I wish someone would post the original Firing Line footage, but the audio and sock puppets will have to do for now. Buckley shows his softer side here, and in his interview with Noam Chomsky, his meditative and thoughtful mind, though beneath the debonair aspect there is a steely and sometimes deeply hostile force.
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Buckley certainly had a greater intellect than his descendants in today's conservative punditry, but the second Chomsky clip shows the techniques he taught them -- flooding the interviewee with words, feigning a bemused, what?-I-hadn't-heard-that surprise when the interviewee comes to a central fact, and above all projecting the haughty dismissiveness of those who argue from a position of power.
All are the coin of the realm today, although these days you get bonus points for braying like a jackass and affecting the Peglerian an'-if-you-don'-like-it-I'm-gunna-punch-you-
inna-mouth demeanor, whereas at least Buckley sounded like a civilized person.
I know, know. I know. Hard to feel the same way about Buckley than one feels about O'Reilly, but then I wonder whether it's just some residual class fetishism on my part--that veneer of intellectualism that apologizes for brutality. Whereas Avraam Noam Chomsky sounds like a good Catholic, with all that talk of guilt!
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