Okay, so you need my play-by-play on this controversy about as much as you need another Paris Hilton story. But I was hyp-mo-tized by the little dust-up between Mark Shea & Mike Poterma of NRO. From my perspective, NRO is distinct from the dead-tree National Review. Internet sites are always more provocative than the magazine equivalent and the sort of comment Poterma made in defending a video which I think is indefensible would likely not be published in NR, probably because NR has an older readership than the edgier NRO.
Poterma's gratuitous labeling of Mark Shea as 'anti-Iraq war' was unfortunate. You can be pro-Iraq War and anti-ad. I thought going into Iraq was defensible (although I thought we were removing a tyrant who'd violated a ceasefire and not started the Wilsonian Project Democracy in the Middle East, which seems about as likely as waging war in order to 'end all wars') & yet find the commercial offensive. You can also be anti-torture and for the Iraq War - so many non-mutually exclusives, so little time. (Btw, it seems Shea had a different tone about the war just before it than he does nowadays. Failure is an orphan, success has a thousand fathers.)
I'm also curious about those saying NR isn't what it used to be without really backing it up. (Neither can I back up that it hasn't changed, so I'm not saying it hasn't.) But what exactly did it 'used to be'? NR has always been hawkish and always been a close friend of the state of Israel. I looked up a Buckley quote (actually Wills' quote) in which he was dismissive of papal pronouncements; looks like he regrets it now:
Lopez: Anything you wrote during your tenure that you regret?
Buckley: I had belated second thoughts about the wisdom of republishing a quip of Garry Wills's in my "For the Record" column. It was the phrase: "Mater si, Magistra no," in response to a papal encyclical that got us into lots and lots of trouble with the liberal Catholic press over lots and lots of years.
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