National Review is on its deathbed

Via Ace's sidebar, Jonah Goldberg persists in his "A plague on both houses, but mostly Trump's" approach to the impeachment. When one compares the earlier contributors to National Review (many of genuine historical significance) with the majority of the current crop, one can only shake one's head in regret at the precipitous decline of a once-valuable conservative magazine.

People, institutions, civilizations are born, they live, struggle and adapt, and they ultimately deteriorate and perish, because man is imperfect, weak and self-destructive. These cycles of birth and death can offer us valuable lessons if we use our thought-boxes appropriately. Goldberg's increasing irrelevance is not, in and of itself, really very important, but the decline of such reputation as he once possessed is a good object lesson for the rest of us to constantly be on the lookout for the intellectual fraudulence that so frequently lurks beneath the veneer of unexamined "expertise" in the world of the talking heads and the inveterate scribblers of political and cultural pronunciamentos.