Well, Antinous, his description of it as "a fun list of five controversial moments in the life of William F. Buckley" is mainly what I was on about, since any thing about Buckley that is really controversial could hardly be described as fun, e.g. the racism or anti-semitism. But but I'll retract it, since I don't really know how Mark felt about WFB and it's not fair to assume from one line what his feelings are. The article, though, is a case in point about the silly mythologizing of Buckley. I'd like to have seen a link to something that was more honest about the man in it's place.

Yeah, it's really more than a little disconcerting to see so many moderates and 'liberals' --and now BoingBoing!--rushing to posthumously rehabilitate this guy. But anyone who's trying to cast him as some sort of honorable, decent intellectual is either unfamiliar with or actively trying to rewrite history: he was none of those things. The WFB of the 50s and 60s was an ardent segregationist and McCarthy supporter who was more than happy to made common cause with the John Birchers. A YouTube search for him and Noam Chomsky turns up a funny video from 1969 of the two on WFB's show Firing Line, in which Chomsky proceeds to wipe the floor with Buckley, whose pro-Vietnam War arguments come across shockingly callow and ill-informed. Not surprisingly, that was the last time he let Chomsky or anyone else who might make him look bad on the show, which ought to dispell once and for all the myth of Buckley the honest intellectual. In fact, he remained as predictable and doctrinare as conservative as you could want for the rest of his life, moderating his positions only when the changing attitudes of the times threatened to make them look monstrous. One commenter made a good catch citing Buckley's little remark about AIDS from 2005, but that's just a whitewashed recycling of the same crap he'd been saying since the mid-80s. I find this line from 2005 particularly rich: "Someone, 20 years ago, suggested a discreet tattoo the site of which would alert the prospective partner to the danger of proceeding as had been planned." I don't know who that "someone" is but here's Buckley again, writing in the NYT in 1986: “Everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm, to protect common-needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals.” So either he's claiming someone else's idea for his own in 86, or realizes that what he's saying is so odious that it's safer to attribute the remark to a non-exist third party in 05, which has the convinent side-effect of making him look like he's standing up for others' right to free expression. Either way: slimeball till the end.