Posted on 02/21/2014 9:08:20 PM PST by Sideshow Bob
Well, the elitist establishment (dare I say RINO) editors over at National Review and National Review Online (NRO) have sunk to another new low in their continued attacks on conservatives. It's been bad enough that the NRO stable of writers have been cranking out multiple hit pieces (including 3 in a row from the normally lucid Dr. Thomas Sowell) attacking Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and the House/Senate Tea Party caucus, but NRO is now moving towards silencing conservative criticism of NRO's writers, columns and seminar RINO and libertarian posters.
Don't get me wrong, I like posting and/or commenting on NRO articles here at FreeRepublic. In the past, it was because the NRO article had something new, interesting or important I wanted to share or discuss with other FReepers.
A few years ago NRO added a clunky commenting function to their website and offered a feature that FR didn't have - a like/dislike button (actually, positive/negative). The button allowed NRO readers to express their displeasure at the posting of another commenter. After a while, NRO changed their posting policy to require registration to post a comment or use the negative button.
OK, I wasn't thrilled with losing some of my web "anonymity", but figured NRO - as a conservative website -wouldn't abuse my privacy too badly. Besides, I still liked being able to use that speedy negative button to "shout down" the pinhead RINO's who sometimes trolled over at NRO.
Many people say that National Review has been in decline away from conservatism ever since founder William F. Buckley died. I am inclined to agree. To be sure, the NR/NRO staff is becoming increasingly filled with young elitist East Coast writers from elitist East Coast universities. They might still be Republicans - and Olympia Snowe Republicans at that - or even Libertarians, but their content and editorial slant are increasingly out of step with the conservative grassroots and Tea Partiers. And it's getting really obvious and obnoxious.
First it was NRO's easy acceptance of Juan McCain as the 2008 GOP nominee, then it was their shameless politicking for a Romney candidacy, their quick embrace of Chris Krispy Creme and finally their bizarre condemnation of Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, Tea Partiers and the government shutdown strategy.
With the clean debt ceiling bill recently passed by Congress you would think that NRO and the GOP Establishment writers would be happy with Ted Cruz and the House/Senate Tea Party Caucus. After all, Ted followed their advice and didn't shut down the federal government again to thwart Obama's continuing attempt to bankrupt the country.
Nope. Now the Establishment is ticked off that Ted & the TPers completely outmanuevered GOPe leadership, turned the tables on Boehner & McConnell and outed them as Obama surrender monkeys. It's taken a few days, but NRO has stepped into the breach and has launched a major offensive against Cruz and the conservative base. Each day for the past week NRO, their writers, their columnists and their editors have escalated their attacks. They want to embarrass Cruz and sway the conservative base back to the "reasonable" leadership of Boehner & McConnell.
The editors started by writing debt ceiling editorials that - just as in the government shutdown last fall - agreed with Cruz & TPers in the House on their conservative position, but criticized their tactics. NRO writers next move to writing puff pieces extolling Boehner's & McConnell's bravery in taking an adult position in passing a clean debt ceiling bill.
To NRO's shock and disbelief, their conservative readers are mixed in between seething anger and sneering, scoffing laughter at the positions and opinions of NRO, Mitch McTurtle, John Boehner, the rest of the GOPe circus and the Establishment RINO seminar posters on their website.
How can this be? Mitch & John are the GOP leaders, NR is the foremost opinion-leading conservative magazine (or so they think). They are confused why the conservative base isn't listening to them.
So the RINO Establishment media step up their game. Byron York (a former NR editor), Mona Charen, Ann Coulter and others sharpen their attacks on Cruz. As noted above, even Dr. Thomas Sowell writes 3 consecutive columns attacking Cruz. Their new storyline - Cruz is selfish and ego-driven. That's why Cruz forced poor Mitch & Assistant Senate Minority Leader John Cornyn to cloture vote in favor of raising America's insane amount of debt. Even worse, they argue, that self-serving Cruz is going to singlehandedly cause the GOP to blow their chance at regaining the Senate majority in November.
But this lie doesn't work either.
The NRO comments on these columns and editorials blow up from the normal handful of comments to HUNDREDS and HUNDREDS of comments that are FURIOUS with the NRO, the GOPe, Charen, Coulter and especially Sowell. While it can't be proven, there appears to be an increase in the number of seminar Establishment posters (perhaps NRO staffers?) attempting to combat the reaction of NRO's conservative readership. But it doesn't help. These seminar NRO posters are getting crushed in thread debates and are being hammered with the speedy negative button.
Now perhaps it's just a coincidence, but in the midst of this conservative Tea Party commenting pushback NRO changed their policy regarding the negative button without fanfare. Readers even need to follow a hidden link to learn that NRO will no longer display the running count of users of the negative button. They claim that they will still maintain a negative count internally, but just won't display that to their readers. This gives their readers a false appearance that any debate within their story threads is balanced.
The good news for Free Republic is that more FReepers will abandon NRO's commenting feature and bring their discussion and debate of NRO materials to this website. It's hard not to interpret NRO's policy change as an attempt to diminish and control Tea Party conservative pushback against GOPe messaging. It's also very sad and ironic for NRO to be moving toward silencing conservatives during the same week that NRO pontificates against FCC's plans to censor news and media.
The media is the only business where the customer is always wrong.
Ah, yes, the famous Daily Beast/Newsweek gambit.
Actually, the widely used commenting system Disqus is the one that changed the down arrow policy in the last couple of days. I assume NRO uses Disqus, but I suspect they had little to do with the change, although they might have had input into the decision I suppose.
I would think they would like the libertarians, the GOPe seems to want to move left on the social issues and true conservatism, while retaining a right leaning economic message.
Having spent over a decade in the media I assure you that editorial departments and reporters think they are far smarter than you. In fact, they think you (readers) are a moron.
Are you sure that it was Disqus? Or is it just a Disqus option that NRO recently implemented?
When you find yourself attacking Thomas Sowell as a RINO and demanding (insinuating ) that he not be published for us to read, that is when you know you have gone wrong, real wrong.
Nice Limbaugh quote.
If you go back long before the Sowell comments, long before Mark Steyn's very public knock-down-dragout with the homosexual NRO managing editor a few weeks ago, even long before Derb was fired for what NRO deemed were some "racially insensitive" [but IMHO true] remarks, NRO's comment sections have been savagely troll-bombed by Leftists for a long time now.
A lot of us who comment there have been complaining how the comments section looks a lot more like one for The Nation than one for NRO for a very long time, and asking when the site was going to bring the obvious agents provocateur to heel.
I don't know if the change is really about the Tea Party, or finally a response to Enemy Posters. [Which JRob would throw summarily out of here with a nice juicy Zot at the first sign of the kind of raving leftwing lunacy I've been seeing in the comments at NRO.]
I give Thomas Sowell a pass; he's not often wrong, but occasionally even Homer nods. Mona Charen? Meh. Who cares? But I do agree with you about the overall drift of the publication, which has now become quite alarming.
Has National Review finally succumbed to O'Sullivan's Law? We shall see...
Lowry has basically scuttled National Review.
Some insight into why they may have hidden the down arrow ratings.
http://www.redstate.com/2012/09/01/our-failing-disqus-experiment/
Looks like it’s an overall change on the Disqus format. Not just on the NRO site.
National Review (and NRO) are simply decaying as many institutions do. As the stink from the decay increases, they are simply trying to hide the truth of that decay and how much they are diverging from the American conservative population.
Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
From what I gleaned from the Redstate comments, there seems to be a troll problem enabled by the fact that Disqus aggregates a commenter’s posts from all sites and allows stalkers to downvote everything the commenter ever wrote.
NRO has always had a huge contingent of leftist trolls that sometimes outnumber the conservative commenters.
I cancelled in 2008, and sometimes when I read my old-old copies, it breaks my heart to see how good it was, for so many years.
Just like we opined and supsected. It is a concerted effort to slam Senator Cruz and our TEA Patriots.
Well, divide and conquer, has backfired.
When people post stupid conspiracy crap like this it makes all of us who hold similar political views look bad.
The change was to and by disqus and applies to all websites that use their commenting program (cf. http://www.theatlantic.com/ )
Do a little research before posting stupid crap.
Please note I was not a Wallace supporter and a case could be made that he (Wallace) represented a substantial danger to Nixon as he could siphon off Conservative or disenchanted Democrats votes. Granted. But NR spent ALL of its time attacking Wallace and little, or none, doing the same with Humphrey.
It became quite clear NR is nothing more than an extension of the Establishment, both Republican and Democrat, which dominates our politics. It talks a great talk but doesn't really do the walk. I haven't trusted it since.
Agreed. National Review is utter garbage.
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