[Editor’s note: The dean and towering intellect of the American conservative movement — William F. Buckley Jr. — died in his study sometime Tuesday night. He had been ill for some time with emphysema, and had not filed a column since the first day of February. In that column, he used the previous night’s Obama-Clinton debate to assay the candidates’ use of the English language, an instrument and weapon of which he has been the absolute master for more than a half century. That Feb. 1 column — Buckley’s last — is reprinted below.]

[Editor’s note: The dean and towering intellect of the American conservative movement — William F. Buckley Jr. — died in his study sometime Tuesday night. He had been ill for some time with emphysema, and had not filed a column since the first day of February. In that column, he used the previous night’s Obama-Clinton debate to assay the candidates’ use of the English language, an instrument and weapon of which he has been the absolute master for more than a half century. That Feb. 1 column — Buckley’s last — is reprinted below.]

If you are in search of details on financial traffic moving about, paying for all the political ads we come across, plus high living for the traffic cops, go to your computer and try searching for “Federal Election Commission” on the Internet.

It asks for miraculous powers of revision to not see a show on television at night and satisfy ourselves that by abiding by the protocols of collective bargaining we are fighting for the survival of essential American rights. The law is an ass, a humbug, if it is defined by the number of people whose rights are being affirmed by neglecting them entirely.

Sixty years ago I was the editor of the daily newspaper at college, and one memorable day in September, plotting the year’s business, we got word that the two big tobacco companies (R.J. Reynolds and Philip Morris) were suspending all their ads in the college press. The news was greeted with dismay both by editors who smoked (“We’ll just die from something else,” they harrumphed) and by those who did not, equally affected by this big hole in the advertising budget. Sixty years!

It is incorrect to assume that all the pro-abortion and anti-abortion arguments have been made. They are centerpieces in vivid, resourceful, emotional and inquisitive thought. Witness the continuing, and intense, curiosity about the presidential candidates and how they feel on the basic issues.

It’s not as it was with President Nixon. The thought of Nixon is impossible except under the shadow of Watergate, which would have meant impeachment and probable conviction.

One stares in dumb amazement at the war front because, incredibly, front-page news in the past few days has had to do with what did or did not happen almost a hundred years ago. More exactly, what should what happened a hundred years ago be called?

In days (long) gone by, the tradition was that gentlemen engaged in media work do not disparage other gentlemen engaged in media work. The protocol was blatantly violated from time to time. How, in the age of Drew Pearson, could one have got through a year without squawking, reviling, protesting — perhaps dwelling on the case for the repeal of the First Amendment?

Pity John McCain, for whom everything has gone sour in the past period, taking him from lead candidate for the Republican nomination to the cellar. Some years ago, after hearing what John McCain withstood in North Vietnam, I pledged never to write a negative word about him, and over the years it has required very few beads of charity to stand by him. His latest difficulty started out sounding worthy of another medal of honor, to wear alongside the one he earned through the efforts of the North Vietnamese torturers.

CNN devoted an entire hour to the chaos in Jena, La., and rendered a considerable service. We hear, running through it all, the voices of critical figures -- the district attorney, the school principal and a school board member, the mothers of the defendants and of the victim, the outsiders. The temptation for this journalist was to seek to isolate words and events and watch the tensions rise, the ease with which despair made its way into the picture, creating a scene reproduced throughout the world.

In the late 1950s, the formal engagement in state socialism by Great Britain had twice been confirmed by the voters. And the socialists had been twice disfranchised. Great Britain was a mess. Clement Attlee, the clever lawyer-intellectual who embraced the dreams of common ownership, couldn’t quite sell the country on the success of it.

Not enough attention has been paid, on the Iraq question, to the factor of universal access to information.

For many years, in many wars, news reporters could not get near the front-line scene. And where high politics were concerned and dictators held sway, newsmen — and foreign diplomats — not only were stymied, they were deliberately misled.

Some set the matter aside as being nothing more than verbal play for the benefit of word-men. What term properly designates what we are doing, and what we are enduring, in many parts of the world, the symbolic center of which is the Twin Towers site in Manhattan?

The most recent initiative of the president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, is to change Venezuela’s time zone by one half-hour. Why? There is only one reasonable answer: to annoy the United States.

Western Europe has a Muslim problem, and it is particularly acute in Great Britain, which is more intimately linked to constitutional traditions and procedures.

Did you know — better, would you have guessed? — that the top income-tax rate in India, which is the home of breast-fed socialism, is a mere 30 percent? That is down from 60 percent in 1979. How does that compare? Well, in the United Kingdom it is down from 83 percent in 1979 to 40 percent today; in the United States, from 70 to 35. In all three cases, it has been cut roughly in half.

Did you know — better, would you have guessed? — that the top income-tax rate in India, which is the home of breast-fed socialism, is a mere 30 percent? That is down from 60 percent in 1979. How does that compare? Well, in the United Kingdom it is down from 83 percent in 1979 to 40 percent today; in the United States, from 70 to 35. In all three cases, it has been cut roughly in half.

[Editor’s note: The dean of American conservatives, William F. Buckley, Jr., has been ill for several weeks. This is his first column since June.]

The genius of David Chase, the originator of “The Sopranos,” was never more evident than in the last episode of the series. I viewed it with an earnest and cosmopolitan young man and his lady, and we wondered, as we waited for the show to start, what would the final act do to Tony Soprano.