David Frum leaves National Review:
“The answers to the Republican dilemma are not obvious and we need a vibrant discussion,” he said. “I think a little more distance can help everybody do a better job of keeping their temper.”...
Mr. Frum said deciding to leave was amicable, but distancing himself from the magazine founded by his idol, Mr. Buckley, was not a hard decision. He said the controversy over Governor Palin’s nomination for vice president was “symbolic of a lot of differences” between his views and those of National Review’s.
“I am really and truly frightened by the collapse of support for the Republican Party by the young and the educated,” he said.
Mr. Frum witnessed the upbraiding his fellow conservative, the columnist Kathleen Parker, received when she wrote in her syndicated column on the National Review’s Web site arguing that Governor Palin was unfit to be vice president. Ms. Parker received nearly 11,000 e-mail messages, one of which lamented that her mother did not abort her.
This will come as little surprise to anyone who has been reading Frum (and the Corner) of late, but it's further evidence of the extent to which National Review is becoming an appendage of NRO, rather than the other way around.
--Christopher Orr