The post-election issue of conservative rag National Review has nothing about Barack Obama's victory, having gone to press before this past week's election. This is a pity, but flipping through the print version of the venerable publication, you'll find some truly noxious points-of-view, the kinds of things NR doesn't trot out on its ever popular blog, The Corner. So it is with cultural critic Jay Nordlinger, who has decided that liberal "hissing" is a feature of the enemy.If you're not familiar with Nordlinger's usual anti-liberal ravings, you're missing the writings of an insane genius. Nordlinger believes liberals are something akin to the devil, and usually accuses them of being in league with Castro, Stalin or worse. And if you don't condemn atrocities constantly years after the fact like he does, you just don't care enough. (By the way, this is the guy who spends most of his time reviewing classical music for NR and other publications.) In this winning harangue against the liberal practice of hissing while in an audience, he fires one shell, over and over again:

The GOP flack who prepped Sarah Palin for various public appearances is stepping up to say that the Alaskan governor isn't quite as dumb as angry McCain aides are trying to paint her. Republican and former Bush executive secretary of the National Security Council Steve Biegun has gotten in touch with National Review editor/wonderboy Rich Lowry to redeem the former vice presidential candidate by repudiating recent claims she has no idea who's in NAFTA and thinks Africa's a country. He calls the allegations "absurd," while managing to note that she had a "steep learning curve on foreign issues," as Lowry formulates it. It's nice someone is stepping out on Sarah's behalf, but is this half-hearted defense simply part of the larger scheme to discredit her for 2012?As you'll recall, McCain aides leaked to Fox News' Carl Cameron that Palin didn't know Africa was a continent, not a country, and that she couldn't name any of the countries in NAFTA. Palin has only expressed indignation at the idea she's none too bright, and now we can at least be consoled by the fact that Palin learned about the conflict in Darfur while she was in church according to Lowry:

The LA Times has a videotape of Obama at a luncheon with known Arab Rashid Khalidi. They say they won't release it because they promised their source they wouldn't. We said that somebody there should release it just so they can claim the $150,000 bounty offered for it and buy essential office supplies, such as toilet paper. Times are tough. But National Review's mongering blog The Corner has figured out that this conspiracy is way bigger than $150,000; $14.685 billion bigger! Break it down, crazy man: See, they figure it like this: LAT is owned by Tribune, which is $14.7 billion in debt, and the incoming Obama administration is gonna have $500 billion of government bailout funds to dole out, and $14.7 billion is "a very small proportion" of $500 billion (this is actually included in the reasoning) and if you keep Hussein Obama happy now then, hey, who's to say he won't give Tribune Co. $14.7 billion when he gets on the inside? Read the signs, people, they're all around you. The Corner also points out:

We're not exactly sure when Middle East scholar Stanley Kurtz became the National Review's point man for hit pieces on the Democratic candidate for president, but we do know the other side has taken great pains to discredit Kurtz every step of the way. Perturbed that the campaign's "Fight the Smears" website attacks his contentions personally, Kurtz fought back today with a pouting missive that just can't help but have the word Bill Ayers in it.Stanley Kurtz is upset that his allegation that Obama was a member of the left-wing New Party isn't being taken more seriously, and he lashes out at the enemy in a post at The Corner:

National Review's The Corner is the best blog in America if you enjoy abject despair, self-delusion, denial, desperation, and embittered finger-pointing. As yet more conservatives defect from the McCain camp, Cornerites press on, demanding that the media investigate Obama's birth certificate and calling Democrat-endorsing Conservatives traitors to the cause. Today, National Review Online ran Kathleen Parker's amusing column on how McCain selected Palin because he wants to bone her. National Review Online editor (editor! she's in charge of the site!) Kathryn Jean Lopez posted to The Corner a bitchy, bitchy preemptive response to the column without mentioning it by name or linking to it. It's a wonder. Enjoy! [The Corner]

Boy, Christopher Buckley's life sucks, he revealed in the Sunday Times to Sheryl Gay Stolberg. His dad and mom died. And oh, also, all the blogs and the New York Post reported on the son he had out of wedlock with his former book publicist and how Wm F. Buckley excluded this child from his will. And then Buckley endorsed Barack Obama and the National Review fired him! All this happened after his dad, who was kind of a famous asshole, died, and maybe now Chris Buckley is trying to be less of an asshole? As he says:

New York magazine's daily online chats about the election are usually just mildly interesting, since the journalists involved tend to be overly polite to one another, because who knows who you're going to be sending a job application to someday? Even Gawker Media veterans and that Daily Kos maniac act all pleasant. But Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi has never been one for such fraternal niceties, and when nymag.com threw him a sparring partner from National Review, the predictably caustic lefty went to work with his fangs, at one point typing, "tell me you're not ashamed." It was awesome and just really uncomfortable at the same time. Highlights:

So Christopher Buckley, the smart-ass novelist son of late conservative intellectual William F. Buckley, went and endorsed Barack Obama in the internet pages of Tina Brown's Daily Beast. He explained, in his endorsement, that he was writing for the Beast because he didn't want to read the hate mail he'd get if he wrote the endorsement at his usual venue, the back page of the National Review. Joke's on him, everyone who reads the National Review Online is even crazier, and the NRO linked everyone to the endorsement! Now it is time for Buckley to write a "wow look at my crazy hate mail" column. And also to quit the National Review! Like forever! Buckley's hate mail column, though, has the advantage of quoting an unnamed editor from the magazine his father founded! "One editor at National Review—a friend of 30 years—emailed me that he thought my opinions 'cretinous.'" Ha, ha, that is probably from Rich Lowry? Buckley continues:

Shock! Christopher Buckley, an East Coast Intellectual Elitist, is supporting Barack Obama for president! It's funny because the intellectual end of the conservative movement has now completely dried up and blown away. And we're defining "intellectual end" broadly enough to include David Brooks btw. Here is the relevant passage from the Buckley column, printed in Tina Brown's weird Daily Brownington Post internet buzz thing:

No one is going to be talking about how he never mastered Twitter when our 44th president is dead, guys. [National Review]

Slightly late to the game of fond remembrances of the late William F. Buckley, Jr. is Fox News correspondent James Rosen's essay on how the founding editor of National Review was a frequent contributor to Playboy. Many of the details Rosen digs up about this sideline beat, so to speak, are fun, but the association isn't quite as counterintuitive or shocking as he'd like to think it is. "Yes, in a union difficult to imagine involving any of today's leading conservatives...the bard of East 73rd Street wrote for Hugh Hefner's oft-vilified Playboy, on and off, for almost four decades, on topics ranging from 'the Negro male' and Nikita Khrushchev to Oprah Winfrey, the Internet, and Y2K." That's a poor use of the word "bard," and also an impaired judgment. P.J. O'Rourke and Christopher Buckley have both written for Playboy and they're "leading conservatives," if not shrieking TV banshees like Ann Coulter. But even back in 1963, when Buckley the Elder made his debut in a transcribed debate he'd had with Norman Mailer, the byline and the magazine were actually rather suited to each other in a strange aesthetic way.

John Derbyshire, the eccentric conservative English opinion writer who loves adolescent girls and hates the troops, invites you to check out the brilliant work of New York Post cartoonist Sean Delonas. "I think my all-time favorite — which annoyingly I can't find on the web — is the one of Bill and Hill as hogs heading for the swill trough as a farmer calls 'Sooo-eeee!'" Get it? They're... pigs. Who enjoy eating swill. "This man is a national treasure." Indeed. [NRO]

We always enjoy the loopy ramblings of Myrna Blyth, who retired from Ladies Home Journal in order to write books like Spin Sisters: How the Women of the Media Sell Unhappiness—and Liberalism—to the Women of America. We'd even wondered what was taking her so long to weigh in on that little-known Trump/Rosie/Barbara Walters thing. So we were delighted today, when, at long last, she reached her bony grandma fingers into her changepurse and whipped out her two cents:

Jesus Christ, it barely played here.

• The GOP apologists at National Review want the White House to revoke the Times's press credentials. [NR]
• The White House, thankfully, doesn't think so highly of the idea. [E&P]
• Knight Ridder is officially no more. [SJMN]
• Dan Rather had to die so that CBS News could live. [NYSun]
• People style spinoff TK? Perhaps. [WWD]
• There are no mags for teenage boys, and, for some reason, the Eat the Pressers are upset about this. [HuffPost]

The Forward reports today on a budding controversy: A cartoon on a recent National Review cover that some say is obviously an anti-Semitic attack on Sen. Chuck Schumer. But NR editor Rich Lowry thinks that charge is ridiculous.

The National Review's webpage presently reads "Hacked by DarkHunter ... Freedom for palestian and Iraq ... gr33tz to #USG and #teso channels"
National Review