by Blue Stockings | David Frum----former speechwriter to Bush and the man who brought you "axis of evil"---is having to defend his conservatism from the likes of the Virgin K-Lo because he has dared to criticize the egregious Palin. Lord. "I Get So Weary of This," the piece is called.
Possibly it is bad form for me to acknowledge this reality....Perhaps it is our job at NRO is tell our readers only what they want to hear, without much regard to whether it is true. Perhaps it is our duty just to keep smiling and to insist that everything is dandy - that John McCain's economic policies make sense, that his selection of Sarah Palin was an act of statesmanship, that she herself is the second coming of Anna Schwartz, and that nobody but an over-educated snob would ever suggest otherwise. (Frum)
Glad you worked that out, David Frum.
Frum is waking up to the same reality as other conservatives: that the Corner is a blog for pushing Republican talking points and Republican propaganda with the sole goal of keeping a discredited regime (which Frum helped enable, and then turned on) in power.
Why is he surprised? Did he expect NOT to be called out---and, rhetorically speaking, shot in the back---when he refused to circle the wagons? Any conservative (cf. Hitchens, Buckley, Parker, Will) who refuses to push Palin to the twirly-eyed hard right is going to be excoriated. Yes, Frum, even you.
On the other hand, why should Frum care? He's one of the original neocons!
Jump ship, dude. Stop making excuses. Everybody loves a repentant neocon!
Okay, not everybody. Okay, not people with memories that extend backwards to the time before this 24 month election year or who were paying attention to other things beside that. Okay, maybe not me or anyone of my progressive ilk. HTML Mencken explains why here.
Okay, maybe nobody. But at least you could save what remains of your soul or at least get credit for trying.
How about a real neo culpa---not one based on the idea that Bush just didn't understand your vision? How about giving up trying to make the current state of political discourse not your fault?
No? Oh.
Anyway. Strange that Frum cares what K-Lo says, given their relative positions on the food chain. Or is troubled by this moron:
As one of my correspondents wrote this very morning:
PLEASE KEEP YOUR REMARKS TO YOURSELF! Nobody but Democrats wants to hear them. (Frum)
Don't "get weary," dude---point and laugh. Enjoy your TV gigs and cocktails, if any. Having been one of the enablers of a discredited political philosophy, you can't have much else to laugh at. Perhaps it's time you draw the line somewhere.
It's a bit much to be surprised by the quality of discourse of those you enabled, and by the stupidity and willful blindness and deafness (not to say dumbness) of the Republican base.
Frum is an atavistic, vicious little fuck .... He, along with Perle, Bolton, Wolfowitz, and others, is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the destruction of our economy. Sadly, he will never pay the price for his crimes.
(And that's the nicest thing blogenfreude said.)
Conservative Andrew Sullivan---
A simple question for the NRO right: When David "Axis Of Evil" Frum is cast out as a liberal MSM toady, who exactly is still a conservative?
Taylor Marsh says:
[T]here's a little war going on in Land of the Conservatives. It's not going away either. If McCain loses, there will be a battle for power and relevancy, not to mention 2012, with Palin at the center of the struggle. Get yer popcorn ready. This is goin' to be a good one.
Ian Leslie (pssst, he's British I think) says:
David Frum, who has come a long way since he wrote this book, is one of the most thoughtful conservative commentators around. He's been criticising McCain's campaign for a while, particularly for the choice of Palin - and upsetting plenty of his less intelligent colleagues at the National Review's Corner blog in the process. (Marbury)
Ha ha, Leslie called K-Lo and the others "less intelligent" than Frum---which: yes--- even the piece doesn't fully acknowledge the evil that is the NeoCulpaCon. After all, after he discovered discovered that Bush was too stupid to absorb the subliminal neocon messages Frum was apparently planting in his speeches, Frum said;
"I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words. And the big shock to me has been that although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas. And that is the root of, maybe, everything."(Vanity Fair 2006)
Morons like Levin and K-Lo can develop their own theories on Frum’s hackery, but here’s mine:
You, David Frum, are a hack, full of shit, and a complete opportunist. You are venal, have no principles, but I doubt you’re doing it just for the money.... Rather, I think you are doing it for ego and for position within your party. Certainly you’re not doing it out of principle or intellectual consistency: Digby makes the excellent and obvious point that, when it suited your career, you had absolutely no problem with incoherent and clueless, fucktard-stupid candidates. And for that matter, your latest tome Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win makes many proposals that call for the sudden Republican endorsement of the welfare state, and at least philosophical acceptance of some degree of government protection for the middle class’s economic well-being.... (The one thing you have remained consistent on is the thing you’re most bugfuck insane about: War on Everybody, All the Time, for which you proselytized –with Richard Perle — with sociopathic lucidity in the book An End To Evil.)
See also:
Laura Rozen at internationally-oriented War and Piece has some thoughtful commentary:
For a few weeks now, especially since the Palin nomination, one has noted a cadre of conservatives - Frum, David Brooks, Ross Douhat, George Will, in part Charles Krauthammer -- expressing not just dismay at the pick, but more broadly kind of nudging the right to an acceptance of its probable loss of the election next month. And a parallel incredible resistance to accept that possibility - a rejection of the legitimacy that essentially Obama could be elected -- by some on the right, a kind of plan to go down in flames, which at times has seemed willfully insanely over the top as well as deeply irresponsible. Fighting has very much turned inwards, and Frum seems to have had enough....
[T]here seems to be an element now on the right of essentially fear, that thinks they went too far and it's going to be awful. I mean, really, read some of the Corner, and there's truly an hysterical quality to some of the stuff. Which the saner Frums and Brooks seem to be trying to kind of talk down. And again from afar, the prospect that the next president would lead so divisively as Bush/Cheney/DeLay/Rove deliberately did is hardly something one would imagine would tempt or politically benefit whoever comes after Bush, trying to lead a union that feels pretty jittery and fragile on many fronts.
Palin is so desperately unappealing to any Americans other members of what Christopher Hitchens today called "the whackjob fringe" of the GOP and a few bitter-enders that even the star of K-Lo's favorite film,("See An American Carol!") Dennis Hopper is jumping the fence.
Republican movie actor Dennis Hopper is so Republican that he starred in that shitty wingnut movie not even Republicans bothered to see, An American Carol. But now the hippie icon and Republican-since-Reagan is in the tank for You Know Who, That One, Barack Obama. “I voted for Bush, father and son, but this time I’ll vote for Obama,” Hopper said in Paris, which is also in the tank for Obama. “I pray God that Barack Obama is elected.” (Wonkette)
Uh-oh; Hopper is sending his prayers to the Republican Jesus. That's Sarah Palin's Jesus! Whose prayers will win?
Gawker lists some prominent Republicans who have jumped ship....
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