Don't Cry for David Frum
By Eric Alterman
David Frum makes an extremely inconvenient martyr for liberals. Forced out of his cushy sinecure at the American Enterprise Institute, he will continue to be fabulously rich, thanks to his marriage to a Canadian newspaper heiress. His voice will be magnified in the national discourse, and tributes to his courage will dot the landscape of American political discourse for weeks to come.
But forget about Frum for a minute and take a look at why he was let go. Frum remains a right-winger. He has not renounced his former self for coming up with the bankrupt concept of the "axis of evil" in service to the Bush administration's propaganda push for its disastrous, dishonest invasion of Iraq. (Frum's tome An End to Evil, written with Richard Perle, will one day serve historians as a near-perfect exhibit for the self-serving intellectual vacuity of Bush-era hubris.) And he has strongly opposed the Obama administration, both at home and abroad, particularly its healthcare reforms.
No, Frum was drummed out of what is, sadly, the conservative movement's most prestigious quasi-academic perch not for any recognizable form of philosophical or theological apostasy. Rather, it was for stating the obvious: that perhaps GOP leaders had screwed up their healthcare fight because they were listening to the wrong people, and hence doing the wrong things.
Way back on December 2, 1993, when William Kristol was still pretty much a nobody with a famous dad and a good-news/bad-news reputation as Dan Quayle's chief attack dog and press leaker, he circulated a four-page memo to Republican leaders warning of the dangers lurking in President Clinton's proposed comprehensive healthcare bill. True, the tone of his musings was a great deal friendlier to Republican muckety-mucks than that of Frum. "Nothing in these pages is intended to supplant the many thoughtful analyses of the Clinton health care plan already produced by Republicans and others," Kristol wrote. Even so, his warning presaged that made by Frum today. Should the Democrats pass their bill, he cautioned, their success would "revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government."
Last year Kristol--now a Republican kingmaker, Weekly Standard founder and editor, Fox News commentator, columnist for the Washington Post and previously for Time and the New York Times (all this despite an atrocious record of analysis regarding Iraq and a willingness to run intellectual interference for the likes of Sarah Palin)--repeated the same argument regarding Obama's plan. On the Weekly Standard website, he informed his troops: "My advice, for what it's worth: Resist the temptation. This is no time to pull punches. Go for the kill." He was echoing the advice of Senator Jim DeMint, who had opined, "If we're able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him."
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As Frum explained, the problem was the abdication of Republicans' intellectual leadership to the folks at talk-radio and Fox News. "Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us, and now we are discovering we work for Fox," he told ABC News, echoing an argument made in the Columbia Journalism Review, that Roger Ailes is "without close contest the most powerful Republican in the country today." (Personally, I might put him just behind Rush Limbaugh, with Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Bill Kristol barking just a few lengths behind.) Healthcare, Frum argued, was a "huge win for the conservative entertainment industry," but for "the cause they purport to represent, it's Waterloo all right: ours."
The upshot of this tawdry affair--as with the less celebrated firing of Bruce Bartlett from the conservative National Center for Policy Analysis after he dissented from ruinous Bush-era budget policies--is, um, Kristol-clear. The rule of Roger and Rush will go unchallenged. No forms of deviation from the consensus of the conservative chatterboxes will be tolerated, no matter how trivial. AEI, like the rest of the conservative movement, will operate on the same basis Joseph Stalin legendarily used when he heard something he didn't like: "no person, no problem."
LinkHere
David Frum makes an extremely inconvenient martyr for liberals. Forced out of his cushy sinecure at the American Enterprise Institute, he will continue to be fabulously rich, thanks to his marriage to a Canadian newspaper heiress. His voice will be magnified in the national discourse, and tributes to his courage will dot the landscape of American political discourse for weeks to come.
But forget about Frum for a minute and take a look at why he was let go. Frum remains a right-winger. He has not renounced his former self for coming up with the bankrupt concept of the "axis of evil" in service to the Bush administration's propaganda push for its disastrous, dishonest invasion of Iraq. (Frum's tome An End to Evil, written with Richard Perle, will one day serve historians as a near-perfect exhibit for the self-serving intellectual vacuity of Bush-era hubris.) And he has strongly opposed the Obama administration, both at home and abroad, particularly its healthcare reforms.
No, Frum was drummed out of what is, sadly, the conservative movement's most prestigious quasi-academic perch not for any recognizable form of philosophical or theological apostasy. Rather, it was for stating the obvious: that perhaps GOP leaders had screwed up their healthcare fight because they were listening to the wrong people, and hence doing the wrong things.
Way back on December 2, 1993, when William Kristol was still pretty much a nobody with a famous dad and a good-news/bad-news reputation as Dan Quayle's chief attack dog and press leaker, he circulated a four-page memo to Republican leaders warning of the dangers lurking in President Clinton's proposed comprehensive healthcare bill. True, the tone of his musings was a great deal friendlier to Republican muckety-mucks than that of Frum. "Nothing in these pages is intended to supplant the many thoughtful analyses of the Clinton health care plan already produced by Republicans and others," Kristol wrote. Even so, his warning presaged that made by Frum today. Should the Democrats pass their bill, he cautioned, their success would "revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government."
Last year Kristol--now a Republican kingmaker, Weekly Standard founder and editor, Fox News commentator, columnist for the Washington Post and previously for Time and the New York Times (all this despite an atrocious record of analysis regarding Iraq and a willingness to run intellectual interference for the likes of Sarah Palin)--repeated the same argument regarding Obama's plan. On the Weekly Standard website, he informed his troops: "My advice, for what it's worth: Resist the temptation. This is no time to pull punches. Go for the kill." He was echoing the advice of Senator Jim DeMint, who had opined, "If we're able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him."
====
As Frum explained, the problem was the abdication of Republicans' intellectual leadership to the folks at talk-radio and Fox News. "Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us, and now we are discovering we work for Fox," he told ABC News, echoing an argument made in the Columbia Journalism Review, that Roger Ailes is "without close contest the most powerful Republican in the country today." (Personally, I might put him just behind Rush Limbaugh, with Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Bill Kristol barking just a few lengths behind.) Healthcare, Frum argued, was a "huge win for the conservative entertainment industry," but for "the cause they purport to represent, it's Waterloo all right: ours."
The upshot of this tawdry affair--as with the less celebrated firing of Bruce Bartlett from the conservative National Center for Policy Analysis after he dissented from ruinous Bush-era budget policies--is, um, Kristol-clear. The rule of Roger and Rush will go unchallenged. No forms of deviation from the consensus of the conservative chatterboxes will be tolerated, no matter how trivial. AEI, like the rest of the conservative movement, will operate on the same basis Joseph Stalin legendarily used when he heard something he didn't like: "no person, no problem."
LinkHere
posted by Kangaroo Brisbane Australia at 6:25 PM
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