Slublog: David Frum Don't Know Much About History
Update: David Frum is a Humorless Dick

Even recent history. Even history he was actually peripherally involved in, being a speechwriter for Bush.

At Hot Air, Slublog takes down Frum's strange defend-Democrats-at-any-cost, attack-Republicans-on-any-pretext historical ignorance.

Basically he's decided it's a political crime to oppose Barack Obama, because doing so is unfair and would destroy the Republic or somethin'.

Quit Whining? I'm not going to link Frum's three-part attack on conservatives to, as the headline has it, "Quit Whining!" I imagine you can get the gist well enough from that headline.

I want to note why Frum is a dick, and I am not a dick. Last week -- or was it two weeks ago -- I had something of an Optimism Day, or a couple in the row, where I kept posting stuff along the lines that:

1) Some conservatives are over-respectful of Obama's political suasion

2) Some conservatives wrongly believe the public's distaste for large deficits and tax hikes (and both together! Hooray!) has suddenly dissipated and the nation now accepts these things.

3) Some conservatives erroneously believe the MSM is all-powerful, and will thwart our every attempt to push our ideas to the public, when in fact it is merely powerful, rather than all-powerful. Witness the non-presidencies of Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore and John Kerry.

Now, I thought, and still think, there is entirely too much defeatism on the right. And I said so, but in a fairly positive way. I did not attack. I just said, "You're wrong, we can do this, Obama's not that popular, the public is not that hungry for socialism, and while the media is more in the tank for Obama than they've ever been for anyone, their influence is at a low ebb and will get lower still."

Whether or not I changed minds I don't know. I'd like to think I did. Or at least provided some pep for the rally.

Compare to Frum. Frum has a ballpark-similar thesis, but strangely he decides it's necessary to insult conservatives left and right -- calling them morally wrongheaded for their pessimism. Further, once again, he strangely concludes the path to victory meanders through the counties of Accommodation, Compromise, Surrender, and Obama Support.

Frum isn't merely wrong. Many are wrong. Being wrong is an intellectual defect, not a defect of character.

But Frum has bad motive and bad intent. He cannot even manage to sell optimism to a party badly in need of the tonic without further dispiriting conservatives by insulting them, belittling them, and telling them, straight up no chaser, that their concerns about the diminishment of liberty and free choice under Obama are not merely illegitimate, but morally corrupt.

Why else would a supposed call for optimism be so cheerless and disheartening, if not by design? He is a speechwriter by trade; I assume he understands what the words he writes mean, and their likely effect.

This is Frum's idea of a call to arms? It's the St. Crispin's Day speech as performed by Bizarro's road company (which always perfrms in the same city -- me hate this city so much me never want to leave).

I have no idea why Frum self-identifies as a conservative. (If he does at all, assuming this is not some counter-programming marketing gimmick.) He is hostile not just to every single conservative principle, but every single conservative; his disgust with the lumpenproles around him is palpable.

Perhaps he's right that conservatives are too willing to embrace disgust at Obama as a unifying principle. But I fail to see how Frum's preferred emotional state of disgust of all conservatives disgusted by statism is preferable, or adds a dollop of moral uplift.

His single policy idea, not merely endlessly repeated but endlessly repeated in as insulting and demeaning a fashion as is possible, is to accede to the Obama/Pelosi/Reid agenda in every principle and in every particular.

David Frum is, in fact, part of the New Majority. That New Majority happens to be Obama's Democratic Majority. It will be a short-lived majority, but I suppose he's entitled to enjoy it while he can.

posted by Ace at 04:36 PM

| Access Comments