William F. Buckley has always been at his best when given the opportunity to deploy his accent in service to his aspirations. He has always been at his worst when he is forced to resort instead to the written word, a medium of the sort that necessarily filters out the unnecessary. Strangely-stretched vowels and the thoughtful sticking of one's pen in one's mouth at opportune moments - among other Buckley trademarks - are of no real avail to the essayist unless one happens to write with an audience in attendance, which Buckley might very well do for all I know.

Writing recently in National Review on the subject of those who would seek to impeach the current president, Buckley acknowledges that the process of impeachment is both constitutional and precedented. But whereas another pundit might feel inclined or even obligated to weigh in on whether or not such a thing might be warranted, Buckley instead fills up whatever space he might have used for the exploration of such a question with an allegedly amusing anecdote about Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and how he took marching orders from his mommy. No, I won't explain the context - aside from Buckley's incessant and probably not-quite-accurate score-settling of which this particular issue has two such instances, National Review really has little going for it, and to reveal any more details to you, the probable non-subscriber, would be akin to stealing.

Anyway, not a word to be found on whether impeachment is warranted - at least, not in the orthodox sense by which one might link the warranty of impeachment to whether or not an impeachable offense has occured. Rather, Buckley has exactly one argument as to why no such event should go down. "What stands out this time around is that there are no serious people urging impeachment," he explains. "By 'serious' is here intended, men and women of sobriety who weigh conscientiously what constitutes impeachable behavior." This would not seem to include the late Gerald Ford, who once proclaimed that "[a]n impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history."