Yet more proof that National Review has redefined itself as a fashionable font of social democracy recently came from Canadian interloper David Frum, who used successive posts at his diary to claim that, “Among the European dictators, [Francisco Franco] ranks behind only Hitler and Stalin in monstrousness,” and to denounce Jesse Helms for his “racialism.” Of course, National Review used to be an unabashed admirer of both Franco—who saved Spain from Communism and the Catholic Church in Spain from destruction, and who was our ally in the Cold War—and Helms, who was the most principled conservative in the Senate during his era. But that was when NR was recognizably conservative and regularly featured writers worth reading, and not a playground for neocon hacks who thought Bush was the “right man, have promised to show us the way to “end evil,” and who think the greatest threat we now face is “fascism.”