> The official, if not always explicitly stated, editorial directive at
> The Nation is that you can criticize Dems on individual policies, but
> you can't globally denounce them as the scumbags and tools they are.
That's exactly the opposite of NR's modus op in the 50's - criticisms of individual Ike policies were just pretexts for lengthy disquisitions on how the administration understood nothing of basic conservative principles. (There was actually a lot of contempt and disdain for the admin's anti-intellectualism.)
I think you're right that the original premise of this thread - that NR whitewashed Bush the way the Nation does Obama - which I accepted at first, is wrong. Any political bloc will have its cheerleading yahoos and its intellectuals. Under Bush, the yahoos may have given the White House a pass, but the intellectuals never did. But then, the progressives don't really have intellectuals, do they?
SA