I'm not generally going to share the same philosophic pew with Christopher Buckley. But like his old man, the late conservative icon William F. Buckley, the younger Buckley has a brain and a way with words and a sense of humor, which to me makes him worth hearing.

You may have read about Christopher Buckley's brush with the right (his right) a couple of weeks ago when he came out in support of Barack Obama. A Kathleen Parker column in Tuesday's Freeman will offer you more on this episode and its fallout. Among the boulders to roll on Buckley's shoulders was the wrath of Rush Limbaugh (or, as Keith Olbermann calls him, "comedian Rush Limbaugh").

Buckley describes it in his blog on Tina Brown's new Web-zine, The Daily Beast.

Pay special attention to the end of the piece, in which Buckley quotes noted columnist E.J. Dionne:

"The cause of Edmund Burke, Leo Strauss, Robert Nisbet and William F. Buckley Jr. is now in the hands of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity — and Sarah Palin. Reason has been overwhelmed by propaganda, ideas by slogans, learned manifestoes by direct-mail hit pieces."

Exactly.