"Boy, I can't think of a better Christmas present than to read about these vile unpleasant asocial deluded individuals suffering..."

"... all locked together in a big metal box. Schadenfreude to the max."

Should Todd "legitimate rape" Akin step aside?

The editors of the Nation Review Online say he should:

While Akin is a stalwart conservative and an honorable man, we regret to say that he inspires no such confidence. That is one reason why Senator Claire McCaskill, the sitting Democratic senator, boosted him during the Republican primaries with ads calling him a “true conservative.” She knew that she is the weakest Senate incumbent on the ballot this year and that her only hope was to draw a weak opponent. Akin won a three-way primary with a plurality of the vote; there was no run-off. McCaskill’s strategy is now paying off.

Akin has backed off from his remarks, albeit with the politician’s excuse of “misspeaking.” People who make such remarks on television are typically capable of making more like them, or rather incapable of exercising the judgment to refrain. We suspect that this same lack of judgment will cause Akin to blow past tomorrow evening’s deadline for him to leave the race and allow the Republicans to select a better nominee. We hope the congressman, who surely wants to see a Senate with as much conservative strength as possible next year, will prove us wrong.

Akin should...
	Step aside right now.
	Stand his ground.
pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: "National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman John Cornyn (R-Tex.) informed Rep. Todd Akin on Monday that the national GOP will not spend money to help elect him to the Senate...."

AND: Hannity, talking to Akin, essentially tells him to get out:

I think there is one political reality that I think has to be faced by you and your campaign and that is that you know, the reality here is that Democrats now have a ton of ammunition and they are now going to try to use these remarks to hurt everybody they can. And if I was put in that position, I would at least be thinking about what is in the best interest of the party. hat is in the best interest of, you know, Mitt Romney in this case. What is in the best interest of the people of Missouri, are they going to be able to hear a campaign about issues or is this going to be the distraction of the campaign. Are you -- you're not even considering that?"

Krauthammer says Akin must leave:

"He's got to leave... He's toxic. Nobody will touch him. Republicans aren't going to support him. He's not going to get any money. They've tossed away a seat that they could easily have won. It isn't only that it was offensive and toxic; it was unbelievably stupid. And there is enough stupidity in Congress that we don't need to add to it in this large amount. The guy's got to leave."

It was sharp of Republicans to drop Akin cold. No one thought he was worth defending.

"If being a louse were a crime, John Edwards would hang for it."

"But he is instead facing prison for alleged campaign-finance violations, and it is our obligation to come unenthusiastically to his defense. He may be guilty of bribery, and if he were a sitting senator he would likely be guilty of gross ethics violations, but the facts do not support prosecuting Edwards under campaign-finance laws."

Say the editors of The National Review.

"If you could do it again, would you publish 'The Talk: The Nonblack Version'?"

"I never ponder counterfactuals."

But he also says: "I may even just give up writing and work as a butler or something. I sometimes feel I've said everything I want to say."

Rich Lowry is keeping it short.

"Needless to say, no one at National Review shares Derb’s appalling view of what parents supposedly should tell their kids about blacks in this instantly notorious piece here."

That's the whole item. Should he have said more?

For links to more commentary on the abysmally bad John Derbyshire piece, go here.

IN THE COMMENTS: Patrick said:

He should have added another line, informing NRO readers that Derbyshire is no longer an NR contributor.

Remember when National Review fired Ann Coulter?

UPDATE: Rich Lowry announces that NR has fired Derbyshire. After some nice compliments — "he’s a deeply literate, funny, and incisive writer" — and some half-compliments — he's "maddening, outrageous, cranky, and provocative" — Lowry calls the new piece "nasty and indefensible." NR would never have published it, yet the name, National Review, is getting used to inflate its prominence. "Derb is effectively using our name to get more oxygen for views with which we’d never associate ourselves otherwise." Lowry calls the article "so outlandish it constitutes a kind of letter of resignation." Perhaps it is what Derbyshire wanted, and now he's got a powerful send-off.

"Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul is in a bid to make history in Iowa."

"Can he become the first marginal, conspiracy-minded congressman with an embarrassing catalog of racist material published under his name to win the caucuses?"

The National Review's Rich Lowry goes hardcore.

Gingrich's "character flaws — his impulsiveness, his grandiosity, his weakness for half-baked (and not especially conservative) ideas..."

"... made him a poor Speaker of the House. Again and again he combined incendiary rhetoric with irresolute action, bringing Republicans all the political costs of a hardline position without actually taking one. Again and again he put his own interests above those of the causes he championed in public."

He says, and his defenders say, that time, reflection, and religious conversion have conquered his dark side. If he is the nominee, a campaign that should be about whether the country will continue on the path to social democracy would inevitably become to a large extent a referendum on Gingrich instead. And there is reason to doubt that he has changed. Each week we see the same traits that weakened Republicans from 1995 through 1998: I’d vote for Paul Ryan’s Medicare reform; Paul Ryan’s Medicare reform is radical right-wing social engineering; I apologize for saying that, and no one should quote what I said because I was wrong; actually, what I said was right all along but nobody understood me. I helped defeat Communism; anyone who made money in the ’80s and ’90s owes me; I’m like Reagan and Thatcher. Local community boards should decide what to do with illegal immigrants. Freddie Mac paid me all that money to tell them how stupid they were. Enough. Gingrich has always said he wants to transform the country. He appears unable to transform, or even govern, himself. He should be an adviser to the Republican party, but not again its head.

So say the editors of The National Review.

"In my house growing up, The Times substituted for religion. If The Times said it, it was the absolute truth." — The NYT deletes that quote!

Whoa! That quote was the centerpiece of my blog post linking to the NYT story about Jill Abramson taking over as the new executive editor of the New York Times. I thought it was rich material for contemplation. The new editor grew up idealizing the newspaper, and now she's in control of it. What will happen? Will we get more truth?

I didn't expect such a sharp slap in the face! The first thing that happens is the quote about truth disappears down the memory hole! Not a word about the excision appears at the site.

I wasn't the only one who called attention to the now-missing quote. James Taranto did:

It may be the most revealing quote ever published in the New York Times.... The Times has of late acted a great deal like a corrupt religious institution. This column has chronicled its often vicious and dishonest attempts--both on the editorial page and in the news sections, which Abramson will head--to shore up its own authority by trying to tear down its competitors....

Instapundit did:

SO IF READING THE NEW YORK TIMES IS A RELIGION, then does that make Jill Abramson pope?

Jay Nordlinger at the National Review did:

I was just writing a column for tomorrow. I was going to say something — not worth getting into the context right now — about not belonging to “the Church of the New York Times.”... 

Wanting to take a break from writing... I checked the news. I was reading about Jill Abramson, just tabbed to be the new chief editor of the New York Times. I read this: “In my house growing up, The Times substituted for religion. If The Times said it, it was the absolute truth.”

Deleting the quote is so pathetic. Abramson held the newspaper in such high esteem, then takes over, and behaves as if the story announcing her ascent is some sort of accidental tweet to be taken down before anybody sees it. But everybody already saw it! We're in the middle of talking about it! How about contributing to the dialogue? But no, we get coverup. As if the lesson hadn't be learned long ago: It's the coverup that gets you.

The instinct to delete... is that what Abramson would like us to think of as the mark of her leadership?

The Church of the New York Times seems to be one of those shame-based religions.

IN THE COMMENTS: Meade said:

The NYT was hacked!

Maybe it was a prank. Can't say with certitude.

ADDED: In Politco, Burgess Everett carries water for the NYT"

Of the quote’s removal... Taranto wrote that the editing process was the likely culprit for the quote’s removal, but added: “It's obvious that an editorial decision was made to ‘rectify’ a quote that made the Times look foolish.”

Not so, Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy told POLITICO. “Space was clearly a consideration,” as the story was used in the newspaper, Murphy said, adding that because the original version of the story was online all day, it needed to be freshened for the paper edition, which did not contain the quote.

“The entire story was rewritten after Jill, [publisher] Arthur Sulzberger [and editors] Bill Keller and Dean Baquet addressed the newsroom, swapping out nearly all of their old quotes for fresh quotes that came from their speeches. Everyone’s quotes in the second version of the story differed considerably from their quotes in the first version of the story,” Murphy said.

Murphy said the “religion” quote was on the Times’s webpage for nearly 12 hours before being replaced by the newspaper version. “This is just the revising, updating and condensing for space that happens every day at The Times,” she said.

But if that were true, wouldn't the version with the quote still exist in the archive? I searched for the quote, using the NYT's archive search function, and what came up was:

IHTPressEngine v. 1.3.12 2011-06-02T12:49:18-0400 A legal fight ...
"In my house growing up, The Times substituted for religion,” she said. “If The Times said it, it was the absolute truth." ...

Click on the link for a page full of code gibberish, not the original version of the article with the quote.

"Picture an addiction so lethal it has the potential to render an entire generation incapable of forming lasting marriages..."

"... and so widespread that it produces more annual revenue — $97 billion worldwide in 2006 — than all of the leading technology companies combined."

National Review freaks out about pornography... in an article by an anonymous woman who thinks her husband rejected her and left her for another woman because of pornography.

"Then why don't you get William F. Buckley to kill the spider?"

I love this scene in "Annie Hall":



I was watching it this morning because I'd made an allusion to it in the comments over in the "Althouse in Washington" post — which, not too surprisingly, no one seemed to get. It wasn't the stuff about William F. Buckley. That's just the thing that makes me laugh the most — and also I thought I might be able to encourage my Woody Allen-o-phobic right-wing readers to go ahead and watch the clip.        

What?  Did you go to a rock concert?... Was it heavy?  Did it achieve total heavy-ocity?... Why don't you get the guy who took you to the rock concert, we'll call him and he can come over and kill the spider....

What is this?  What are you, since when do you read the "National Review"?  What are you turning in to?... Why don't you get William F. Buckley to kill the spider?...

Are you going with a right-wing rock-and roll star?  Is that possible?

IN THE COMMENTS: EDH not only identifies the allusion, he remembers this clip of me in "Annie Hall" mode:



My "where is the camera?" response is also like the lobster scene.

K-Lo leaves NRO and TBogg makes an anti-Hispanic joke about it.

That's the way I read this.

***

Gawker speculates that National Review is hurting for cash after the death of William F. Buckley.

***

Sadly, No! goes with the sexist approach to the news.

"National Review's Wise Latina Caricature Inexplicably Asian."

Brian Beutler says the magazine's editors seem "flummoxed by the very idea of a 'wise Latina' — have caricaturized the Puerto Rican-descended Sonia Sotomayor as an Asian Buddhist."



What was the National Review thinking? Possibilities:

1. The Buddha in meditation is a quick visual representation of wisdom... and specifically the kind of wisdom that is inappropriate for a Supreme Court Justice, since the Buddha is not consulting texts but looking inward (or at nothing or whatever) and generating new wisdom. Even if she is wise, we don't want that wisdom. We want competence operating in the orthodox judicial mode of reading, analyzing, and interpreting the law as it is written.

2. Americans usually think of the Buddha as fat, and it's a way of calling her fat. Just a free-floating insult — to both Sotomayor and the Buddha.

3. The Buddha is a male, and it's a way of suggesting that Sotomayor is insufficiently feminine and perhaps even lesbian.

4. She's other and all those other groups may be blended together and viewed as threatening to the American way of life.

Let's hope it's #1.

"Politics in a democracy are always 'vulgar' — since democracy is rule by the 'vulgus,' the common people, the crowd."

Writes William Kristol, rankling at Peggy Noonan's "In the end the Palin candidacy is a symptom and expression of a new vulgarization in American politics."

I've read both columns, and it is Noonan's that moves me to quote more:

No news conferences? Interviews now only with friendly journalists? You can't be president or vice president and govern in that style, as a sequestered figure. This has been Mr. Bush's style the past few years, and see where it got us. You must address America in its entirety, not as a sliver or a series of slivers but as a full and whole entity, a great nation trying to hold together. When you don't, when you play only to your little piece, you contribute to its fracturing.

Noonan isn't looking for an eggheadedness, just coherence.

I gather this week from conservative publications that those whose thoughts lead them to criticism in this area are to be shunned, and accused of the lowest motives. In one now-famous case, Christopher Buckley was shooed from the great magazine his father invented. In all this, the conservative intelligentsia are doing what they have done for five years. They bitterly attacked those who came to stand against the Bush administration. This was destructive. If they had stood for conservative principle and the full expression of views, instead of attempting to silence those who opposed mere party, their movement, and the party, would be in a better, and healthier, position.

And now I'm moved to go back to Buckley's column, which I only skimmed last week:

This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget “by the end of my first term.” Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?

All this is genuinely saddening, and for the country is perhaps even tragic, for America ought, really, to be governed by men like John McCain—who have spent their entire lives in its service, even willing to give the last full measure of their devotion to it. If he goes out losing ugly, it will be beyond tragic....

As for Senator Obama: He has exhibited throughout a “first-class temperament,” pace Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s famous comment about FDR. As for his intellect, well, he’s a Harvard man, though that’s sure as heck no guarantee of anything, these days....

I’ve read Obama’s books, and they are first-rate. He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books. Imagine. He is also a lefty. I am not. I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets. On abortion, gay marriage, et al, I’m libertarian. I believe with my sage and epigrammatic friend P.J. O’Rourke that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.

But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren’t going to get us out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves....

Buckley's explanation makes perfect sense to me.

How did Sarah Palin get picked for VP?

In The New Yorker, Jane Mayer offers an account of what happened, beginning in blogdom:

In February, 2007, Adam Brickley..., a self-described “obsessive” political junkie who recently graduated from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, told me that he began by “randomly searching Wikipedia and election sites for Republican women.”...

Brickley registered a Web site—palinforvp.blogspot.com—which began getting attention in the conservative blogosphere. In the month before Palin was picked by McCain, Brickley said, his Web site was receiving about three thousand hits a day. Support for Palin had spread from one right-of-center Internet site to the next. First, the popular conservative blogger InstaPundit mentioned Brickley’s campaign.

Here's that first Instapundit link, back on September 22, 2007: "THERE'S A BLOG AIMED AT DRAFTING ALASKA GOV. Sarah Palin for Vice President. I don't see that as terribly likely, but I certainly like her action on the Bridge to Nowhere, and I wouldn't mind seeing her fill Ted Stevens' seat." It's Instapundit's third mention of Palin, the previous two being "porkbuster" posts.

Back to The New Yorker:

Then a site called the American Scene said that Palin was “very appealing”; another, Stop the A.C.L.U., described her as “a great choice.” The traditional conservative media soon got in on the act: The American Spectator embraced Palin, and Rush Limbaugh, the radio host, praised her as “a babe.”...

Brickley is an authentic heartland voice, but he is also the product of an effort by wealthy conservative organizations in Washington to train activists. He has attended several workshops sponsored by the Leadership Institute, a group based in the Washington area and founded in 1979 by the Christian conservative activist Morton Blackwell....

While Brickley and others were spreading the word about Palin on the Internet, Palin was wooing a number of well-connected Washington conservative thinkers. In a stroke of luck, Palin did not have to go to the capital to meet these members of “the permanent political establishment”; they came to Alaska. Shortly after taking office, Palin received two memos from Paulette Simpson, the Alaska Federation of Republican Women leader, noting that two prominent conservative magazines—The Weekly Standard, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, and National Review, founded by William F. Buckley, Jr.—were planning luxury cruises to Alaska in the summer of 2007, which would make stops in Juneau.

The plot thickens! First, a lone blogger. Then, that crazy National Review cruise ship! Oliver Stone should buy the movie rights to this article. William Kristol and Fred Barnes step into the story, landing by boat on the uncharted territory of the frozen north. There's the first Thanksgiving:

Kristol brought his wife and daughter; [Michael] Gerson brought his wife and two children. Barnes, who brought his sister and his wife, sat on one side of Governor Palin, who presided at the head of the long table in the mansion’s formal dining room; the Kristols sat on the other.... The menu featured halibut cheeks—the choicest part of the fish. Before the meal, Palin delivered a lengthy grace. Simpson, who was at the luncheon, said, “I told a girlfriend afterwards, ‘That was some grace!’ It really set the tone.” Joe Balash, Palin’s assistant, who was also present, said, “There are not many politicians who will say grace with the conviction of faith she has. It’s a daily part of her life.”

Cheeky!

During the lunch, everyone was charmed when the Governor’s small daughter Piper popped in to inquire about dessert. Fred Barnes recalled being “struck by how smart Palin was, and how unusually confident. Maybe because she had been a beauty queen, and a star athlete, and succeeded at almost everything she had done.” It didn’t escape his notice, too, that she was “exceptionally pretty.”

Oh, how the governor played those geezers from Washington.

You can read the rest at the link: Barnes and Kristol pushed Palin, McCain supposedly had his heart set on Joe Lieberman, Peggy Noonan and Christopher Buckey spoke out against Palin, and now -- according to a "longtime McCain friend" -- "John’s personal comfort level is low with everyone right now. He’s angry. But it was his choice."