Shock! Christopher Buckley, an East Coast Intellectual Elitist, is supporting Barack Obama for president! It's funny because the intellectual end of the conservative movement has now completely dried up and blown away. And we're defining "intellectual end" broadly enough to include David Brooks btw. Here is the relevant passage from the Buckley column, printed in Tina Brown's weird Daily Brownington Post internet buzz thing:

I am—drum roll, please, cue trumpets—making this announcement in the cyberpages of The Daily Beast (what joy to be writing for a publication so named!) rather than in the pages of National Review, where I write the back-page column. For a reason: My colleague, the superb and very dishy Kathleen Parker, recently wrote in National Review Online a column stating what John Cleese as Basil Fawlty would call “the bleeding obvious”: namely, that Sarah Palin is an embarrassment, and a dangerous one at that. She’s not exactly alone. New York Times columnist David Brooks, who began his career at NR, just called Governor Palin “a cancer on the Republican Party.” As for Kathleen, she has to date received 12,000 (quite literally) foam-at-the-mouth hate-emails. One correspondent, if that’s quite the right word, suggested that Kathleen’s mother should have aborted her and tossed the fetus into a Dumpster. There’s Socratic dialogue for you. Dear Pup once said to me sighfully after a right-winger who fancied himself a WFB protégé had said something transcendently and provocatively cretinous, “You know, I’ve spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks.” Well, the dear man did his best. At any rate, I don’t have the kidney at the moment for 12,000 emails saying how good it is he’s no longer alive to see his Judas of a son endorse for the presidency a covert Muslim who pals around with the Weather Underground. So, you’re reading it here first.

Amusingly, over at NRO's The Corner, they've been running fawning friendly interviews with Chris all week. A vague request for comment on this column by Mark Steyn has not yet been answered. Presumably K-Lo and Jonah are wating for the "grownups" to weigh in seriously, or alternatively for a particularly insane email they can quote in lieu of coming up with a rosy response to this rather ominous column from a current high-profile National Review contributor.