In today's media environment there's no shortage of opinion, heck even I have one, but that also means there's a glut of what I call "idiocrity."  Exhibit A comes from Mark Krikorian, a contributor at a publication that should know better, namely the National Review.  First he wonders why we should pronounce President Obama's first Supreme Court justice nominee's name with the proper Spanish pronunciation, which apparently is the way she wants it to be pronounced, even though it's not the "natural English pronunciation."  Then he follows up that post with more "logic":

Deferring to people's own pronunciation of their names should obviously be our first inclination, but there ought to be limits. Putting the emphasis on the final syllable of Sotomayor is unnatural in English (which is why the president stopped doing it after the first time at his press conference), unlike my correspondent's simple preference for a monophthong over a diphthong, and insisting on an unnatural pronunciation is something we shouldn't be giving in to…

This may seem like carping, but it's not. Part of our success in assimilation has been to leave whole areas of culture up to the individual, so that newcomers have whatever cuisine or religion or so on they want, limiting the demand for conformity to a smaller field than most other places would. But one of the areas where conformity is appropriate is how your new countrymen say your name, since that's not something the rest of us can just ignore, unlike what church you go to or what you eat for lunch. And there are basically two options — the newcomer adapts to us, or we adapt to him. And multiculturalism means there's a lot more of the latter going on than there should be.

To this I say, "Huh?"  I need only look at my own experience to say that this is just plain stupid.  My last name is Lowder and it's proper pronunciation makes it rhyme with "chowder", but before most people hear my name pronounced they assume that the first syllable rhymes with "hoe".  Using this guy's "logic" my family, which has been in North Carolina for over a couple of hundred years, has been forcing our neighbors to speak unnaturally for generations thus I guess we're not properly assimilated. How un-American of us!  I guess I should also apologize for my parents dropping the "h" from John.

I think Lex is right; Buckley's legacy is tarnished by this kind of writing.