Christopher Buckley, official heretic

Christopher Buckley is no longer an employee at National Review, the conservative magazine founded by his father. It's not for corruption, drunkenness, debauchery, or even badly written columns. It's because he's endorsed Obama:

I had gone out of my way in my Beast endorsement to say that I was not doing it in the pages of National Review, where I write the back-page column, because of the experience of my colleague, the lovely Kathleen Parker. Kathleen had written in NRO that she felt Sarah Palin was an embarrassment. (Hardly an alarmist view.) This brought 12,000 livid emails, among them a real charmer suggesting that Kathleen's mother ought to have aborted her and tossed the fetus into a dumpster. I didn't want to put NR in an awkward position.

Since my Obama endorsement, Kathleen and I have become BFFs and now trade incoming hate-mails. No one has yet suggested my dear old Mum should have aborted me, but it's pretty darned angry out there in Right Wing Land. One editor at National Review — a friend of 30 years — emailed me that he thought my opinions "cretinous." One thoughtful correspondent, who feels that I have "betrayed" — the b-word has been much used in all this — my father and the conservative movement generally, said he plans to devote the rest of his life to getting people to cancel their subscriptions to National Review. But there was one bright spot: To those who wrote me to demand, "Cancel my subscription," I was able to quote the title of my father's last book, a delicious compendium of his NR "Notes and Asides": Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription.

Within hours of my endorsement appearing in The Daily Beast it became clear that National Review had a serious problem on its hands. So the next morning, I thought the only decent thing to do would be to offer to resign my column there. This offer was accepted — rather briskly! — by Rich Lowry, NR's editor, and its publisher, the superb and able and fine Jack Fowler. I retain the fondest feelings for the magazine that my father founded, but I will admit to a certain sadness that an act of publishing a reasoned argument for the opposition should result in acrimony and disavowal.

Proving, if it needed further proof, that conservatives can lose their cool just as gracelessly as liberals . . . and at equal speed.

I can easily understand someone holding generally conservative views still being unable to endorse McCain: he's not conservative in the majority of his opinions, and he's dismayingly populist where he's not alarmingly authoritarian. Obama is no prize for the small government fan, but the differences between him and McCain may well lead wavering conservatives to stay away from the polls or even pull the lever for "the opposition" rather than the devil they know all too well (because nobody would want to "waste their votes" by voting for Bob Barr, right?).