About a month ago, during the debate over immigration reform, the editorial board at the National Review issued a series of challenges to the editorial board at the Wall Street Journal to debate the merits of the immigration bill. The WSJ never accepted the challenge and the bill eventually died in the Senate and both NRO and the WSJ moved on.
But it looks as if the right-wing anti-gay activists at MassResistance have taken a page out of the NRO playbook and are now using it against them, challenging the magazine for its fawning coverage of Mitt Romney:
Twenty-two conservative activist leaders will publicly release a letter this week challenging the conservative magazine National Review's "puff work" for presidential candidate Mitt Romney and implying that the magazine is quietly abandoning the social conservative grassroots and constitutionalism. The editors refuse even to acknowledge receipt of the letter, which cites information about which they've misled their readers …
"A magazine that conservatives grew up with has legitimized a charlatan who trashed a constitution. As an opponent of judicial tyranny, Romney is a fraud," Haskins said. "Notwithstanding the post-constitutional nihilism of [NR pro-Romney blogger David] French, no legal training is needed to read English. Constitutions are not for lawyers to lock away from prying eyes, but for laymen as defense against the Frenches, Hewitts and Romneys of the world."
NR also conspicuously failed to report a detailed, provocative letter forty-four conservative leaders sent Romney disproving his claim that he "enforced the law" by imposing homosexual "marriage" when the Legislature refused to legalize it. Law professors and constitutional attorneys have affirmed the conclusions of the letter, which urged Romney to reverse his illegal orders. Signers included Paul Weyrich, an architect of the Reagan revolution; Robert Knight, a draftsman of the Defense of Marriage Act; Sandy Rios of the Culture Campaign (former president of Concerned Women for America); Phil Lawler, editor of Catholic World News; Phil Likoudis, editor of The Wanderer; and attorney Gary Kreep (United States Justice Foundation).
In contrast to NR spiking coverage of both letters, Kathryn Jean Lopez, their dedicated Romney cheerleader, trumpeted as newsworthy a pro-Romney letter from eight "conservatives" of widely varying reputations and conflicts of interest, including some who privately admit Romney failed to defend the constitution.
When NRO was challenging the WSJ, they mocked them as “the type of people who ordinarily you’d expect to welcome a challenge and a good old-fashioned intellectual rumble” and wondered sarcastically why they were hearing “only silence.”
Well, MassResistance is now challenging NRO to explain its "puff work" coverage of the Romney campaign and will be releasing the letter it sent to the magazine later this week. We’ll be keeping an eye on NRO to see when, or even if, they bother to respond.
