Say What You Want About William F. Buckley…

by tristero

but his ideas were more repugnant than a bad case of halitosis:

Everyone detected with AIDS should be tatooed in the upper forearm, to protect common-needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals.

I understand that, after hearing that a friend of his, the odious Roy Cohn, had contracted AIDS, he changed his mind. Fair enough, but most of us sober up and think better of our most repellent ideas before publishing them in the first place.

Spectacularly rotten judment combined with a gratuitously violent nastiness. Those are William F. Buckley’s most influential bequests to the conservative movement. And every day they do homage to these character traits, and indeed, to his entire enormous legacy of pretentious snobbery, bigotry, homophobia, and stupidity.

I would tell you what I really think of Buckley but I thought I would go easy today.