Like Jedmunds I don't need TNR to pat me on the head. I don't care. But this "mommy he hit me back!" whine is ridiculous.
I'm sure TNR writers really appreciate their jobs and hope to continue earning a paycheck to do whatever it is that they do, and some of them do good suff, and perhaps they blame their negative circulation and declining influence on nasty bloggers who say mean things about them on the internets. Or maybe they should just understand that their contrarianism is as predictable as the rising sun, that their support for the Iraq war means they're partly responsible for a catastrophic foreign policy blunder for which we will be reaping the moral, economic, diplomatic consequences for decades, that their endorsement of Lieberman in 2004 turned them into a caricature of themselves, and if they want people to actually like them they should can, as Jay Rosen of Pressthink put it here, their apparent belief that "we're smarter than our readers online, and that's why they read us!"
My problem with TNR of course isn't that I can't handle something I only agree with 80% of the time. My problem with TNR is that it has long defined the left flank of acceptable opinion and discourse in this country. That's in part the fault of the mainstream media which lets it occupy that space and that's in part due to a tendency of some TNR writers to be overly concerned with marginalizing opinion to the left of it in order to maintain its occupation of that space in our discourse. If the left flank of acceptable mainstream opinion is the center-right, and the right flank are the radical morons of the National Review, the outcome is going to be a world where hardline conservative John McCain is labelled a moderate.
