Commentary

NRO Got Bit

by T Nelson

t's a free country, at least for now, and the A&E cable channel is free to hire and fire whomever it wants, for any reason they want. So is the conservative magazine National Review. So, just as A&E was free to screw up their hit show Duck Dynasty by dropping its star for saying something honest but unflattering about gays, NR was well within their rights to drop their only science/math guy like a tabasco-filled pumpkin pone when he went off half-cocked a few months back and said something honest but unflattering in his free time about one specific race in America.

I forget which race it was. But it seems a little disingenuous for NR Online to complain now that they're getting sued by Michael Mann, the global warming nut, because they went off half-cocked and said something honest but unflattering about the size and analytical provenance of his hockey stick. NRO deserves credit for fighting the global lack-of-warming deniers. But maybe having a science guy on staff might have saved them a bunch o' bucks. And now, quite understandably, they've also rediscovered that freedom of speech is important. Somehow, though, it comes out sounding a bit like the way that your call is important to the electric company when you call them after they decide to cut off your electricity for not paying their bill within three days after they send it out.

So, like Wikipedia, they want us to donate. And why not? NRO has the distinction of having dropped some of the best and most popular conservative writers in the country. They've still got some of the best in the business.

We expect news media giants like Yahoo and NBC to pre-emptively cave to the PC movement. So when NR did it, they became just another media company, and they got on my “cost-cutting” list, just like Scientific American a few years back when they abandoned science and published an issue full of hit pieces on Bjørn Lomborg. (And yes, I canceled my “own” goddam subscription, having learned from WFB's book by that title).

Actions are what counts in this world. The GOP establishment has so many squishes they could qualify for Federal support as a wetland under the Clean Water Act. If the GOP stood by its principles, Dick Cheney would be in the middle of his second term by now and the Washington Post would be running sizzling exposés about some unfortunate slip of the tongue by the nation's first full-time cardiologist. Running for president is the VP's job, but Cheney just sat there being brilliant, and instead of planning his campaign he just passed the time shooting lawyers. His boss, clearly impressed, didn't even consider replacing him. As a result, the GOP was free to scrounge up some guy from World War I, who promptly got trounced by some other guy whose only qualification was to be of a politically fashionable ethnicity.

Maybe that only proves that no good deed goes unpunished. Government got bit a long time ago, and they're now walking toward us with arms outstretched. We're from the government, they're saying, and we're here to eat your brains ... I mean help ... ourselves to your bank accounts and your health insurance and whatever else you got.

As far as our brains are concerned, the juiciest ones are the ones inside the heads of the y-gens and the #gens. That's where the real battle is being fought, and the only bastion that remains is manned by a handful of dissidents who are still able to think and resist. Them young-uns on the sidelines aren't going to take a stand until they see what, if anything, the GOP stands for. If both left and right do the same thing, why take sides? If both sides are the same, people can't take sides even if they want to.

The GOP establishment says that compromise is part of politics. Extremism in the defense of liberty is a vice in their eyes, because it gets you defeated, like Barry Goldwater back in—my gosh, has it really been that long? But when the zombies are inside the gates, is it better to compromise and become a zombie by degrees, or go down fighting?

I don't know the answer to that, but unpleasant truths need to be exposed and lies need to be fought. We expect A&E to be sleazy. But we hold our political and intellectual leaders to a higher standard than a lowly TV network. It's demoralizing when they throw one of their own to the slobbering zombie hordes to appease them. It may be comfy up there in their Governor's mansion, but hey, we're surrounded out here, we're running low on ammo, and those guys are shooting some of their arrows in the wrong direction.