Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Rich Lowry Pretends There is Good News

National Review editor Rich Lowry--a guy who supposedly cares more about truth in reporting than searching for ways to validate his magazine's agenda--managed to get my interest by writing a post called "The Good News For Obama." The first few sentences, however, disturbed me, not necessarily because they were incorrect but because he says a lot about National Review's online stable of writers:
. . . I suppose is that he's just had a 1994-like event without actually losing control of Congress. Tonight reminds me a little bit of the defeat of the rule on the crime bill in the summer of 1994 — a sharp crack in the edifice of Democratic rule that promised more change to come.
And then, of course, is the clincher sentence: "It was all avoidable, of course, if they were willing to compromise sooner, but they were drunk on their ideology and their power." Yeah, if only they were "willing to compromise," those pigheads. Does this sound like a dispatch from Opposite Land?

From what I recall (and I was 8 at the time), the Clinton crime bill was exactly a model of the kind of compromise that Lowry and his fellow Republicans choose to ignore--it created whole new classes of death penalty offenses, including nonviolent drug trafficking and carjacking, and it rewrote the book against habeas corpus for a lot of drug offenders. The "compromise" part was that it also included legislation outlawing assault weapons, which I don't even hear teabaggers complaining about very much (although that doesn't stop them from guessing about Obama's agenda for the guns they currently own). Newt Gingrich's Contract With America did its best to ignore whatever part of the bill might have pleased the Republican masses, arguing (and getting) legislation establishing mandatory minimum sentences for said drug traffickers and carjackers. Ignoring whatever compromises your opponents offer is itself offered in the spirit of compromise.

It has gotten to the point in National Review where even the pretense of either supporting Barack Obama or registering that he is popular and intelligent, or even a decent human being, is no longer acceptable.

In The New Republic, Jonathan Chait wrote about National Review's competitor The Weekly Standard, and sought to define their difference in this way:
A magazine like National Review specializes in making the case for conservative ideas. The Standard's contribution is to assert over and over that Republicans are succeeding, or at least doing better than you think they are. The idea is to buck up your side and encourage them to keep fighting, in order to ward off the self-defeating psychology of losing.
Maybe. Or maybe they basically serve the same function, and the only difference is that National Review has slightly better writers. It reflects a Larouchian readership that has such a foul conception of liberalism that when someone says something innocuous about how Obama did the right thing in taking out Somali pirates, they have to perform public penance for the remainder of the day. Does this really seem like the kind of atmosphere where "conservative ideas" can be expressed without fear?

You have to feel sorry for the people who work there, sometimes. I know it's not really fun to be a journalist anywhere, but it must particularly sting having to constantly walk on eggshells, satisfying a constituency that no longer sees open-mindedness as a virtue. This is probably true of any political magazine (it's why I can't stand reading The Nation, either) but in the case of National Review, you have a stable of writers that are basically forcing themselves to deny that Obama, like a broken clock, has to make a pleasing decision once in a while. The laws of physics demand it.

One of these days, in the near future, I'm going to write a long post about why I still can't believe they publish the insane ramblings of Andy McCarthy. Here is his latest piece, replete with facts clearly pulled out of his ass; here is a classic, in case you're in need of a good evening purge (not a euphemism: I mean vomiting).

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