Dear Mr. "Roth" -
My husband, who is otherwise occupied, asked me to send you this short note on his behalf. He says it is unseemly for an anonymous blogger to imply personal success by imputing failure to a man as accomplished as Bill Buckley. I would add that my husband was laughing so hard at the insolence of your post, some small lepidoptera cases were shaken off their wall mounts.
Sincerely yours,
Vèra Nabokov
The point is not to elevate one's self but to rightly analyze the point of failure of a major cultural figure.
The founder of The Alternative has dropped his Mencken pastiches long enough to write plainly that WFB's impact was political: "... by the 1980s Buckley's positions had pretty much defeated liberalism wherever democratic elections could be held. Without him this change would have been either impossible or much delayed."
Tyrrell obliquely reinforces the point with his obit's final paragraph:
And so the baton is passed. On the conservative side it passes from Buckley to Ann Coulter.I take him to mean that Buckley held the baton of political polemic, the baton of chief liberal-baiter. That would also put him in line with Westbrook Pegler or Rush Limbaugh.
What a strange and tragic eulogy.
