William F Buckley Jr Leaves the Building

This man was not one of my favorite people. I still watched him on "Firing Line" when it was on PBS and would grind my teeth at times. I also read his columns from time to time in the Bay Area papers. Same bad dental habits persisted.
I guess you should always say something good about a person when they die so I'll say Buckley had a lot of friends and not all of them, such as John Kenneth Galbraith, agreed with him so that's says something for his character.
On the other hand...
I could list a lot of things I sharply disagreed with vis a vi Willliam F. Buckley. How could a man WHO WAS SUPPOSED TO BE so brillant oppose universal adult sufferage in a free society all the way into the 1990's? How could he give "intellectual" support to deny blacks the right to vote in the 1960's in the face of Southern bigotry, for instance? How could he write nice things about men like Francisco Franco as long as that guy was a fascist and not a Communist, as if being tortured at the hands of state-thugs governed by a "Generalisimo" was a better value than torture at the hands of the KGB?
But at least for now I'd like to post something he and I agreed on--at least in the conclusion if not the reasoning. It's from a 1978 debate on the Panama Canal Treaties and he does a good job here even if i don't agree with most of what leads up to his conclusion to let the Canal Zone go to the country its located in.
As someone put it, on the website this is from, I disagreed with 90 percent of what Buckley said, but he's was at least a more serious and engaging debater than either Michael Savage or Michael Moore or most all the others who exhibit themselves as pundits in the media today. I'm caught between not wanting to attack a man when he passes from this mortal earth and not wanting to be a hypocrite so I'll stop here and let the man speak for himself.