A purge too far

It's a little-known fact, but I was once selected as the heir apparent to William F. Buckley by his syndicate, Universal Press Syndicate. As he was getting quite old and obviously approaching the end of his run, they'd looked over all the columnists of my generation and decided that I was the one whose intelligence and writing style was most similar to that of Buckley.

The syndication went nowhere; the Dallas Morning News was the only paper to pick up my UPS column - which was the same as my WND column - and we learned that the newspaper editors a) believed that my sentence structure was too complex and my vocabulary was too expansive for the eighth-grade reading level they were targeting, and b) didn't want another right-wing columnist when they already had Ann Coulter. The outcome might have been very different if UPS sold its columns in package deals the way some of the other syndicates do, but they reasonably believed every column should stand on its own. So, after 18 months, Universal gave up and my second spell as a nationally syndicated columnist came to an end. But it always gave me a small sense of accomplishment, because I'd long been a reader of William F. Buckley's magazine.

I used to read National Review in the library at college. I liked Commentary as well, but National Review always had a compelling sense of ideological style to it that made it seem both relevant to the times as well as moderately intellectual. I fell out of the habit of reading it after college, but then discovered NRO and The Corner not long after it was introduced online and began reading that on a daily basis. I thought about looking into becoming an NR contributor from time to time, but there was never really any reason to do so since WND's traffic was already blowing away NRO's and it would have been a step down in terms of readership even if it was a step up in terms of prestige.

I let my subscription to NR Digital go more out of a general sense that things were ideologically falling apart there than in response to any specific event. I disliked the growing My Party Left or Right theme there, was mystified by the total lack of competence concerning economics, and found the purge of Joe Sobran to be reprehensible. But I still read The Corner every day even though I seldom bothered with the articles on the main page. Readers here will recall that "NRO'S CORNER" was one of the featured Day Trip links for most of the last seven years. But then I read this post by Rich Lowry yesterday:

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