IN PASSING

Here's to William F. Buckley.

The bane of liberals, quasi- and pseudointellectuals, Buckley passed away at his home in Connecticut. He was found by his son at his desk. Buckley was 82 years old.

If you remember watching Firing Line and listening to Buckley decimate someone who dealt in the ephemeral phraseology of leftism, you couldn't help but smile, even if he sometimes required a dictionary to understand.

He made a generation of thinkers — conservative or otherwise — into students of language and proved that the written (and spoken) word was better than a thousand pictures.