I finally found a subject on which I can agree with Robert Stacy McCain. We both disdain National Review. But the similarity ends immediately. McCain doesn’t hate NR because it’s the home of dishwater-dull rightwing apparatchiks like Kathryn Jean Lopez and Jay Nordlinger. Instead he thinks that it’s a hotbed of intellectual snobbery.

Oh, the stories that D.C. conservative journalists could tell you about their dealings with National Review! Since I cannot breach any confidences, let me just ask you to imagine a D.C. press conference or discussion panel.

Mingling around the danish-and-coffee table in the back of the room, you’ll see representatives of all the various Right-side media: Washington Times, Human Events, American Spectator, CNS, etc., etc. Camaraderie and conviviality are the prevailing spirit — a spirit of which the National Review representative does not partake.

The National Review man is not a mere reporter, you see, but an intellectual! . . .

. . . the insufferable snobbery of the NR crowd is notorious, and even the most down-to-earth of them cannot resist succumbing in some degree to this esprit des snobs.

. . . the magazine’s repeated blunders under the Lowry regime — remember, it was Lowry’s NR which deemed Rod Dreher’s “Crunchy Cons” deserving of a cover story and later gave Dreher his own separate blog to promote that ridiculous philosophical cul-de-sac — have become an embarrassment.

I don’t attend D.C. rightwing gatherings and thus I never feel the sting of being snubbed by snooty NRniks. I do regularly check the Corner and occassionally scan articles on NRO. I acutally bought a copy of the magazine recently to see Jonah Goldberg’s remarkably thin article on energy. The only genuinely interesting piece in the issue was a review by Terry Teachout of the book What America read.

Back in the pre-Lowry days, NR occasionally featured writers such as Chronicles editor, Thomas Fleming. Prior to the Iraq war, it sometimes published Andrew Bacevich. They have been replaced by the likes of Victor Davis Hanson and Mark Steyn. Nothing to get snobby about there.