It’s a problem when I cannot tell the difference between the National Review and the Washington Post.
NR likes to pride itself as the beacon of conservatism. Well the light that shines from it is pretty damn dim. A dim beacon serves no purpose. And if NR echoes WaPo on how they view what happened in Charlottesville , then throw that dim beacon away and stop wasting your time.
NR likes to pride itself as the beacon of conservatism. Well the light that shines from it is pretty damn dim. A dim beacon serves no purpose. And if NR echoes WaPo on how they view what happened in Charlottesville , then throw that dim beacon away and stop wasting your time.
Very well said. And that has been true for QUITE some time now, dating back to at least their sacking of John Derbyshire for daring to tell the truth.
ReplyDeleteLowry had ample reason to remove Derbyshire from the masthead in 2006 and failed to do so. (His babble about IWSBs in 2012 was inane, btw). Derbyshire's function at NR was to provide entertainment. Unlike Meghan Cox Gurdon, Florence King, and Cathy Seipp, he wasn't funny anymore.
ReplyDeleteThe trouble with NR is in part the market: journalism is imploding and competing occupations are collecting the talent that might, in 1980, have been prospects for NR. Lowry hasn't recruited anyone interesting for the staff since about 1999 and hardly any for the per-diem contributor slots since about 2002. Some of his hires over the years (Robert verBruggen, Daniel Foster, and Jason Lee Steorts) have been on the spectrum which runs from 'vapid' to 'pathetic'. (Steorts was responsible for the end of Mark Steyn's association with the magazine). Now their most astringent contributor is Kevin Williamson, whose efforts are given over to absurd screeds targeting white male wage-earners.
Many years ago, Richard John Neuhuaus offered an idiosyncrtatic definition of 'defunct' to mean 'having finished a course of life'. By that standard, NR is defunct (and Commentary is a substitute for John Podhoretz finding honest work. A pity, but that's the reality.