David Frum

[Wok]

I read an interesting article he wrote for Newsweek, and I never heard of the guy until today. It appears he is getting kicked in the cunt by Mark Levin. This guy says the Republican party needs to be rebranded and appeal to more voters, and Rush should not be the face of the Party.

I agree Rush should not be the face of the Party (or appear that way), but I cannot see hardliners wanting to change the underlying party line message, and Rush is the mouthpiece for that message. Perhaps this is why Frum is getting kicked?

 

[KingOrfeo]

David Frum was a speechwriter for W and coined the "Axis of Evil" phrase (though he originally wrote it as "Axis of Hatred" -- W punched it up), lumping together three countries -- Iran, Iraq and North Korea -- that politically had absolutely nothing in common except being on bad terms with the U.S., and had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11 or al-Qaeda and, except in Iran's case to some extent (Iran does fund Hezbollah), absolutely nothing to do with international terrorism in any form. So, he's not an intellectually honest man, but he knows what's what in politics. The phrase resonated, after all.

 

[Wok]

David Frum was a speechwriter for W and coined the "Axis of Evil" phrase (though he originally wrote it as "Axis of Hatred" -- W punched it up), lumping together three countries -- Iran, Iraq and North Korea -- that politically had absolutely nothing in common except being on bad terms with the U.S. So, he's not an intellectually honest man, but he knows what's what in politics.

That I get. However, it appears he is not liked very much right now. So any opposition leads to throwing loyalists under the bus, or is Frum a turncoat?

 

[rosco rathbone]

When one thinks of the worst stereotypes of Republicans--red-faced white men at the country club--a visual image comes to mind not far from Rush's bloated angry visage. All he needs is a top hat and a monocle, like the Monopoly guy.

 

[KingOrfeo]

That I get. However, it appears he is not liked very much right now. So any opposition leads to throwing loyalists under the bus, or is Frum a turncoat?

I'd say the former. Frum's politics seem to be the same they always were -- he is no more a "turncoat" than Limbaugh is. This is simply an intra-party struggle over the Republican Party's direction -- something that will inevitably happen now and then in any "big tent" party.

 

[NaughtyLil1]

I don't know diddly jack about David Frum.

Just wanted to sneak in and say hi.

 

[Wok]

I don't know diddly jack about David Frum.

Just wanted to sneak in and say hi.

Hi there my friend!

 

[GuiltyPleasure]

Like Celine Dion we dumped (I mean gave him as a gift from Canada) him on you. You're welcome.

 

[Wok]

Like Celine Dion we dumped (I mean gave him as a gift from Canada) him on you. You're welcome.

What about Brian Adams? I like Bryan Adams. He sang about 69.

 

[GuiltyPleasure]

What about Brian Adams? I like Bryan Adams. He sang about 69.

He takes a mean photograph too but has bad skin, he's yours.

 

[mark_j]

What about Brian Adams? I like Bryan Adams. He sang about 69.

No No Canada apologized for Brian Adams on many occasions.

 

[JMohegan]

I read an interesting article he wrote for Newsweek, and I never heard of the guy until today. It appears he is getting kicked in the cunt by Mark Levin. This guy says the Republican party needs to be rebranded and appeal to more voters, and Rush should not be the face of the Party.

I agree Rush should not be the face of the Party (or appear that way), but I cannot see hardliners wanting to change the underlying party line message, and Rush is the mouthpiece for that message. Perhaps this is why Frum is getting kicked?

If you want to know why Levin is kicking Frum for his Limbaugh comments, see Mark Levin. Scroll down to "Contributions to Other Radio Shows."

As for Frum, he was one of the few conservative columnists willing to openly criticize the McCain/Palin policy of character assassination as campaign tactic, in the midst of economic crisis last fall. "Anybody who imagines that an election can be won under these circumstances by banging on about William Ayers and Jeremiah Wright is … to put it mildly … severely under-estimating the electoral importance of pocketbook issues."

Frum, October 8: "Those who press this Ayers line of attack are whipping Republicans and conservatives into a fury that is going to be very hard to calm after November. Is it really wise to send conservatives into opposition in a mood of disdain and fury for a man who may well be the next president of the United States, incidentally the first African-American president? Anger is a very bad political adviser. It can isolate us and push us to the extremes at exactly the moment when we ought to be rebuilding, rethinking, regrouping and recruiting."

He was (and is) right, of course. The Newsweek article is really just an extension of that October theme.

 

[Scabbers]

Limbaugh, Coulter and Levin: The Axis of Drivel.

 

[KingOrfeo]

From Frum's article linked in the OP:

Levin had been provoked by a blog entry I'd posted the day before on my site, NewMajority.com. Here's what I wrote: President Obama and Rush Limbaugh do not agree on much, but they share at least one thing: Both wish to see Rush anointed as the leader of the Republican party.

Here's Rahm Emanuel on Face the Nation yesterday: "the voice and the intellectual force and energy behind the Republican party." What a great endorsement for Rush! … But what about the rest of the party? Here's the duel that Obama and Limbaugh are jointly arranging:

On the one side, the president of the United States: soft-spoken and conciliatory, never angry, always invoking the recession and its victims. This president invokes the language of "responsibility," and in his own life seems to epitomize that ideal: He is physically honed and disciplined, his worst vice an occasional cigarette. He is at the same time an apparently devoted husband and father. Unsurprisingly, women voters trust and admire him.

And for the leader of the Republicans? A man who is aggressive and bombastic, cutting and sarcastic, who dismisses the concerned citizens in network news focus groups as "losers." With his private plane and his cigars, his history of drug dependency and his personal bulk, not to mention his tangled marital history, Rush is a walking stereotype of self-indulgence—exactly the image that Barack Obama most wants to affix to our philosophy and our party. And we're cooperating! Those images of crowds of CPACers cheering Rush's every rancorous word—we'll be seeing them rebroadcast for a long time.

Rush knows what he is doing. The worse conservatives do, the more important Rush becomes as leader of the ardent remnant. The better conservatives succeed, the more we become a broad national governing coalition, the more Rush will be sidelined.

But do the rest of us understand what we are doing to ourselves by accepting this leadership? Rush is to the Republicanism of the 2000s what Jesse Jackson was to the Democratic party in the 1980s. He plays an important role in our coalition, and of course he and his supporters have to be treated with respect. But he cannot be allowed to be the public face of the enterprise—and we have to find ways of assuring the public that he is just one Republican voice among many, and very far from the most important.

Very commonensical. If the Pubs can't attend to that message, they really have lost their way.

 

[GuiltyPleasure]

From Frum's article linked in the OP:



Very commonensical. If the Pubs can't attend to that message, they really have lost their way.

They have, with George leading the way. Bless 'em.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Also of interest is Frum's analysis of the GOP's decline:

Even before the November 2008 defeat—even before the financial crisis and the congressional elections of November 2006—it was already apparent that the Republican Party and the conservative movement were in deep trouble. And not just because of Iraq, either (although Iraq obviously did not help).

At the peak of the Bush boom in 2007, the typical American worker was earning barely more after inflation than the typical American worker had earned in 2000. Out of those flat earnings, that worker was paying more for food, energy and out-of-pocket costs of health care. Political parties that do not deliver economic improvement for the typical person do not get reelected. We Republicans and conservatives were not delivering. The reasons for our failure are complex and controversial, but the consequences are not.

We lost the presidency in 2008. In 2006 and 2008, together, we lost 51 seats in the House and 14 in the Senate. Even in 2004, President Bush won reelection by the narrowest margin of any reelected president in American history.

The trends below those vote totals were even more alarming. Republicans have never done well among the poor and the nonwhite—and as the country's Hispanic population grows, so, too, do those groups. More ominously, Republicans are losing their appeal to voters with whom they've historically done well.

In 1988 George H.W. Bush beat Michael Dukakis among college graduates by 25 points. Nothing unusual there: Republicans have owned the college-graduate vote. But in 1992 Ross Perot led an exodus of the college-educated out of the GOP, and they never fully returned. In 2008 Obama beat John McCain among college graduates by 8 points, the first Democratic win among B.A. holders since exit polling began.

Political strategists used to talk about a GOP "lock" on the presidency because of the Republican hold on the big Sun Belt states: California, Texas, Florida. Republicans won California in every presidential election from 1952 through 1988 (except the Goldwater disaster of 1964). Democrats have won California in the five consecutive presidential elections since 1988.

In 1984 Reagan won young voters by 20 points; the elder Bush won voters under 30 again in 1988. Since that year, the Democrats have won the under-30 vote in five consecutive presidential elections. Voters who turned 20 between 2000 and 2005 are the most lopsidedly Democratic age cohort in the electorate. If they eat right, exercise and wear seat belts, they will be voting against George W. Bush well into the 2060s.

Between 2004 and 2008, Democrats more than doubled their party-identification advantage in Pennsylvania. A survey of party switchers in the state found that a majority of the reaffiliating voters had belonged to the GOP for 20 years or more. They were educated and affluent. More than half of those who left stated that the GOP had become too extreme.

And proposed solutions:

Look at America's public-policy problems, look at voting trends, and it's inescapably obvious that the Republican Party needs to evolve. We need to put free-market health-care reform, not tax cuts, at the core of our economic message. It's health-care costs that are crushing middle-class incomes. Between 2000 and 2006, the amount that employers paid for labor rose substantially. Employees got none of that money; all of it was absorbed by rising health-care costs. Meanwhile, the income-tax cuts offered by Republicans interest fewer and fewer people: before the recession, two thirds of American workers paid more in payroll taxes than in income taxes.

We need to modulate our social conservatism (not jettison—modulate). The GOP will remain a predominantly conservative party and a predominantly pro-life party. But especially on gay-rights issues, the under-30 generation has arrived at a new consensus. Our party seems to be running to govern a country that no longer exists. The rule that both our presidential and vice presidential candidates must always be pro-life has become counterproductive: McCain's only hope of winning the presidency in 2008 was to carry Pennsylvania, and yet Pennsylvania's most successful Republican vote winner, former governor Tom Ridge, was barred from the ticket because he's pro-choice.

We need an environmental message. You don't have to accept Al Gore's predictions of imminent gloom to accept that it cannot be healthy to pump gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. We are rightly mistrustful of liberal environmentalist disrespect for property rights. But property owners also care about property values, about conservation, and as a party of property owners we should be taking those values more seriously.

Above all, we need to take governing seriously again. Voters have long associated Democrats with corrupt urban machines, Republicans with personal integrity and fiscal responsibility. Even ultraliberal states like Massachusetts would elect Republican governors like Frank Sargent, Leverett Saltonstall, William Weld and Mitt Romney precisely to keep an austere eye on the depredations of Democratic legislators. After Iraq, Katrina and Harriet Miers, Democrats surged to a five-to-three advantage on the competence and ethics questions. And that was before we put Sarah Palin on our national ticket.

Does any Liti-Con have a problem with any of that?

 

[Wok]

If you want to know why Levin is kicking Frum for his Limbaugh comments, see Mark Levin. Scroll down to "Contributions to Other Radio Shows."

As for Frum, he was one of the few conservative columnists willing to openly criticize the McCain/Palin policy of character assassination as campaign tactic, in the midst of economic crisis last fall. "Anybody who imagines that an election can be won under these circumstances by banging on about William Ayers and Jeremiah Wright is … to put it mildly … severely under-estimating the electoral importance of pocketbook issues."

Frum, October 8: "Those who press this Ayers line of attack are whipping Republicans and conservatives into a fury that is going to be very hard to calm after November. Is it really wise to send conservatives into opposition in a mood of disdain and fury for a man who may well be the next president of the United States, incidentally the first African-American president? Anger is a very bad political adviser. It can isolate us and push us to the extremes at exactly the moment when we ought to be rebuilding, rethinking, regrouping and recruiting."

He was (and is) right, of course. The Newsweek article is really just an extension of that October theme.

I do know conservatives can give a rat's ass about McCain, as you know too. However, to openly criticize Palin is another thing, so yeah, I can see where that came from now. Anyway, that is all water under the bridge, so the focus is how to get GOP's back into power again.

 

[KingOrfeo]

And the Freepers are siding with Limbaugh.

As a liberal I should be pleased that the Pubs are working so hard to remain irrelevant, but it's still sad to watch.

 

[Lancecastor]

Frum is the son of dead Canadian legendary CBC Radio newswoman Barbara Frum.

He was the mouthpiece for the Paul Wolfowitz crowd that shifted the USA to "first strike" foreign policy (New American Century) as well as the axis of evil bullshit.

His entree into American politics was made possible by the policies and thinking of Canada's "Ronald Reagan/Margaret Thatcher", former Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.

Interestingly, now the USA is headed on another Canadian path, the concepts of semi-nationalized industry, a fully regulated banking system and universal healthcare.

Soon, the USA will be truly Canadian in every respect.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Frum is the son of dead Canadian legendary CBC Radio newswoman Barbara Frum.

He was the mouthpiece for the Paul Wolfowitz crowd that shifted the USA to "first strike" foreign policy (New American Century) as well as the axis of evil bullshit.

His entree into American politics was made possible by the policies and thinking of Canada's "Ronald Reagan/Margaret Thatcher", former Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.

Interestingly, now the USA is headed on another Canadian path, the concepts of semi-nationalized industry, a fully regulated banking system and universal healthcare.

Soon, the USA will be truly Canadian in every respect.

I'm not putting maple syrup on baked beans!

 

[Generic_chick]

I'm not putting maple syrup on baked beans!

That's weird.

You will be required to spell words correctly though, centre, colour, neighbour. You'll learn to like it.

 

[Lancecastor]

I'm not putting maple syrup on baked beans!

Not yet...and just wait until you find out there is no such thing as "canadian bacon".

 

[Borscht]

When one thinks of the worst stereotypes of Republicans--red-faced white men at the country club--a visual image comes to mind not far from Rush's bloated angry visage. All he needs is a top hat and a monocle, like the Monopoly guy.

If Limbaugh didn't exist, the Dems would have to invent him.

He does look exactly like the sort of Republican who would beat his servants.

 

[Olivia_Yearns]

David Frum is extremely intelligent, and writes very well. He's written some lousy shit in columns for the National Post (canadian) over the years. He's particularly obnoxious on issues related to sexual orientation and gender. I think he's an asshole, but certainly a first-class asshole. He's been sounding like a voice of reason for the republican party. But I also think he's an angry elitist coward who basically distrusts and dislikes ordinary people.

and ... he's smarter then the average bear.

 

[Shugahhhh]

Frum, October 8: "Those who press this Ayers line of attack are whipping Republicans and conservatives into a fury that is going to be very hard to calm after November. Is it really wise to send conservatives into opposition in a mood of disdain and fury for a man who may well be the next president of the United States, incidentally the first African-American president? Anger is a very bad political adviser. It can isolate us and push us to the extremes at exactly the moment when we ought to be rebuilding, rethinking, regrouping and recruiting."

He was (and is) right, of course. The Newsweek article is really just an extension of that October theme.

We sure have seen that come to fruition here in Wingnuttia.

I'm enjoying the power grab, even Newt Gingrich is rearing his ugly head. I hear he's going to co-pilot with Putin for a quick swing over Alaska.

Not yet...and just wait until you find out there is no such thing as "canadian bacon".

But there is "Canadian Bakin'". If only those fuckers at customs had a sense of humor....