The Beast has buzz!; or, Buckley v. National Review

Christopher Buckley, as you may have heard by now, used his column in The Daily Beast to endorse Barack Obama last Friday. The son of the legendary late conservative William F. Buckley, Jr., Buckley said that the "campaign has changed John McCain," whom he once respected (and wrote at least one speech for):

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?

In contrast, he wrote, Obama possessed precisely that "first-rate temperament" (as Oliver Wendell Holmes said of FDR) and was, moreover, "that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books" -- good ones, Buckley added. What's more, he "seemed to understand that traditional left-politics aren't going to get us out of this pit we've dug for ourselves."

In today's installment of his column/blog, aptly titled (for conservatives, anyway) "What Fresh Hell Is This?", he continues the story: The day after his endorsement ran, he offered to resign his column in the National Review; Rich Lowry, the editor, accepted -- "rather briskly!" (The original title of the post, judging from reactions to it as well as the current web address, was "Sorry, Dad, I Was Fired." It's since been changed to something more neutral.)

A few residents of the Corner, NR's group blog, have fired back: Mark Steyn observed that Buckley had put off his endorsement till an Obama victory seemed likely, and that his priority was continued invitations to all the right parties on the NY-DC corridor; Victor Davis Hanson said Buckley simply failed to understand that Obama and the Democrats "hope to alter this country in ways we should all find revolting."

Today, Lowry clarifies that Buckley in fact resigned and was by no means fired; he also says he was just a temporary fill-in for the columnist Steyn, in any case.* But Lowry affirms his respect for Buckley.

The oddest response to Buckley on the Corner: One Andy McCarthy tries to undermine the idea that Obama, as Buckley uncontroversially stated, wrote "Dreams of My Father" himself: McCarthy argues that the true author is William Ayers, the onetime Weather Underground member who is now an educational professor! This meme is evidently alive in some fringe right-wing publications; McCarthy is trying to take it mainstream.

So far, only one Cornerite, Jonathan Adler, has spoken up against this bit of insanity, calling it "nutter-territory stuff."

William F. Buckley prided himself on "separating the Right from the kooks," his son notes in the Beast. Adler, at least, continues that tradition. But what about Lowry? What are his thoughts on McCarthy's using NR as a venue for this kind of "argument"?

UPDATE: Christopher Buckley tells Slate's Tim Noah that "it is simply not accurate" to say that he was a mere fill-in columnist. Buckley says he'd been told by Lowry before he took the gig that Steyn "was giving it up" -- the column, that is.