Lean Left

Ethical Priorities at National Review

by KTK

October 14th, 2008

No one really cares what goes on at National Review, still less its online daycare center, NRO, but it’s interesting to see how they handle their various internal schisms.

Many will recall Ann Coulter’s unhinged NRO column in which she declared that “we should invade [the 9/11 hijackers'] countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity”. It prompted widespread criticism of both her and NRO. After various awkward attempts to defend herself, in which she only dug her hole deeper, and after getting into a public hissy fit with NRO, which had been trying to distance itself from the criticism, and in which Coulter, with characteristic class, called her editors “girly boys”, she was dumped from their roster of columnists.

Many people thought that was a rare sign of decency on their part, but, also with characteristic class, Jonah Goldberg published a column offering a handful of explanations for her firing and going out of his way to explain that it was not related to her racist, murderous raving.

It was Ann who decided to sever her ties with National Review — not the other way around.

This is what happened.

In the wake of her invade-and-Christianize-them column, Coulter wrote a long, rambling rant of a response to her critics that was barely coherent. She’s a smart and funny person, but this was Ann at her worst — emoting rather than thinking, and badly needing editing and some self-censorship, or what is commonly referred to as “judgment.”

Running this “piece” would have been an embarrassment to Ann, and to NRO. Rich Lowry pointed this out to her in an e-mail (I was returning from my honeymoon). She wrote back an angry response, defending herself from the charge that she hates Muslims and wants to convert them at gunpoint.

But this was not the point. It was NEVER the point. The problem with Ann’s first column was its sloppiness of expression and thought. Ann didn’t fail as a person — as all her critics on the Left say — she failed as WRITER, which for us is almost as bad.

Rich wrote her another e-mail, engaging her on this point, and asking her — in more diplomatic terms — to approach the whole controversy not as a PR-hungry, free-swinging pundit on Geraldo, but as a careful writer.

No response.

Instead, she apparently proceeded to run around town bad-mouthing NR and its employees. Then she showed up on TV and, in an attempt to ingratiate herself with fellow martyr Bill Maher, said we were “censoring” her.

By this point, it was clear she wasn’t interested in continuing the relationship.

What publication on earth would continue a relationship with a writer who would refuse to discuss her work with her editors? What publication would continue to publish a writer who attacked it on TV? What publication would continue to publish a writer who lied about it — on TV and to a Washington Post reporter?

And, finally, what CONSERVATIVE publication would continue to publish a writer who doesn’t even know the meaning of the word “censorship”?

That’s what matters to NRO: that its columnists’ vengeful calls for assassination and forcible religious conversion (along with bizarre ranting about the “lumpen mesomorphs” at airport security counters and how she was desperate to hear bombs dropping in Afghanistan) are not written well enough - not that they’re crazed, uncivilized, or inflammatory. Openly promoting murderous religious crusades is not a problem for Jonah Goldberg (do the words “forcible conversion” evoke no cultural associations at all for that dipshit?); refusing to respond to an NRO editor’s e-mail, however, is a firing offense. And, even after that fiasco, they apparently spent several weeks negotiating with Coulter and soliciting further columns to try to make sense of her original one. Her first screed was published just two days after 9/11, and she was not publicly terminated until almost three weeks later, on October 2, 2001 - again, for reasons that, as Goldberg goes to lengths to insist, were NEVER about her hating Muslims and wanting to convert them at gunpoint. (In fact, Goldberg approvingly notes that “William F. Buckley himself has called, essentially, for a holy war” as proof of his utter lack of sensitivity on that particular point.)

So we have a baseline for NRO’s moral sensibilities: advocating holy war, assassination, imperialism, and forcible religious conversion is not beyond the pale (ha!) for them, but insulting NRO editors is.

OK. So now we know. (Commentary would be, I think, distinctly pointless.)

But this week we get another look at those moral standards as the philosophes of the National Review once more wield their swords of moral righteousness.

Christopher Buckley, son of National Review founder and obnoxious bigot William F., wrote a column for the NRO. He also wrote a completely separate column at The Daily Beast, which is a Tina Brown-edited online magazine totally unrelated to National Review. Last Friday, in his Daily Beast column, he endorsed Barack Obama for the Presidency, for predictable reasons - McCain has betrayed his own prinicples and Obama is smart and admirable.

He notes that he did not make any such comments at NRO, because one of their other columnists had received over 12,000 hostile e-mails after criticizing Sarah Palin and he didn’t want to deal, himself, with the NRO’s particular brand of open-mindedness. It was wasted effort, of course. They came and got him anyway.

“Within hours”, Buckley says, NRO was inundated with angry e-mails and subscription cancellations (Rich Lowry says it was about 100 e-mails and a handful of cancellations), all of them prompted by a column Buckley had not published at NRO. (Such is the keenness of the right-winger’s discriminatory faculties.) The complainants included some of Buckley’s fellow writers. And so the next morning Buckley e-mailed Rich Lowry at NRO and offered to resign his column there, to spare them further backlash. Lowry immediately accepted, and it was announced in Buckley’s Beast column today.

Within hours of my endorsement appearing in The Daily Beast it became clear that National Review had a serious problem on its hands. So the next morning, I thought the only decent thing to do would be to offer to resign my column there. This offer was accepted—rather briskly!—by Rich Lowry, NR’s editor, and its publisher, the superb and able and fine Jack Fowler. . . .

So, I have been effectively fatwahed (is that how you spell it?) by the conservative movement, and the magazine that my father founded must now distance itself from me. But then, conservatives have always had a bit of trouble with the concept of diversity. The GOP likes to say it’s a big-tent. Looks more like a yurt to me.

Lowry, of course, is as clueless as ever. As with Coulter, he somehow tries to spin this as having nothing to do with him:

I’d like to clarify this “firing” business. Over the weekend, Chris wrote us a jaunty e-mail with the subject line “A Sincere Offer,” in which he offered to resign his column on NR’s back page and said that if we accepted, there “would be no hard feelings, only warmest regards and understanding.” We took the offer sincerely.

For an editor who claims he once fired a nasty, racist, pro-violence religious bigot because she “doesn’t even know the meaning of the word ‘censorship’”, he seems strangely ignorant of the meaning of the phrase “offer to resign”. An offer of a resignation is not a resignation - it’s an indication of willingness to stay on if the other person approves, or to leave if they say so. Buckley is out at NRO because Lowry took the affirmative step of pushing him out. It’s true that Buckley wasn’t “fired” (Lowry is reacting to a misleading headline on Buckley’s column), but it isn’t true that he left of his own accord, and it makes no sense to say “we took the offer [to resign] sincerely”. Of course the offer was sincere; it only became an actual resignation when Lowry decided Buckley couldn’t stay, but for some bizarre reason he wants to imply that it all just happened without his participation - the offer was sincere, so there was nothing he could do about it.

Aside from that nonsense, we are now in a position to calibrate an endorsement of Barack Obama on the scale of moral righteousness, as understood at NRO.

It took them three weeks to get rid of Coulter, in relation to her call, on the NRO Web site, for religious war, forcible conversion, and a program of assassinations, and then only after, and only because, she had personally insulted the NRO editors.

Buckley was pushed out of NRO 24 hours after offering a political endorsement of Barack Obama while going out of his way to insulate NRO from the issue.

So for Rich Lowry (and presumably Jonah Goldberg, though he hasn’t weighed in on the Buckley thing), endorsing Obama is vastly worse than religious war, bigotry, and racism - it requires an immediate repudiation with no opportunity to make amends as they begged Coulter to do. It’s apparently worse even than insulting the editors personally - in both cases you get fired, but in the latter case, again, it takes longer. In fact, it appears to be the worst thing anyone at National Review has ever done (at least no one else is known to have been fired faster) - a conclusion that is difficult to believe, but seems to be inescapable.

So we now have a relative scale of moral priority for National Review and its special-needs editors’ corps:

• Crusade/assassination/bat-shit violent crazy: A-OK
• Bat-shit violent crazy/bad writing: Demand apology
• Call Jonah Goldberg “girly boy”: Firing offense (wait 3 weeks)
• Endorse Barack Obama: Firing offense (immediate)

This is a group of people who would have to grow a mile in moral stature just to be able to be an embarrassment to themselves.

Categories: Bloggin, Culture, General, Media, News & Current Events, Politics |