death of a huge literary presence of the past 50 years. Regardless of your understanding or assent to what was Buckley's focus and accomplishment, this shallow approach is distracting and ungracious, to say the least.

David Williams --
You may find Vidal "annoying" but he's a greater, far more important writer than Buckley was. And Vidal never advocated racial segregation, the Vietnam war, or tattooing people with AIDS.

I feel as if I have lost an old friend tho' I was not fortunate enough to have met him. I disagreed with him more times than not but what he gifted to the nation intellectually, politically and culturally is of some comfort in an age where ignorance from the top on down reigns supreme! RIP Mr. Buckley. G-d speed!

To paraphrase William Gibbs McAdoo, Mr. Buckley's oratory and writings were an array of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea.

I knew I could count on the Village Voice for an oasis of honesty in the middle of the usual postmortem fawning in the news. What a scumbag this man was. Quotes from the National Review's vociferous defense of segregation and attacks on Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement should be displayed all over TV and newspapers in the coming days, but sadly, they probably won't be.