By email, Dan alerted me to, on his Riehl World View, where Mark Levin added a second guest commentary, this time focusing on “conservative” David Frum. Here’s an excerpt and the link over:
My interactions with Frum have been minimal, despite his past suggestions that they were something more. As best I recall, I met him first on an Amtrak train. He was sitting near the restroom feverishly working his lap top’s keyboard. We exchanged pleasantries, and that was about it. I believe the next time I met him was at the Ledeen’s home. He seemed harmless enough. The next thing I knew, he had a blog at NRO. I rarely read it, but when I did, I noticed he displayed a quirkiness and psuedo-intellectualism which suggested to me that something was a little off with the guy. But I didn’t give it much thought. I became reacquainted with Frum after he viciously attacked Rush Limbaugh, after having attempted to spar with Rush over a period of months. And it was this unhinged, emotional outburst that caught my attention. I then realized, as did others, that Frum was a truly pathetic character subject to wild personality lurches and obsessed with drawing attention to himself.
If you read the whole thing, you will see Mark points out his March 4, 2009 on-air conversation with David Frum. At the end of the audio, Frum tips his hand; a conservative he is not.
You should also go back to when John McCain announced Sarah Palin as his running mate and read what Frum wrote about her. Frum talks a lot about the Republican Party’s need to attract younger voters, women, and minorities. So, what does he do when a brilliant, youthful woman joined the ticket and perhaps helped balance it alongside elder statesman McCain? Frum trashed her. He downplayed Palin’s 13 years in state and local government and executive experience as a two-termed mayor and time as governor, made no mention of her as an entrepreneur, and did not bother to learn of nor mention what foreign policy experience she had gained as the governor of Alaska (Mark wrote about it here). Sarah Palin’s life, work, and political experience was at least the equal of Barack Obama’s community organizing, time in the Illinois state Senate, 3 years as a junior Senator, one junket to Russia with Senator Lugar, and ineffective dabbling (some say damaging) in Kenya’s internal politics. Frum chose to attack the very candidate he said he would vote for come November without even taking the time to get to know her. What a guy.
David Frum is a funny kind of Republican; he attacks conservatives like Rush, Mark, and Palin, and promotes liberal issues. If that is his formula for attracting more people into the Republican Party and he needs work, I’m sure Frum would fit right in at ACORN registering people to vote.
Hannity looks nicer in person
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David Frum is no Republican. He is a RINO.
The shrinking big republican tent that Frum and others are referring to is that portion of the Republican Party that represents the conservative wing, the Neocons, the right-wingers, the pro-life crowd that are core conservative constituents.
Right-wing refers to the opposite of left-wing, socialists, communists, fascists, statists and the democrat leadership and we know who they are so whatever name you choose to substitute for conservative is darling by comparison. There are degrees of republicans but very little difference when it comes to democrats. The furthest position from the left is the conservative one and yet that is the most ‘liberal’ in terms of the true meaning of that word. Since conservatives stand for less government they stand for more freedom, liberty and choice and a greater ability to pursue happiness. Since they stand for fewer taxes, they stand for more property and less debt bequeathed to generations that had no vote in the matter. Since they stand for less central control they don’t prevent people from moving, or force people to move to alternative other locations with varying degrees of local control more suitable to how they choose to live and work.
The more you slide away from conservatism the more you slide towards policies that modify and damage your liberty, freedom and choice. I cannot imagine a bigger tent than one that promotes individual choice in terms of how you want to live, work and pursue happiness than one which allows you to do it on your own terms and by your own free choice and will. How do you diminish that appeal in order to expand the tent? Everyone is invited to share that goal. If, to such an environment comes those that seek more government, more regulations, more central control, less individualism, more taxes and more debt no one would stop such endeavors if they elected to do such only to themselves but conservatives resist when they are forced to swallow the same policies… at the point of a gun.
Ultimately the one difference Frum and others really refer to are the pro-choice beliefs of the Christian right and the freedom a woman has in terms of her own body. The pro-choice vs. the pro-life issue nearly consumed the Supreme Court and could some day destroy the very concept of freedom in this nation. Anyone with a biological/philosophical background understands that unborn babies are at some point complete humans lacking nothing more than dimensional size. There is a point, which should be recognized by strong law, whereby they cease to be the sole property of the mother just the way we finally understood that men, women and children could never be the property of others and consequently abolished slavery. Ultimately the property within the mother becomes at least as important as the mother and maybe even more so. Almost always pregnancy is an optional choice. Leonardo Da Vinci once said that the day would eventually come when we would look at the killing of an animal the way we look at the killing of a man. He had no idea that the day would arise when we look at the killing of late term babies the way we look at the killing of an animal.
And so if Frum and his big tent companions wishes to expand the party I suspect he is really referring to pro-choice women. Roe vs. Wade, is most notably understood as a decision that never belonged in the domain of the high court, at the very extreme it might someday be overturned leaving each state to determine its own abortion laws, as with same sex marriage or in a fashion similar to eminent domain, which is now also relegated to the states because of another unfortunate Supreme Court screw-up (Kelo)… only this time in reverse.
Of all those women worrying about being unable to terminate babies in the mid to latter part of gestation just imagine all the personal freedoms that you will no longer have available when a mature socialist (statist) government controls just about every aspect of your life from the moment that you arise in the morning to the moment that you go to bed in the evening. What will become of the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th, 9th, 10th and 14th amendments? It may seem that the 13th amendment was never passed and that slavery applies to all of us. If a case were to be made for abortion on demand I would guess that the best argument would be birth into a world like that because manifest destiny could then be defined as more of the same throughout our country and the world for untold generations yet to be born.
I’m really getting annoyed with the “Big Tent” phrase. Even that idiot “Hans und Franz Jerkinator” uses it now. No one talks in detail about Conservative issues, they only refer to “right-wing” and “tents”. If we support gay marriage, would that make the tent bigger? If we support abortion, would that also make it bigger? How about amnesty and open borders? The left now has a new term to exploit that can be used to focus the ignorant American population on the “closed”, “narrow-minded”, “right-wing” Conservative Republicans that want to restrict who can join their ranks via the “tent” size analogy. The “tent” analogy came from RINO’s like Jeb Bush. So, Moderate Republicans have provided the left with talking points with which to attack Conservatives. If we state our positions over and over, people will follow a just cause. Stick to Conservative values, articulate them in specific terms, and the people will follow.
The ‘Big Tent’ concept is a talking point creation of RINOS that has become a weapon the left has been given to use and enjoy because republican centrists, moderates and RINO’s can’t stop committing suicide with it in their attempt to discredit conservatives.