Kathryn – Your reader is way off base. Battlestar Galactica “rules the day” around here? This is nonsense on stilts on top of a roof on a mountain top. I hear this sort of thing all the time from people who don’t like BSG posts (or Sullivan posts, or Marmite posts, or timewasters, etc). Your reader should go back and — oh, I dunno — count the actual number of Battlestar Galactica posts over the last month and compare that number to posts on the war on terror, the war in Iraq, Gonzales, global warming etc. You’ll discover that “rules the day” can best be translated as “on rare occasion.”

This is of a piece with a larger and more persistent criticism of the Corner that I reject entirely (usually because it’s offered by people who disagree with something in the Corner and don’t have a good direct argument against it). Because the Corner is so well-read and well-liked, people confuse the Corner for NRO and NR combined. The Corner was my idea. It was intended to be a conservative water cooler or faculty lounge where NR writers and friends could chat things up, hash things out, crack wise and generally demonstrate that conservatives are a more diverse group of thinkers than the usual conventional wisdom suggests. If you want a better measure of NRO’s “seriousness” or NR’s positions go to the homepage or read the magazine or pay attention to the editorials. I’m not saying that the Corner is unserious but it’s popularity rests on being more than the plodding recitation of conservative pieties and diktats some readers demand of it.