National Review Online Is Having A Fund-Raiser

But I'm wondering if the time has come to let my subscription lapse. With loathsome words from John Derbyshire echoing around the blogosphere today, I must say that (a) if Derbyshire is a conservative, I'm not and (b) if this is where NR is going, I'm not. Derbyshire says:

[M]y attitude to the war is really just punitive, and Iraq was a target of opportunity. I am not a Wilsonian nation-builder. I don’t want to “bring democracy to Iraq.” I don’t, in fact, give a fig about the Iraqis. I am happy to leave barbarians alone to practice their unspeakable folkways, so long as they do not bother civilized peoples. When they do bother us, though, I want them smacked down with great ferocity.

I've been reading NR for a long time and have always regarded it as a mixed bag. I don't expect to agree with everything all their writers say. But this is the sort of thing that requires one to actively dissociate oneself.

Besides, I live in Alabama, which has a population of about four and a half million, of which maybe a half-million are mean, ignorant, and willing to serve up the Derbyshire foreign policy for nothing, albeit not as articulately.