Editor’s note: This is the text of brief remarks, as prepared, delivered at the National Review Online’s tenth-anniversary celebration on October 11, 2006, in Washington, D.C.

I can’t help being a little nostalgic coming back to Washington where I was a reporter at the time of the Republican takeover of Congress. Those were the days when Republicans cared about limiting government, and — this is how long ago it was — the days when Republicans had straight sex scandals involving actual adults. You know, back when they really represented our values!

This, of course, is a wonderful occasion for us, and I think it’s important at this event to correctly apportion credit for all the successes of NRO. That’s why I want to make sure that everyone here knows, I invented the Goldberg File. That’s right.

Well, maybe that’s a bit of an overstatement. I asked Jonah years ago to write a daily chronicle of the Clinton impeachment controversy, and after that my main contribution was sheer editorial inattentiveness. I had no idea what Jonah was writing, because, look, let’s be honest, I had a magazine to run! So the next thing I knew he had launched this column on Battlestar Galactica, political philosophy, and Cosmo. By the time I tuned in again, my reaction was, “What the hell — I don’t even like dogs.”

But it was too late. Jonah had established himself as the brilliant, hilarious, and endlessly creative writer all of us know. He had also clued us into the potential of the website, and there wouldn’t be a NRO as we know it without Jonah Goldberg.

A lot of the success we’ve had with NRO has been serendipity, but there was one brilliant managerial move right at the beginning. That was when the powers that be at NR decided to sit Kathryn Lopez down and sell her on all the many benefits of insomnia. Sure, human-rights groups might say that extreme sleep deprivation is “torture,” but we do it to our own special-forces guys in their survival evasion resistance and escape training, so really–how bad can it be?

Kathryn, of course, is the literally tireless editor of NRO. She is principled, impassioned, and has unbelievable instincts. It’s a little unsettling how often I or Kate O’Beirne will suggest something to Kathryn and she’ll say in effect, “uh, nice idea — I did that yesterday.” As I always tell her, she is one of the most important editors in America and she is absolutely invaluable to us.

I’d like to recognize a few special guests…

‐ one of conservatism’s most important and funny voices, Laura Ingraham;

‐ a great public servant and great patriot, Scooter Libby

I also would like to thank all of our writers here tonight, both on staff and not. I can’t name all of you, but you know who you are, and many of you have been with us, and believed in us, long before everyone else realized the importance of the web. Thank you all so much.

And, finally, I want to thank all of our readers and supporters. William F. Buckley long ago said, NR exists to make a point not a profit. We have always stayed true to that principle. Our defense of the profit motive has always been entirely theoretical. Which is one of the reasons we thought it would be a great business venture to supplement our money-losing magazine with a money-losing website.

At a lot of magazines, there is a much too cozy relationship between editorial and publishing. At NR, the opposite is the case. Let me give you an example. A few years ago Jonah Goldberg wrote an article attacking Canada, unsubtly titled, “Bomb Canada.” It happened to be in the same issue of NR in which our advertising guy had landed a full-page, four-color ad from the US-Canadian Friendship Council. Needless to say, we lost the account and our advertising guys concluded it’s not safe to sell ads in NR advocating friendship with any country.

I was in the habit of ending my remarks at events like this by quoting Tocqueville to the effect that “no great battle is ever fully lose, because no great battle is every fully won,” so that’s why we have to keep fighting. Then, Ramesh, after one of these rousing finales, took me aside with a pained expression on his face and said, “Uh, Rich, that’s not Tocqueville.”

So, let me just thank everyone for coming again…