LOL: No One's Accepting National Review's Newest Partial Apology So They Decide to Forgive Themselves Instead

National Review is tired of waiting for people to accept their begrudging, compelled apologies, so they're accepting their own apology now.

You're welcome.

Oh, and send them money.

"A fuller and more complicated picture emerged." Just so.

Is this Charles Cooke? The "just so" sounds like Charles Cooke, although, let's face it, a lot of them enjoy putting on British airs.

Jay Nordlinger is five minutes away from announcing that his pronouns are "Toffy-Nosed Ponce" and "British Pansy."

For an overheated few minutes, the world (meaning the world of people engaged in producing and consuming nanosecond-by-nanosecond commentary on the Internet) was rapt with revulsion at the sight of a group of smirking high-school boys -- Catholic-school students, some in red "Make America Great Again" caps -- menacing an older Native American man beating a drum as part of a protest in Washington, where the students were visiting as part of the annual March for Life. The condemnations were vitriolic, including here at National Review.

A word on the Nick Frankovich Corner post. As longtime readers know, the Corner is our group blog that encourages real-time, unfiltered reactions by our individual writers (it was basically Twitter before the advent of Twitter). There is always a peril in that. Occasionally, we'll get something hastily and spectacularly wrong. Nick was operating off the best version of events he had on Saturday night, and writing as a faithful Catholic and pro-lifer who has the highest expectations of his compatriots, not as a social-justice activist. As soon as better evidence emerged, we deleted the post.

He still has not apologized to the children he defamed. In fact -- I don't know this to be true, so I'll ask if it's true. People are saying in your own comments areas, National Review, that all through Sunday, Nicholas Frankovich continued doubling down on his condemnation if these schoolchildren, even as the facts proved, conclusively, that his slander was, well, slanderous.

Is that true? "IF TRUE," as you and leftwing friends like to say, it would explain why he pointedly refused to apologize for and retract the factual allegations he had stated and/or insinuated, and only begrudgingly, tersely, apologized to readers (not the parties actually defamed, but readers of the magazine) for a "preachy," "high-handed" tone.

So is that true? Is he continuing to double-down on his original slander? Was his non-apology forced by Lowry or Fowler? If so, why did you permit him that very obvious Clintonesque evasion? Why did you permit him to not apologize in an alleged "Apology" post?

Who are you hoping to fool? I know you think conservatives are idiots and easily conned -- your continued existence does in fact suggest that this belief might be at least partially well-founded -- but do you think we're that stupid to accept an OBVIOUS non-apology as an earnest apology?

Frankovich seeks forgiveness for his tone? Fair enough; I'm forgiving. I forgive him for his tone.

But he did not seek forgiveness for slandering children due to his vicious bigotry against any conservative who dares to wear a MAGA hat at a political rally (those little MONSTERS!), so I won't be forgiving him for that.

You don't get forgiven for things you haven't apologized for. Many of you make great pains to instruct us about how piously Christian you are (pardon me for doubting your Christianity, as Frankovich doubted the Christianity of the Registered Hat Offenders; lot of this going around).

So I'm sure you know that one can only forgive for what is actually confessed.

No one can or should forgive Frankovich -- or Lowry, for that matter -- for things they haven't actually confessed to.

In this business, all we can do is own up to mistakes when they happen.

It's all you can do, and yet you haven't actually done it yet.

We apologize to our readers and especially to the Covington students, who didn't need us piling on.

Is Frankovich apologizing? And are the students innocent? You say they didn't need you piling on, but guilty people also don't need people piling on.

Can we be forgiven for continuing to see an awful lot of hedging in your "apologies"?

What happened to them, unfortunately, is very familiar: The boys were vilified and threatened, while the partisans of what is cynically and inaccurately described as social justice began the work of hunting down the boys parents’'employers in the hopes of ruining those families economically.

It's very familiar, indeed. And yet Lowry and Frankovich fell for it. Again. Will they be explaining at any point why they are so prone to joining leftwing SJW lynch mobs, even though they concede this tactic is very "familiar" and therefore they really ought to have some innoculation against being infected by it in now the eighth year running of vicious leftwing social media lynch mobs?

Why do they continue falling for it?

Will they admit -- and ask for forgiveness, I suppose -- that they are so rabidly anti-Trump that the sight of a MAGA hat causes them to think very unreasoning, bigoted thoughts and assume that people are racist and deserving of scalp-hunting?

Or is that another thing they want to be forgiven for, without actually confessing?

The tone of the commentary was--well, here's how one writer for Vulture put it: "I just want these people to die. Simple as that. Every single one of them. And their parents." The students were, in this estimate, only "white slugs."

Hey, let's quote some of the commentary at National Review: The boys were "bullying," and "evil," and "evil" in such a way as to suggest the Roman soldiers crucifying Jesus Christ Himself.

Interesting that you go so far afield, to leftwing Vulture, to find such odious, vicious commentary when it is sitting right there on your computer as you write up this phony Third Time's a Charm excuse-making non-apology.

Because the culture wars are approached as a zero-sum game, many of the most committed progressives are now desperately trying to formulate a reason to continue slandering them and attempting to chase their parents into unemployment and penury.

And this was all obvious from the start.

And you helped.

Oh, right: Because you were foooooooled. Again.

But you're the smart ones, right?

That speaks to the sorry state of our democracy: Why bother trying to persuade or convince your fellow citizens when you can simply make them into pariahs?

I love the part in any non-apology where the non-apologizing person starts moving from "I was to blame" to "when you think about it, isn't Society really to blame here? Wouldn't you say there were Greater Social Forces acting on me that excuse my own behavior? Democracy,am I right?"

The Times, in articulating the "fuller picture," went so far as to suggest that to invoke the name of Donald Trump -- or to simply wear a hat bearing his famous slogan -- constitutes a "racially charged taunt."

Dan McLaughlin, one of your own writers, basically said that we're just going to have to live with this and there's nothing we can do about it. Sigh. Shoulder shrug.

Your buddy Ross Douthat said that these kids should not have been allowed to wear these political hats at a political rally.

A contributor of yours, the effete JeffB., sniffed that even wearing such hats to a rally was (sniff) "tasteless."

I find it very telling that you continue to try to locate the flaw in the left wing, rather than admitting it exists in just as virulent a form at National Review and its coterie.

These are not, for the most part, ideas offered in good faith: They are stratagems deployed to delegitimize certain political points of view. If supporters of the president are to be condemned as engaging in racial provocation for simply saying his name, then the conversation has nowhere to go.

All of this exposes a larger and more serious deficiency: in citizenship. Good citizens with proper respect for themselves, their neighbors, and their country do not seek to destroy the lives of a couple of teenagers in the pursuit of a transient and petty political advantage.

You are now turning what should be an apology for your own actions into yet another lecture about how we -- who didn't do anything wrong -- can improve our behavior.

I saw one of your interns, Xan DeSanctis, execute this exact same maneuver two days ago. She gets the story wrong and carries a torch for the lynch mob, then, when she finds out she's been "fooled" (by a story she desperately wanted to be true), she starts lecturing "journalists and commentators" about the need for "we" to do more fact checking.

I don't get this new Millennial/NPC trick of lecturing others in the midst of what is supposed to be an apology for your own sins.

And here's where we come to National Review forgiving itself, to spare you the bother of forgiving them:

Errors can be forgiven, and the occasional tendency to get carried away with rhetorical excess can be received with charity --especially by those of us who suffer from the same temptation from time to time. But political psychosis and deceit are something else. They can be forgiven only contingently --and never forgotten.

Are they actually forgiving the rest of the media for the exact same sins and false headlines and slanders that they themselves were equally guilty of?

And are we supposed to be so fucking stupid and that we're acutally intended to think, "Gee, if National Review can forgive the New York Times and Vulture for slandering and scalp-hunting children, I guess I should be a Good Christian Sap too and forgive National Review for doing the same exact fucking thing"?

Unbelievable.

Unbelievable.

By the way, once again, I'm allowed to post this in full because National Review has set a "You are allowed to plagiarize Ace without penalty" policy in place and I feel, naturally, this should work in both directions.

Update: Frankovich, who's a Real Journalist (just ask him!), put an awful lot of credence in the Narrative that Philips was not just an Indian, but a proud veteran of the Vietnam War.

Again, a little fact-checking would have been nice:

41 Washington Post trying to fix Phillips' story

"Correction: Earlier versions of this story incorrectly said that Native American activist Nathan Phillips fought in the Vietnam War. Phillips served in the U.S. Marines from 1972 to 1976 but was never deployed to Vietnam."

Posted by: Christopher R Taylor

Question: If Frankovich is such an ardent pro-lifer, I'm wondering which candidate he supported in the last presidential election.

Was it the one who supported abortion until the last minute of the last day, and then maybe twenty minutes or an hour past that?

Or was he voting for spoiler candidates hoping that Hillary would win and then he could claim "Yeah, but I didn't actually vote for her"?

I'm wondering how committed to the pro-life cause Conservatism, Inc. actually is if it will gladly elect a rabidly pro-abortion candidate over personal pique that their Demands are being ignored by the Deplorables.

And I'm wondering how much people who aren't very pro-life, like myself, ought to fight for a cause that isn't even really our own given that the people who claim to be super-pro-life are so cavalier about putting a pro-abortion president into power?

Should I care about your issues more than you care about them, Alleged Conservatism, Inc. "Pro-Lifers"?

Blame-Shifting Case of the Passive Voice Detected:

54 The best part is the passive "the boys were vilified and threatened..." No active voice "We vilified the boys, and the boys were threatened." They bear no blame whatsoever for the school having to cancel classes.

Posted by: no good deed at January 22, 2019

Agreed:

80 I'm sure the local magistrates in Salem were "operating off of the best version of events they had at the time" when the killed those men and women accused of witchcraft.

Posted by: joe, living dangerously at January 22, 2019

Mistakes were made, and some children were, um, rather burned, I suppose.

More:

191 How does NRO plan to make amends to the kids whose lives they joined in trying to destroy?

I don't see any sign of actual repentance.

Posted by: chique d'afrique

Dude, they're forgiving themselves as fast as they can! That's kind of like repentance.

posted by Ace of Spades at 02:08 PM

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