William F. Buckley Jr. will never really pass from our scene ...

William F. Buckley Jr., a Founder of the 20th Century's Conservative Movement

His son, novelist Christopher Buckley, summed his life up very nicely:

"He founded a magazine [The National Review ... which he ran for about forever], wrote over 50 books, influenced the course of political history, had a son, had two grandchildren and sailed across the Atlantic Ocean three times. ... He really didn't leave any stone unturned."

More recently, he turned against the neo-Conservatives by pretty much damning the Iraq War which he saw as a "failure" more than a year ago in a CBS interview.

To my knowledge, he remained among the 0.00314592% of the American people who had not yet endorsed Barack Obama for President as of yesterday when he passed on to a better place.

I wonder if I would ever be able to find and blow the dust off of my ancient copy of God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom. It was one of my first really good reads ... in what seems like another lifetime.

Mr. Buckley was as intense then (roughly 1950) as he has been for better than a half century!