The guys over at The New Criterion are whining, as is their wont, this time in an unsigned note in the February issue about those liberal snobs at the New York Times: "[W]e predicted some months back that Mark Steyn's America Alone, one of the most important books to be published last year, would not be reviewed in the Times: so far, its only appearance in the Times has been on its bestseller list."

Well, Steyn's pamphlet may have been on the list at some point, but it's not there now.

Regardless, any idiot, even one not affiliated with the New Criterion, could have made the same prediction, with perfect accuracy, given that the Times doesn't make a habit of reviewing books put out by Regnery Publishing, the right wing's vanity press, an outfit that, in this particular case, didn't even have the smarts to determine whether Steyn (who on his web site calls himself "The One-Man Global Content Provider," an oblique, yet still emetic, reference, I think, to his appreciation for the low-brow genre known as Broadway musicals) chose a title that matched exactly one already taken by Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, whose book, America Alone, was published by the far more reputable Cambridge University Press two years earlier.

(Bonus: Former New Republic sock-puppeteer and annoyance-about-town Lee Siegel gets knocked around in the same item in the New Criterion.)

| HOME |