What hath Rich Lowry wrought?

In an effort to grab off a chunk of the Amazon.com market, the National Review has got something called “The National Review Book Service” (www.nrbookservice.com).
This is the place to go to order reprints of dismal pietistic 19th century children’s books like the Elsie Dinsmore series. Elsie is a nice 19th century christian girl whose devotion to her stern father famously stops short of reading him an non-christian volume on the Sabbath. For this act of gross insubordination dear olde Dad confines Elsie to her room on a bread and water diet until she contracts a perilous “brain fever”.
Normally though, both father and daughter are expressing their love for one another in terms that would give Dr. Freud the screaming bedspins. So don’t let Mr. Dinsmore’s Jehovah complex fool you. Yes, the books get even weirder from there culminating in Elsie’s gold-digging marriage to her father’s middle aged best friend.

So for all your schlock-needs check out the Nation Review’s on line book service.

Good grief! THIS is the house built by William F. Buckley?? Old Bill was a Tory bastard but at least he was a literate polemicist! His Nation Review shilling for dreck like Elsie Dinsmore is akin to H.L. Mencken marking out hard for “The Rover Boys”.
This is every bit a symptom of conservatism’s gross ideological decline. A surfeit of easy electoral victories and the pressing need to hold together a fractious coalition have reduced the once proud National Review to slavishly praising atavistic blather like the Elsie Dinsmore series. Bereft of ideas and desperate to placate conservatism’s increasingly revolutionary christian cadres, the NR pushes Elsie and the curious 19th centry theme park the movement would force us all to inhabit.
What what of it?
Surely so conservative a publication as the National Review can justify feckless commercial undertakings such as this? Indeed it can. However there is something plain sad about the prominent place they gave Ann Coulter’s latest primal scream...after all didn’t they fire her for excesses too great even for the Nation Review??

Sick
Demented
Typical