Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

Steven White, Whippersnapper™, responding to my defense of TNR, reiterates Kathy G’s point – that when they do go all counter intuitive, it genuinely enables the implementation of noxious conservative policies:

And that’s sort of the dark side, if you will, of the magazine: Despite its degree to which it is continually interesting and worth reading, all too often the higher-ups hire people to write things that really shouldn’t be written in any magazine left of The Weekly Standard. And whenever some crazy, wingnut idea gets into the pages of TNR, suddenly it’s “bipartisan” or “moderate” instead of just crazy.

Can Steven White, Kathy G or anyone who reads this blog give me an example of a bad policy during the Bush administration whose passage or implementation was otherwise not going to happen or was in doubt but then TNR ran an article or editorial endorsing said policy, and that article pushed the policy over the edge and insured its passage or implementation?

And as a side note to Kathy G’s jeremiad, since when did welfare reform and NAFTA being bad become mainstream liberal ideas? Gosh, I used to think those were the two keystone achievements of the Clinton presidency…