RINO Watch shall be a new feature in which I, through the microphone of the Holy Spirit, reveal to the world inside traitors of the highest caliber. The latest person to go against the Will of the LORD is the late William F. Buckley’s son, Christopher:

Let me be the latest conservative/libertarian/whatever to leap onto the Barack Obama bandwagon. It’s a good thing my dear old mum and pup are no longer alive. They’d cut off my allowance.

They’d probably paddle you, too, for making such an idiotic endorsement. I’m afraid that this is not adiaphora; anyone who votes for IHOp votes for Satan.

Or would they? But let’s get that part out of the way. The only reason my vote would be of any interest to anyone is that my last name happens to be Buckley—a name I inherited. So in the event anyone notices or cares, the headline will be: “William F. Buckley’s Son Says He Is Pro-Obama.” I know, I know: It lacks the throw-weight of “Ron Reagan Jr. to Address Democratic Convention,” but it’ll have to do.

You shame your father, too, with your RINO ideals and willingness to accept a tax maniac.

I am—drum roll, please, cue trumpets—making this announcement in the cyberpages of The Daily Beast (what joy to be writing for a publication so named!) rather than in the pages of National Review, where I write the back-page column. For a reason: My colleague, the superb and very dishy Kathleen Parker, recently wrote in National Review Online a column stating what John Cleese as Basil Fawlty would call “the bleeding obvious”: namely, that Sarah Palin is an embarrassment, and a dangerous one at that. She’s not exactly alone. New York Times columnist David Brooks, who began his career at NR, just called Governor Palin “a cancer on the Republican Party.”

Kathleen Parker deserves every single hate mail she gets, what with her idiotic insults and unfounded ad hominems against who shall be our Greatest President. David Brooks is also a RINO, as is everyone from the New York Times other than Maureen Dowd. If you wrote this garbage at The National Review, you would have deservedly been burned at the stake.

As for Kathleen, she has to date received 12,000 (quite literally) foam-at-the-mouth hate-emails. One correspondent, if that’s quite the right word, suggested that Kathleen’s mother should have aborted her and tossed the fetus into a Dumpster. There’s Socratic dialogue for you. Dear Pup once said to me sighfully after a right-winger who fancied himself a WFB protégé had said something transcendently and provocatively cretinous, “You know, I’ve spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks.” Well, the dear man did his best. At any rate, I don’t have the kidney at the moment for 12,000 emails saying how good it is he’s no longer alive to see his Judas of a son endorse for the presidency a covert Muslim who pals around with the Weather Underground. So, you’re reading it here first.

As I said, Kathleen Parker deserves every diatribe hurdled at her, and then she deserves to be knocked out with them in a bowling alley, after which she shall surely become a gutter ball. As for William F Buckley, he said that the real kooks were the RINOs and the isolationists. You, Christopher, with your willing endorsement of a man you know full well to be Muslim and terrorist, are acting just like the kind of people that your father decried.

I have known John McCain personally since 1982. I wrote a well-received speech for him. Earlier this year, I wrote in The New York Times—I’m beginning to sound like Paul Krugman, who cannot begin a column without saying, “As I warned the world in my last column…”—a highly favorable Op-Ed about McCain, taking Rush Limbaugh and the others in the Right Wing Sanhedrin to task for going after McCain for being insufficiently conservative. I don’t—still—doubt that McCain’s instincts remain fundamentally conservative. But the problem is otherwise.

It’s not like you’re going anywhere with kissing McCain’s ass, so why don’t you just admit that he’s a moron, and a RINO like you?

McCain rose to power on his personality and biography. He was authentic. He spoke truth to power. He told the media they were “jerks” (a sure sign of authenticity, to say nothing of good taste; we are jerks). He was real. He was unconventional. He embraced former anti-war leaders. He brought resolution to the awful missing-POW business. He brought about normalization with Vietnam—his former torturers! Yes, he erred in accepting plane rides and vacations from Charles Keating, but then, having been cleared on technicalities, groveled in apology before the nation. He told me across a lunch table, “The Keating business was much worse than my five and a half years in Hanoi, because I at least walked away from that with my honor.” Your heart went out to the guy. I thought at the time, God, this guy should be president someday.

There’s nothing wrong with doing the bidding of Charles Keating. Just like a RINO, you have to mention one of the man’s faults (which, in this case, isn’t even a fault, in the eyes of Sensible Americans) in every praise you give him. McCain’s a military hero, a believer in forgiveness, and a maverick. Why do you hate John McCain, Christopher?

A year ago, when everyone, including the man I’m about to endorse, was caterwauling to get out of Iraq on the next available flight, John McCain, practically alone, said no, no—bad move. Surge. It seemed a suicidal position to take, an act of political bravery of the kind you don’t see a whole lot of anymore.

And he’s a real hero for stopping the Democrat Congress from mowing rampant over the weeds. Now, we’re still in Iraq, we’re still winning the War on Terror, and we’re still not caving in to the Defeatocrats.

But that was—sigh—then. John McCain has changed. He said, famously, apropos the Republican debacle post-1994, “We came to Washington to change it, and Washington changed us.” This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget “by the end of my first term.” Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?

If anything, the 2008 campaign has taken McCain’s RINO policies and shoved them into an antique closet until further notice. He is right to be angry with IHOp, the most liberal senator in Congress, and a confirmed terrorist; he knows that Palin, and Palin alone, can balance the budget. When our country is in crisis, we must go all out against those who would indoctrinate our family; McCain is still not aggressive enough, and still doesn’t hold Christians in high regard. There’s a reason why McCain must eventually step down for Sarah Palin.

All this is genuinely saddening, and for the country is perhaps even tragic, for America ought, really, to be governed by men like John McCain—who have spent their entire lives in its service, even willing to give the last full measure of their devotion to it. If he goes out losing ugly, it will be beyond tragic, graffiti on a marble bust.

Is that why you aren’t voting for him? Are you eager to see a man break down and cry? Why do you hate dignity, you Northeastern pussy?

As for Senator Obama: He has exhibited throughout a “first-class temperament,” pace Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s famous comment about FDR. As for his intellect, well, he’s a Harvard man, though that’s sure as heck no guarantee of anything, these days. Vietnam was brought to you by Harvard and (one or two) Yale men. As for our current adventure in Mesopotamia, consider this lustrous alumni roster. Bush 43: Yale. Rumsfeld: Princeton. Paul Bremer: Yale and Harvard. What do they all have in common? Andover! The best and the brightest.

Buckley babbles on, and on, and on… He’s a Harvard man, which makes him smart; yet he’s a Harvard man, which is why I’m not voting for him. I find it insulting that you call Vietnam a failure; were it not for liberals like McGovern trying to smear Nixon for Watergate, we would have won for South Vietnam. Andover is an excellent school, though.

I’ve read Obama’s books, and they are first-rate. He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books. Imagine. He is also a lefty. I am not. I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets. On abortion, gay marriage, et al, I’m libertarian. I believe with my sage and epigrammatic friend P.J. O’Rourke that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.

Yes, and IHOp wants to raise taxes through the roof, and then regulate the repairmen that come to fix the roof, then regulate the fire department that comes to save the repairmen stuck on the roof, and then regulate the health care industry that patches up the men who fell off the roof, and so on. I can see why you’re voting for IHOp, though; you admire the fact that he prefers to write frivolous books rather than govern, and the fact that he supports abortion and gay marriage just seals the deal for you, atheist. If you want him to seize your property, go ahead. But don’t help him seize mine.

But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren’t going to get us out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves. If he raises taxes and throws up tariff walls and opens the coffers of the DNC to bribe-money from the special interest groups against whom he has (somewhat disingenuously) railed during the campaign trail, then he will almost certainly reap a whirlwind that will make Katrina look like a balmy summer zephyr.

He’s going to subscribe to a far-Left mantra, which will be sure to cause another Katrina (as you’ve realized). So, I ask you again, you goosestepping turd: Why are you voting for him? The Democrats keep people poor for a reason; poor in wealth, poor in spirit, and poor in intellect. Apparently, you wish to overlook the fact that he was the most liberal senator, and instead pray for him to wreck the Heartland.

Obama has in him—I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy “We are the people we have been waiting for” silly rhetoric—the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for.

No, he’s a radical and a halfwit. Grow up, already. We don’t want to keep you working in the back pages of the National Review.

So, I wish him all the best. We are all in this together. Necessity is the mother of bipartisanship. And so, for the first time in my life, I’ll be pulling the Democratic lever in November. As the saying goes, God save the United States of America.

So, you’re just another RINO to be poached like Andrew Sullivan, and willing to submit to the George Soros machine in blind ignorance of the failures of our Democrat Congress. Well, I can only hope that you and Andrew Sullivan remain poached, rather than reincarnate your former self to make the Republican Party Leftist. Good riddance.