Slade Sohmer of the Recount, a political news site you’ve never heard of, believes he has caught National Review in an inconsistency in “how they handle First Ladies,” and he attributes this — naturally — to racism. His proof is a screen-cap snippet of an article about a Michelle Obama documentary and another screen-cap snippet of an article about Melania Trump.
The political partisan’s powers of self-moronization are really something to behold. Slade Sohmer offers the textbook case.
The former article is a review of a documentary written by NR critic Kyle Smith and published this week; the latter is a syndicated column written by Michelle Malkin and published by Creators Syndicate in 2018 and reprinted at National Review Online.
So, the indictment is: Two different articles, by two different writers, about two different first ladies, one a film review and the other an op-ed column, written years apart, and published by two very dissimilar institutions, do not take precisely the same view of “how they handle First Ladies,” as though the subject at hand were an editorial directive handed down on — what, the first ladyhood of the first lady as such?
Different opinions about first ladies? Wait until somebody finds out that Charlie Cooke and Kathryn Jean Lopez have rather different opinions about Jesus, or that I think Bill Buckley was too hard on Ike, or that not everybody agrees with Ramesh Ponnuru that there was a pretty good case for removing Donald Trump from office during the impeachment.
And don’t get me started on Kyle Smith and The Seventh Seal or Michelle Malkin and . . . quite a few things, not least of them the current Mrs. Trump.
The breadth and depth of Slade Sohmer’s imbecility here is almost impressive. You have to try to be that ghastly and insipid. It takes work. It rarely comes naturally. Perhaps Slade Sohmer is a natural. He certainly seems to be.
This is precisely the kind of low-minded partisan hackery and intellectual dishonesty American journalism could use a good deal less of.