Buckley announces formally today that he's supporting Obama:
Let me be the latest conservative/libertarian/whatever to leap onto the Barack Obama bandwagon. It’s a good thing my dear old mum and pup are no longer alive. They’d cut off my allowance.
Here is his rationale:
But that was—sigh—then. 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?
[HT: Kevin Vance]
Update 10/7:
Andrew Sullivan picks up on the Miller piece which highlights the Buckley-Obama factiod I announced in yesterday's post.
There's a new interview with Buckley and book review of Supreme Courtship by Cheryl Miller over on Culture11. It's a great read. Here's a quick sample.
Buckley doesn’t waste time. Only an hour after he finished Boomsday, a satire of the impending entitlement crisis, he sent an email to his editor: “Well, I finished. What now?” The answer came: How about a novel about the Supreme Court? At first, Buckley was skeptical: “It doesn’t immediately lend itself to comedy.” (As one character in the novel describes the Court: “It’s basically nine old farts in robes sending footnotes to each other.”) But he figured the Court had to be funnier than the Department of Interior — perhaps the only other Washington institution he hasn’t yet skewered. Although, given recent revelations about a sex-and-drugs scandal in the once sleepy department, it might already be a Christopher Buckley novel.
The Huffington Post released their the Audio book review of Supreme Courtship today. Here's a quick sample of it:
To Buckley's continuing credit, he has crafted a loony fiction in "Supreme Courtship" that feels perilously real.BOTTOM LINE
If you're comic sensibilities coincide with Jon Stewart or Stephan Colbert, this incisive Buckley lampoon is right up your alley.
Update 10/6:
Since Chris Buckley dodged a few of Peter's attempts to get him to describe Supreme Courtship, I thought I would direct you to this brief video of Buckley speaking at a Barnes & Noble about the book. There is also a quick interview with Buckley about his political perspective. He says he might vote for Obama.
Click on the image to watch at The Resident.
