Frum Fights Off Criticism, Makes Case

A great op-ed by David Frum in the National Post, as conservatives beg him to explain himself and his "new" views:

George Bush narrowly won the presidency in 2000, and I was recruited to join the administration as a speech-writer. My initial brief was domestic policy and economics, and it soon become impossible to avoid noticing that the administration’s economic were not working very well.

(...)

So much of our energy was being absorbed instead by cultural battles left behind from the unfinished business of the 1960s and 1970s. Here, too often, we were on the wrong side of history: Back in the 1960s and 1970s, we’d been fighting to protect the common-sense instincts of ordinary people from elite interference. Now, in the Terri Schiavo euthanasia case, with stem cell research, on gay rights issues, it was we who had become the interfering elite, against a society that was reaching its own new equilibrium.

Of course, that’s not how conservatives saw it. We saw a country divided in two, red states and blue, NASCAR vs. NPR, real America against the phonies in the cities. A movement that had begun as an intellectual one now scornfully pooh-poohed the need for people in government to know anything much at all. But expertise does matter, and the neglect of expertise leads to mismanagement and failure — as we saw in Iraq, in Katrina and in the disregard of warning signals from the financial market. It was under a supposedly pro-market administration that the United States suffered the worst market failure of the post-war era, and that should have sobered us. Instead, we rallied to Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber.

Read it all. I wonder if what Frum is trying to do is going to have any effect? IMO, it's not. People are on the US right are dumbing down even more and becoming a cheap populist movement. David Frum has been mocked, and is the focus of hate like "Goldstein" in 1984.

Radio Carny Barkers

I have posted on Rush Limbaugh and the Republican Civil War many times this week. Here is a very thoughtful piece by John Derbyshire in the The American Conservative on why these talk radio bloviators should be marginalized. (read)

With reasons for gratitude duly noted, are there some downsides to conservative talk radio? Taking the conservative project as a whole—limited government, fiscal prudence, equality under law, personal liberty, patriotism, realism abroad—has talk radio helped or hurt? All those good things are plainly off the table for the next four years at least, a prospect that conservatives can only view with anguish. Did the Limbaughs, Hannitys, Savages, and Ingrahams lead us to this sorry state of affairs?

They surely did. At the very least, by yoking themselves to the clueless George W. Bush and his free-spending administration, they helped create the great debt bubble that has now burst so spectacularly. The big names, too, were all uncritical of the decade-long (at least) efforts to “build democracy” in no-account nations with politically primitive populations. Sean Hannity called the Iraq War a “massive success,” and in January 2008 deemed the U.S. economy “phenomenal.”

That last paragraph packs a punch. Those people chose sides and defended Bush through thick and thin, ignoring evidence in front of their faces. The majority of the population were seeing things differently. People often don't know what they want, but looking at Bush and guys like Limbaugh, the majority thought, I know what I don't want.

In my own little internet world, conservative websites had/have the same problem. Question nation building in Iraq or Afghanistan? You were a chickenshit, who wanted to "cut and run." Question neo-conservatism? You were a "paleo-conservative." (A term coined meaning dinosaur, old fogey and often used to describe Pat Buchannan.) Question George W. Bush? You had "Bush Derangement Syndrome." It became annoying and divisive.

That's why I started this blog. I couldn't find anywhere else where a conservative type could go to question the orthodoxies. Rightist blogs were fighting leftists so hard they couldn't admit that anything was wrong from their own camp.

GOP Civil War Part II

subtitle to post: Feeling Better About Being Canadian

Check out this absurd suck up to Rush in the Washington Times by Andrew Breitbart.

Segments:

Spokespeople for CPAC said it was the best-received speech in the conference's 36 years. And that included Ronald Reagan, who, by the way, was no rhetorical slouch.

(...)

Anonymous liberal commentators, the rabid pests of the new media, sought out the most popular conservative blogs to flood the zone with familiar Rush Limbaugh slanders. Their goal: To demoralize the right with layer upon layer of media domination. Only talk radio with its emphasis on Socratic debate over raw emotionalism and with Mr. Limbaugh in the driver's seat has escaped the left's clutches of pure media dominance.

For years, the radio kin of these underhanded online annoyances - coined by Rush as "seminar callers" - have read their Democratic National Committee-produced scripts to muddy the political waters. Talk-show call screeners will be on double duty this week trying to keep off the air anyone who might try to tear down the post-speech unity and elation.

This is serious wacko-ness. Notice the two parts I bolded. They're saying they are the rationalists over raw emotionalism. Next paragraph they say they have to cut off anybody who ruins post speech "unity and elation". Is elation not a raw emotion?

Andrew Breitbart is a big player on the right, especially on the internet. Either he's too dumb, or he expects his audience to be too dumb. Either way, it's not a winning formula.

Why do I care anyway? I'm Canadian. For so many years, the US has lead the way for conservatism. Canada seemed lost. But observing the US over the last half decade, they have dropped the ball on conservatism. They opened up the doors to the kooks and now they run the place. They are a joke. Fiscal prudence and libertarianism are gone. It's now some sort of religious revival type movement where the peasants are dictated at how to think. Breitbart above is saying callers who phone into talk radio who disagree need to be aggressively screened. They don't want to debate. They don't want beliefs challenged. They are sheep.

I don't look up to my big neighbour to the south as much as I used to.

PJ O'Rourke: We Blew It

PJ O'Rourke is one of the biggest influences I've had in forming my political opinions. Fiscal conservatism mixed with libertarianism. Parliament of Whores and Holidays in Hell spoke to me in my 20's. Here's a great, long article on the aftermath of the 2008 election.

We have all of this going for us, worldwide. And yet we chose to
deliver our sermons only to the faithful or the already converted. Of course the trailer park Protestants yell "Amen." If you were handling rattlesnakes and keeping dinosaurs for pets, would you vote for the party that gets money from PETA?

...

To go from slime to the sublime, there are the lofty issues about which we never bothered to form enough principles to go out and break them. What is the coherent modern conservative foreign policy?

We may think of this as a post 9/11 problem, but it's been with us all along. What was Reagan thinking, landing Marines in Lebanon to prop up the government of a country that didn't have one? In 1984, I visited the site where the Marines were murdered. It was a beachfront bivouac overlooked on three sides by hills full of hostile Shiite militia. You'd urge your daughter to date Rosie O'Donnell before you'd put troops ashore in such a place.