Ever see anyone use the word ‘wrong’ eight times in the same sentence or ‘traduces’ even once ever besides here now or in something David Frum wrote? (Back to that in a moment.)
Last year, while house-sitting for his working wife and in between moving the furniture around, Frum set down his duster long enough to take up Palin-bashing; he departed that part-time, home-alone gig with the National Review soon thereafter. Frum has left quite a few jobs (and Canada) since leaving Yale and Harvard Law School in 1987. One of those jobs was a brief stint in the Bush 43 White House; after that door hit him on the way out, he promptly bashed the President he had just served. Back in March, when Frum took some shots at Rush, Mark took Frum to task on-air, the latter’s son tried to call the show, and he was soon followed by his very whiny father.
Nowadays, Frum gets most of his work and praise from pundits on lib TV after another of his columns fretting about conservatives appears on his web site, New Majority. Here’s a taste:
The big conservative book of the moment, Mark Levin’s Liberty & Tyranny is suffused with this message of doom. “Liberty, once lost, is lost forever,†intones Levin in one of the book’s many dire assertions.
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The apocalyptic despair heard from today’s conservatives is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong as a description of reality, wrong politically, wrong psychologically, wrong morally.It’s wrong first because it denies and traduces the successes and achievements of the conservative movement. The story of the world since 1975 has been a story of the marvelous return and spread of liberty, in the United States and around the world.
(If you have to spit, please use the bathroom or expectorate outside.)
As this site’s owner pointed out today, Mark responded last night to Frum’s latest tripe yet he is hardly alone in pushing back against this squish and like ilk (i.e. Conor Friedersdorf and Rod Dreher). Here are four examples:
As is his habit, Frum places the blame for political instability on conservatives. Also, with no sense of apparent irony, Frum outlines what he thinks makes this country’s political system so stable while refusing to even acknowledge what the opposition did for eight years to undermine that stability. I’m not suggesting we copy the left’s playbook, but think it’s unfair for Frum to pretend conservative pessimism is a level of villainy never before seen on the political stage.
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Unintentionally, Mr. Frum has fingered precisely what’s wrong with the approach of Republican “moderates” or “neo-Statists,” as Levin might say. Having read Levin’s book from cover to cover and reviewed it, I sense not a scintilla of “doom” in these pages. Levin is a seriously credentialed Reaganite, which among other things by definition means he shares the late president’s affinity for bold colors and optimism. But even if one were unaware of that, the hard fact is that it is not Levin or his book but the “Statist” argument that is the greatest purveyor of doom and gloom. And if one is a “neo-Statist” as Frum has apparently become, the idea is to be gloomy but just not as gloomy as the Statist. Sort of gloom-lite.
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NOT LONG AGO, people were saying that right-leaning books didn’t sell. Now reader Gordon Dalman writes: “Michelle Malkin’s Culture of Corruption is now #1 on Amazon. It’s good to see both Glenn Beck and Mark Levin in the Top 10 as well.†[Program note: Malkin will be on Mark's show this
FridayTuesday, August 4.]–
Just compare David Frum’s new website, New Majority, and his YouTube page NewMajorityWebsite, to other websites and YouTube channels, and you will see why he must crawl back to Newsweek in order to find anyone that agrees with him.
The right’s real new majority is conservative. That rapidly expanding block will long remember with disdain those “moderates” that voted with the Democrats in Congress to saddle future generations with trillions of dollars of debt and bigger government.
When the sales of Frum’s last and long ago published book crawl above 5,000 copies, perhaps he will land a job co-anchoring at the 2012 Republican National Convention with Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann. If not, maybe they will at least hire him part-time to clean their offices.
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Frum has been trying to climb out of the valley of ignominy for a long time. Maybe he should analyze the word “conservatismâ€. It is about conserving what is traditional and what works. Moderation cannot be conservative and is not “new†unless it modifies and moderates liberalism. From a practical and accurate perspective, consistent with the language, he should address himself as a moderate liberal which also applies to many others devoid of an understanding of history, economics, the significance of property, national defense and man’s inherent natural rights. More flamboyant moderate liberals such as Andrew Sullivan and the better known “McCain slayer†Colin Powel and others that populate the pages of the Slimes, the New Yorker and even Vanity Fare are better equipped at articulating the fallacy of moderation than Frum. The ratings are in; they are noticed and better loved by the liberal media and are especially sought after by liberals who often parade them out as conservatives, albeit counterfeit that they are. Frum is trying hard but still has a way to go to be the affectionate and loved moderate the media seeks to advertise to achieve the credibility that permits them to slyly support real liberals without being categorized as unfair.
I don’t need a moderate to define for me what a conservative is about and who I am. If I would choose an alternative way of defining myself and what defines a conservative I would trust a solid liberal to provide the clues. Mr. Frum should understand that he is not sufficiently hated by liberals to qualify as a conservative. In fact they say nothing significant about him because he does not represent a threat. No one worries that the Fairness Doctrine, or one of its camouflaged do alikes, might squelch Frum’s political speech; it might, in fact, enhance it. When Mr. Frum, Mr. Dreher and others of his tribe are sufficiently vilified by the NY Slimes and the present Administration they might catch my attention. If he had the honesty to seek a yardstick to measure what really characterizes a conservative I would suggest that he try and comprehend why the media so vilifies Sarah Palin (fiscal responsibility, smaller government and strong national defense). Those clues, once deciphered, should lead him to understand exactly where he has gone wrong.