Your quote is just missing a few words:

...the best way to help this economy recover was to let [rich] people keep more of their own money. And so, I worked with the Congress to cut taxes on everybody who pays taxes. ... And the plan worked [for myself and other wealthy people]. If you think about [the top 20%], where we were, coming out of 2001, and where we are today, you can't help but say the plan worked [and those idiots in the bottom 80% are funding our power]. Cutting taxes helped stimulate economic growth [where it needed it, at the top].

These unscientific "just so" stories reveal more about the teller than they do about the truth. Sir David could just as easily have chosen to say that men bought Ferraris to increase their advantage over other men; making their mark higher on the tree, so to speak. This version would still be about sex, but is not driven by the female of the species (pun intended).

Or, he could have told the young woman any of a variety of other things:

• Turn off lights when you're not in a room.
• Recycle.
• Walk or bicycle where possible.
• Given her a resource that would have provided these and many other tips to help reduce her personal footprint on the planet.

The fact that he chose to make a gender-blaming response to a young female tells more about his view of young females than about how she can personally help reduce carbon emissions.

Sir David's intent was probably completely without malice. I took it to be intended as a joke, in fact. But Sir David's choice of what is funny still reveals an underlying attitude to young women. His joke's message implied that this young woman (a) was shallow enough to be impressed by a car (yes, I know there are women like that, but I don't think they're in the majority—at least they don't seem to be in Dallas or the Texas hill country, where I spend most of my time); (b) was responsible for the choices of wealthy car buyers.

People make jokes about race and disability as well. Because they're joking, does that mean the person choosing to tell the racist/sexist/whatever joke is not racist/sexist/whatever themselves? No, it means that on some level, they think racism/sexism/whatever is funny. Playing off stereotypes gets an easy laugh for many a comedian, but that doesn't make it a good one.

People "laugh because it's funny and we laugh because it's true"—to us. When we don't laugh, it's frequently because we don't share the frame of reference that finds the joke funny.

It's hard to resist, I know (I've tossed them scraps myself). Still, I thought I'd post a reminder to the bs-free souls on this thread ;-)

Would you rather he talked down to you?

Buckley's vocabulary range exceeded that of most people. Whatever his politics, he thought extremely clearly and used exactly the right word to express the particular shade of meaning he needed. To do less--to censor himself because we, the unwashed masses, might not know what a word meant--would be insulting. Of his potential audience, some would not read him because they found him bewildering, some would read with perfect understanding, and some would read with the occasional reference to a dictionary. I fell into the latter category.

Further, Buckley felt this was part of his work ethic. In the article you link to, Buckley himself describes what he felt as his obligation in the course of his work:

But newspapers, in particular in one-paper cities, tend to acknowledge an obligation beyond merely reporting the news. The very idea of a ''feature,'' whether designed to advise (Ann Landers), amuse (Art Buchwald), satirize (G. B. Trudeau) or opine (the syndicated columnist) presupposes that the performer should use the full range of his relevant skills, even if the percentage of readers who turn to that feature is reduced. [emphasis mine]

He was not a show-off, he was himself, and unapologetically so. If all we read is only simplified, homogenized language, we will find it hard to escape simplified, homogenized thought.

Thank you for so perfectly expressing the joy of the dictionary. To your description I might add the joy of adding a new category of thought when you add a word. We're linguistic souls (even the mostly spatial types like myself), and having a new word or symbol attached to a concept immediately adds a tool we can use when thinking. This is why one of the first things repressive regimes do is burn the books and suppress the intellectuals.