After I wrote my first article for National Review– “The Oil Shortage That Wasn’t” on April 15, 1991 (you can read it here)–I phoned my grandmother.

She had known William F. Buckley, Jr. in the late 1950s and 1960s, arguing against him on the “Liberty Amendment” (an ill-fated constitutional amendment that would have barred government agencies from competing with business) and arguing alongside him in the 1964 Goldwater race. She liked his quick wit and his ability to hold forth over a cigar and a cocktail. She loved “Firing Line,” but was said she was always concerned that he would fall out of his chair.

By 1991, she was in a hospital bed in Boston and hadn’t seen Buckley in over 30 years. Still, she was delighted to have her grandson in the pages of the magazine she had read religiously for years.

But she was concerned she might not see the magazine for weeks. Her mail was delivered to her home in upstate New York and she doubted the hospital subscribed to National Review. “I guess I will have to ask Teresa,” she said with some glee in her voice.

Her daughter Teresa was the kind of leftist who worked at MIT and volunteered her summers to help the Sandanistas set up their library system. Her husband was gay and her food organic. It was not an errand Teresa was going to enjoy.

The next day, my grandmother phoned me. She was outraged and sad. Teresa had absolutely refused to buy the magazine, even with borrowed money. “I’m not giving a dime to that man”–she meant Buckley–”and I am not helping you do it.”

It was a matter of principle not to help her dying mother. I’m not sure what the principle was, but whatever it was, it was inflexible.

I didn’t have a copy of the magazine yet, so I couldn’t send it. (National Review did not have a Washington office in those days, so I couldn’t easily get one either.)

I boldly called the National Review and asked Buckley’s long-time assistant what I could do. I was hoping she would mail me a copy and I would send it on to my grandmother.

She put me on hold for a long while. (I later learned she went it to talk to Buckley himself. He apparently remembered my grandmother. Or maybe he was simply kind.)

When she returned, she said that I was going to transferred to a young staffer named Rich Lowry. He would take down my grandmother’s address in the hospital.

The National Review was going to fed-ex two copies of the magazine to her hospital bed.

I nearly dropped the phone.

Lowry made it happen.

The next day, my grandmother was elated. A uniformed Fed-Ex employee had brought the urgent package to her bedside and insisted on a signature. “Just wait until Teresa arrives,” she crowed.

The second copy of National Review was inscribed to her, apparently by Buckley.

William F. Buckley, Jr., the dashing founder of National Review and the modern conservative movement, is gone and no doubt God will need a dictionary to keep up with him.

I knew Buckley only fleetingly. The first time I met him was when Marc Thiessen, then-editor of the Vassar Spectator (and now chief speechwriter for President Bush) invited Buckley and R. Emmet Tyrell to speak on campus. Marc had masterminded a conference with some 20 or so other colleges and universities. We had high hopes that we could jumpstart student journalism into a real force for reform. (Yeah, it didn’t happen. I know.)

Anyway, Buckley came. As I walked with him into the parlor at Josselyn Hall, he stopped and swiveled his head. A long, slow pan of the personless room. He was quiet enough that no one spoke.

It was an utterly ordinary room to me. A worn Persian, saggy couches, an out-of-tune baby grand, bookcases lining a fireplace no one was allowed to use. But I lived in that dorm and had coffee in that parlor every day. Clearly, the room meant something else to Buckley.

We sat down on one of those saggy couches and he said: “You know, this is where I sat 40 years ago, waiting for my sister to bring down her roommate, Pat, for the first time.” When no one said anything, he gently explained: “Pat is my wife.”

Later that same day, Buckley spoke on journalism and conservatism. I don’t remember a word of what he said, but I do remember what happened.

Josselyn Hall’s parlor is a peninsula, a Florida connected to the dorm only on one side. Usually this is an advantage–its long window-lined sides let sunlight flood in–but not today. The day Buckley spoke, three sides of the parlor were surrounded by student protesters. Hundreds of them, carrying signs, chanting slogans.

At the time, I didn’t find any of this surprising. In the Reagan years, on a college campus, conservatives and libertarians were in the minority–and the vocal left always let us know it. Reflecting back now, I am kind of surprised. Why bother protesting Buckley? We would never think to demonstrate against Chomsky. What would be the point? Everyone should be free to peacefully express their views, no matter how benighted. But that was liberal complaint against Buckley in the 1980s: his crime was his existence. Or as Buckley famously said: “liberals are all for another point of view, until someone supplies one.”

Anyway, the protests continued and someone broke into the basement and cut the power. The room was dark. Only the flashlights waved by the protesters outside cast any light. Buckley continued speaking.

One by one, candles were found and lit. Tyrell, the founder of the American Spectator, cried out: “Hey Bill, the liberals want to show us how they see the world.”

It brought a hearty laugh from the crowd and Buckley too.

Later, trying to appear too smart, I asked Buckley about the power outage. “The point wasn’t the dark, but all of the individual candles that were lit, with no one coordinating the activity.” (I was big on Hayek and spontaneous order at the time.)

“Maybe people just didn’t want to eat in the dark,” Buckley said. That was Buckley, a sense of humor, commonsense and wisdom. That and all of his writing will be why he will remembered as an enduring American character.

“Rambo” has been dumped by Britain’s biggest film distributor, Odeon, over the weekend, according to Daily Variety. Apparently this is a commercial spat over contract terms and not Odeon looking down its long nose at a blood-spattered American action pic.

Strangely, “Rambo” is the first major motion picture to highlight the persecution of the Karen hill tribes inside Myanmar–and continuing role of American evangelicals there. The Karen are predominantly Christian ethnic minority. Its about time someone paid attention to the situation.

The Karen (pronounced “care-in”) were massacred, tortured, and enslaved. Young boys were forced to carry heavy loads of water or ammunition for the army that burned their bamboo villages while girls were raped or sold into prostitution. In either case, many were simply worked to death. Burma’s military junta was open and frank about its plans to exterminate a group that looked, spoke and worshiped differently from the Burmese majority. Imagine Bosnia in Southeast Asia.

I traveled inside Burma (as the locals still call it) a number of times with armed Karen rebels in the late 1990s, looking for stories I could sell to the Reader’s Digest and the Atlantic.

Even though I had written for both publications, there was very little interest on the part of U.S.-based editors. Burma was faraway and any editorial interest was soaked up by the plight of Aung San Suu Kyi.

What’s more, the suffering of a predominantly Christian group at the hands of overwhelmingly Bhuddist military did not fit some politically correct paradigms. Are Bhuddists, like, pacifists or something? And anyway stories of Christian persecution sound so 19th century. Today wiser heads can only think of Christians as persecutors, bigots who don’t want gays to marry or Muslim women to drive wearing burkas.

So even dramatic, war-zone coverage was hard to place. The world was looking the other way.

“Rambo” is not a documentary and driving action narrative doesn’t slow down to explain a lot about the Karen. But it is a start.

The Christian group most active with the Karen (I don’t know any secular NGOs involved with them) is Christian Freedom International. Its president is Jim Jacobson, a quietly brave man who gave up a political career in the White House to build clinics and schools in the jungles and cities of Asia. The ones in Burma are found and burned by the Burmese military every few months. Jim shrugs and builds again.

So the New York Times decides to take a poke at Senator John McCain and the blogosphere goes nuts.

Michelle Malkin nicely summarizes the political lesson for McCain: “The media halo’s gone, Maverick. Nothing personal. Just business.” Excellent point. McCain seemed to be expecting that the press will treat him as they did in 2000–with grace and understanding. It wasn’t his charm that won the press over in 2000; it was the fact that he was a challenger who posed a real risk to George W. Bush. Now that he is the Republican frontrunner, he should expect to be treated like any other Republican. And this Times story is just the beginning.

Others were quick to point out that the New York Times had the story for months–including the month in which the paper decided to endorse McCain.

This is even more evidence that newspapers should not endorse candidates. If the Times knew about McCain’s alleged ethics problems prior to the endorsement, why did it endorse him? Or, if the Times was determined to endorse him, didn’t they qualify the endorsement in some way? Any way you look at it, endorsements are bad for the paper that makes them. Today, across the blogosphere and talk-radio land, that endorsement is being thrown in the face of New York Times readers.

What about the story itself? With McCain, a reporter must be cautious. There are a lot of rumors out there about him. I have investigated a few myself. Each of the ones I investigated turned out to be false; no just unverifiable, but actually false. (Obviously, I will not repeat them here.)

Look, when a politician sets himself up as a moral paragon, he invites rumors from former staffers and political rivals. So reporters have to be especially careful since McCain is a magnet for these kind of charges.

And it doesn’t appear the Times was careful. The evidence presented is wispy, as insubstantial as toilet paper. It is stories like these that hurt the reputation of the Times.

On the other hand, McCain has a glass jaw on ethical issues. If the Times ever gets the goods and makes a powerful case on an ethics charge, McCain is in big trouble.

For now, it is the Times that is in trouble.

In the morning, came the mourning.

Mostly it was from NPR’s “Morning Edition,” where the host twice referred to Cuban dictator Fidel Castro as a “hero.” And the funny thing is, Castro isn’t even dead yet.

This story is overblown by both sides: the aging hippies who somehow still admire the monster and impatient exiles waiting for reform and democracy. Suddenly everyone is breathlessly talking about Castro relinquishing power.

But it isn’t true. He will remain head of the Cuban Communist Party, which is where the real power lies. This obvious point has been missed in all of the commentary, offline and online, that I have seen.

All the autocrat has done is decline to accept another term as president of the council of state. He had already provisionally turned over those responsibilities to his brother Raul in July 2006. He is too old and sick to manage petty internal debates about which young comrade should address the provincial deputy assistant commissars planning commission. So Fidel keeps his hand on the big issues and leaves the micromanagement of his gulag island to someone else.

And who is that someone else? Why didn’t any one point out that turning over power to a member of your family, without even a pretense of an election, is what monarchs do, not Marxists? Talk about internal contradictions…

What if that someone else turns out to be Hugo Chavez? After all, power vacuums attract the power hungry and Cuba is increasingly reliant on trade and aid for the emerging dictatorship. Could could Cuba become a semi-satellite of Venezuela–like Syria is to Iran–and therefore become a real threat to America?

UPDATE: I will be Fox’s “Your World” with Neil Cavuto discussing this issue around 4 EST today.

Archbishops of Canterbury have been disappointing people for years.

More than a decade ago, up an impossibly steep hill in Burma, I accidentally met the Anglican Archbishop of Burma. He was a old man, sitting in a bamboo chair, taking tea with a Karen rebel commander.

I had a letter of introduction from Saw Bo Mya, one of guiding lights of the Karen hill tribes’ rebellion against the Burmese Bhuddist tyrants. Though I was there to see the rebel commander, the conversation with the archbishop proved more memorable.

The Archbishop was on his way to the Lambeth conference in the United Kingdom, a once-a-decade gathering of Anglican primates and prelates from around the world. He was anxious to tell his fellow bishops how Christians were suffering in Burma, but, he said, he worried more about Britain than Burma.

In Burma, our churches and schools are full. There are new converts every day. In Britain, it seems that the congregations are dying away.

He was being polite, but I decided to pick at the scab anyway. Was he aware that the Archbishop of Canterbury had said on British television that one doesn’t have to believe in the Trinity to be a good Christian.

(For my non-religious readers, let me explain how big this comment by the archbishop was: for almost two thousand years, virtually all Christians have treated belief in the tri-une God as a core belief. Otherwise, if one takes the unitary view of God, one ends up, with the Muslims, believing that, as the Koran says, “God neither begets nor is begotten.” For there to be a son, as in Jesus, God must have at least two natures. As it turns out, God has three aspects, but that is a different story.)

At first, the Archbishop of Burma simply could not believe me. It was as if I had said the Archbishop of Canterbury had reintroduced worship of the Fire-God and was throwing virgins into the flames.

When a missionary, who had been in London a few weeks earlier, backed me up, the Burmese Primate shook his head. Every time he visited England, it seemed to get a little odder. “This is why I pray for the English as much as my countrymen,” he said.

Of course, now we have Archbishop Rowan eager to make his peace with Sharia law. Sometimes I think that the U.K.’s only hope is that the next Archbishop of Canterbury hails from the third world.

On a lighter note, check out this fabulous bit of doggrel written by Iowahawk. It is funny and sadly right on.

Check out this fascinating website, which lists vote totals by county in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

It shows that the anti-McCain vote is slightly more than 50% of the GOP vote, as of 8:37 PM election night. If that holds up, it means that roughly half of Virginia Republicans who bothered to vote (turnout was very low this primary season in Virginia) voted against McCain.

If Virginia’s McCain Republicans actually cast their ballots for people still in the race, the result would have been far different. Maybe this is not an accident. Perhaps they did so to send a message to McCain, but without giving the victory to Huckabee, who they feared would not prevail in November. So a vote for Guiliani or Thompson was a safe protest, while one for Huckabee presented the real possibility that the former preacher could win.

While Fox News has already called Virginia for McCain (and rightly so), the anti-McCain poll was divided. That division was good news for the Arizona senator.

I voted in the Oakridge precinct of Arlington County, Virginia, a few minutes before the polls closed at 7 PM. The energy in the school gymnasium was clearly with Obama. The young professionals on line couldn’t contain their excitement and were actually talking about voting for the “first black president.” The only blacks in the room were the school teachers running the polls.

Arlington is Obama territory. Young, white, highly educated and comparatively wealthy.

The only Republican (I presume) on line with me was a soldier in his BDUs, boots and heavy-looking backpack. He wasn’t talking.

One of the poll workers told me Democratic turnout was much higher than in any primary they could remember. As for the Republicans? 2004 was higher in that precinct, I was told.

All day long, I was hearing from Republican friends. They were asking how they should send a message to McCain: by voting for Huckabee or by voting for Thompson (who is out of the race but still on the ballot.) Of course, this is not a statistically valid sample–but it reveals some unease among conservatives in the Old Dominion. McCain should wonder why they still want to send him a message when most of the media has all but handed the race to McCain?

That’s how one conservative activist put it to me at C-PAC last night.

What should we do? She asked. We can’t work for McCain…

I asked her why? She gave me the usual reasons (a general disdain for conservatives, campaign-finance reform, amnesty for illegal immigrants, support for global warming legislation).

I couldn’t help thinking that she and other conservatives want to send the GOP a message: Yes, we are the base and you make us hold our nose to pass legislation (like Medicare’s prescription drug benefit) and vote for candidates we don’t like (Bush in 2000), but now you’re asking us to vote for a candidate that hates us. That is embarrassed by us. That has a sour look on his face when he comes here to C-PAC to placate us.

In a few months, the activists may forget about all this. After all, they rallied for Dole in 1996. (In fact, Dole and McCain are a lot alike: senators, sardonic, war heroes with bad arms… By the end of 2008, they will probably have one more thing in common: they both lost to someone named Clinton.)

If the activists are looking for something to do and they really can’t work for the McCain campaign, they can pick a contested House race and volunteer there. In the thumbin’ of 2006, the GOP lost 30 seats in the House of Representatives. Eighteen of those were lost by less than 5,000 votes each. Another six or so seats, were lost to scandal (Foley, DeLay et al). If the GOP won back all of those–a big “if”–it would be within six seats of majority control. Of course, the math above does not account the 28 GOP retirements, which mean costly defenses even in supposed “safe” seats.

So the House is an uphill battle with every single probability against the conservative activists. Just the kind of struggle the Right used to relish.

Mitt Romney dropped out, just like his father did.

In both cases, the road got rough and the media got tough–and Romney pere and fils ran.

In 1969, during the Republican governor’s meeting, George Romney begged Rockefeller to let him leave the race. He wanted to leave with honor, but leave. (Kinda like his position on Vietnam.) The brainwashing comment had been taken out of context–he meant that U.S. generals in South Vietnam were trying to snow him–but it still hurt Romney every time it was played.

Mitt is leaving after losing a number of races. Yet he is still a viable candidate. No doubt, he saw his candidacy as a troubled investment, not a cause. With investments, there is always a point where the green-eyeshade in you says, ok, we’ve lost enough. Causes are like love affairs and sharks; they go until stopped by an outside force.

It is better that the country knows now what insubstantial stuff Mitt Romney is made of, rather than later, in the searing white crucible of the presidency. Consider the intensity of hatred that Bush had to defy in order to turn things around in Iraq. Could Romney withstand that heat? Obviously not.

Romney’s departure from the presidential race robbed most Republicans of the only viable alternative to McCain. This little fact will not be gratefully remembered.

He left in the name of party unity in a time of war. It is a noble sentiment and a vestigal emotion from an earlier age. Is courage too?

UPDATE: I talked to a few senior staffers at the Romney campaign at C-PAC. They said the “real reason” for Romney’s exit was mathematics: He would have to win 4 out of every five of the remaining delegates. Backchannel conversations with Huckabee revealed that he has no plans to drop out and, indeed, has a visceral hatred of Mormons. With Huckabee staying in, Romney had no chance.