David Frum: When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality?

[Lord Zentei]

Interesting article by ex neocon and GWB speechwriter David Frum. Thought I'd share:

When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality?

Some of my Republican friends ask if I’ve gone crazy. I say: Look in the mirror.

By David Frum
Published Nov 20, 2011

It’s a very strange experience to have your friends think you’ve gone crazy. Some will tell you so. Others will indulgently humor you. Still others will avoid you. More than a few will demand that the authorities do something to get you off the streets. During one unpleasant moment after I was fired from the think tank where I’d worked for the previous seven years, I tried to reassure my wife with an old cliché: “The great thing about an experience like this is that you learn who your friends really are.” She answered, “I was happier when I didn’t know.”

It’s possible that my friends are right. I don’t think so—but then, crazy people never do. So let me put the case to you.

I’ve been a Republican all my adult life. I have worked on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, at Forbes magazine, at the Manhattan and American Enterprise Institutes, as a speechwriter in the George W. Bush administration. I believe in free markets, low taxes, reasonable regulation, and limited government. I voted for John ­McCain in 2008, and I have strongly criticized the major policy decisions of the Obama administration. But as I contemplate my party and my movement in 2011, I see things I simply cannot support.

America desperately needs a responsible and compassionate alternative to the Obama administration’s path of bigger government at higher cost. And yet: This past summer, the GOP nearly forced America to the verge of default just to score a point in a budget debate. In the throes of the worst economic crisis since the Depression, Republican politicians demand massive budget cuts and shrug off the concerns of the unemployed. In the face of evidence of dwindling upward mobility and long-stagnating middle-class wages, my party’s economic ideas sometimes seem to have shrunk to just one: more tax cuts for the very highest earners. When I entered Republican politics, during an earlier period of malaise, in the late seventies and early eighties, the movement got most of the big questions—crime, inflation, the Cold War—right. This time, the party is getting the big questions disastrously wrong.

It was not so long ago that Texas governor Bush denounced attempts to cut the earned-income tax credit as “balancing the budget on the backs of the poor.” By 2011, Republican commentators were noisily complaining that the poorer half of society are “lucky duckies” because the EITC offsets their federal tax obligations—or because the recession had left them with such meager incomes that they had no tax to pay in the first place. In 2000, candidate Bush routinely invoked “churches, synagogues, and mosques.” By 2010, prominent Republicans were denouncing the construction of a mosque in lower Manhattan as an outrageous insult. In 2003, President Bush and a Republican majority in Congress enacted a new ­prescription-drug program in Medicare. By 2011, all but four Republicans in the House and five in the Senate were voting to withdraw the Medicare guarantee from everybody under age 55. Today, the Fed’s pushing down interest rates in hopes of igniting economic growth is close to treason, according to Governor Rick Perry, coyly seconded by TheWall Street Journal. In 2000, the same policy qualified Alan Greenspan as the “greatest central banker in the history of the world,” according to Perry’s mentor, Senator Phil Gramm. Today, health reform that combines regulation of private insurance, individual mandates, and subsidies for those who need them is considered unconstitutional and an open invitation to “death panels.” A dozen years ago, a very similar reform was the Senate Republican alternative to Hillarycare. Today, stimulative fiscal policy that includes tax cuts for almost every American is “socialism.” In 2001, stimulative fiscal policy that included tax cuts for rather fewer Americans was an economic­-recovery program.

I can’t shrug off this flight from reality and responsibility as somebody else’s problem. I belonged to this movement; I helped to make the mess. People may very well say: Hey, wait a minute, didn’t you work in the George W. Bush administration that disappointed so many people in so many ways? What qualifies you to dispense advice to anybody else?

Fair question. I am haunted by the Bush experience, although it seems almost presumptuous for someone who played such a minor role to feel so much unease. The people who made the big decisions certainly seem to sleep well enough. Yet there is also the chance for something positive to come out of it all. True, some of my colleagues emerged from those years eager to revenge themselves and escalate political conflict: “They send one of ours to the hospital, we send two of theirs to the morgue.” I came out thinking, I want no more part of this cycle of revenge. For the past half-dozen years, I have been arguing that we conservatives need to follow a different course. And it is this argument that has led so many of my friends to demand, sometimes bemusedly, sometimes angrily, “What the hell happened to you?” I could fire the same question back: “Never mind me—what happened to you?”

So what did happen? The first decade of the 21st century was a crazy bookend to the twentieth, opening with a second Pearl Harbor and ending with a second Great Crash, with a second Vietnam wedged in between. Now we seem caught in the coils of a second Great Depression. These shocks radicalized the political system, damaging hawkish Democrats like Hillary Clinton in the Bush years and then driving Republicans to dust off the economics of Ayn Rand.

Some liberals suspect that the conservative changes of mind since 2008 are opportunistic and cynical. It’s true that cynicism is never entirely absent from politics: I won’t soon forget the lupine smile that played about the lips of the leader of one prominent conservative institution as he told me, “Our donors truly think the apocalypse has arrived.” Yet conscious cynicism is much rarer than you might suppose. Few of us have the self-knowledge and emotional discipline to say one thing while meaning another. If we say something often enough, we come to believe it. We don’t usually delude others until after we have first deluded ourselves. Some of the smartest and most sophisticated people I know—canny investors, erudite authors—sincerely and passionately believe that President Barack Obama has gone far beyond conventional American liberalism and is willfully and relentlessly driving the United States down the road to socialism. No counterevidence will dissuade them from this belief: not record-high corporate profits, not almost 500,000 job losses in the public sector, not the lowest tax rates since the Truman administration. It is not easy to fit this belief alongside the equally strongly held belief that the president is a pitiful, bumbling amateur, dazed and overwhelmed by a job too big for him—and yet that is done too.

Conservatism has evolved from a political philosophy into a market segment.

Conservatives have been driven to these fevered anxieties as much by their own trauma as by external events. In the aughts, Republicans held more power for longer than at any time since the twenties, yet the result was the weakest and least broadly shared economic expansion since World War II, followed by an economic crash and prolonged slump. Along the way, the GOP suffered two severe election defeats in 2006 and 2008. Imagine yourself a rank-and-file Republican in 2009: If you have not lost your job or your home, your savings have been sliced and your children cannot find work. Your retirement prospects have dimmed. Most of all, your neighbors blame you for all that has gone wrong in the country. There’s one thing you know for sure: None of this is your fault! And when the new president fails to deliver rapid recovery, he can be designated the target for everyone’s accumulated disappointment and rage. In the midst of economic wreckage, what relief to thrust all blame upon Barack Obama as the wrecker-in-chief.

The Bush years cannot be repudiated, but the memory of them can be discarded to make way for a new and more radical ideology, assembled from bits of the old GOP platform that were once sublimated by the party elites but now roam the land freely: ultralibertarianism, crank monetary theories, populist fury, and paranoid visions of a Democratic Party controlled by ACORN and the New Black Panthers. For the past three years, the media have praised the enthusiasm and energy the tea party has brought to the GOP. Yet it’s telling that that movement has failed time and again to produce even a remotely credible candidate for president. Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich: The list of tea-party candidates reads like the early history of the U.S. space program, a series of humiliating fizzles and explosions that never achieved liftoff. A political movement that never took governing seriously was exploited by a succession of political entrepreneurs uninterested in governing—but all too interested in merchandising. Much as viewers tune in to American Idol to laugh at the inept, borderline dysfunctional early auditions, these tea-party champions provide a ghoulish type of news entertainment each time they reveal that they know nothing about public affairs and have never attempted to learn. But Cain’s gaffe on Libya or Perry’s brain freeze on the Department of Energy are not only indicators of bad leadership. They are indicators of a crisis of followership. The tea party never demanded knowledge or concern for governance, and so of course it never got them.

Many hope that the tea-party mood is just a passing mania, eventually to subside into something more like the businessperson’s Republicanism practiced in the nineties by governors and mayors like George Pataki and Rudy Giuliani, Christine Todd Whitman and Dick Riordan, Tommy Thompson and John Engler. This hope tends to coalesce around the candidacies of Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman, two smart and well-informed former governors who eschew the strident rhetoric of the tea party and who have thereby earned its deep distrust. But there are good reasons to fear that the ebbing of Republican radicalism remains far off, even if Romney (or Huntsman) does capture the White House next year.

1. Fiscal Austerity and Economic Stagnation
We have entered an era in which politics increasingly revolves around the ugly question of who will bear how much pain. Conservative constituencies already see themselves as aggrieved victims of American government: They are the people who pay the taxes even as their “earned” benefits are siphoned off to provide welfare for the undeserving. The reality is, however, that the big winners in the American fiscal system are the rich, the old, the rural, and veterans—typically conservative constituencies. Squeezing the programs conservatives most dislike—PBS, the National Endowment for the Humanities, tax credits for the poor, the Department of Education, etc.—yields relatively little money. Any serious move to balance the budget, or even just reduce the deficit a little, must inevitably cut programs conservative voters do like: Medicare for current beneficiaries, farm subsidies, veterans’ benefits, and big tax loopholes like the mortgage-interest deduction and employer-provided health benefits. The rank and file of the GOP are therefore caught between their interests and their ideology—intensifying their suspicion that shadowy Washington elites are playing dirty tricks upon them.

2. Ethnic Competition
White America has been plunged into a mood of pessimism and anger since 2008. Ron Brownstein reports in the National Journal: “63 percent of African-Americans and 54 percent of Hispanics said they expected their children to exceed their standard of living. Even ­college-educated whites are less optimistic (only about two-fifths agree). But the noncollege whites are the gloomiest: Just one-third of them think their kids will live better than they do; an equal number think their children won’t even match their living standard. No other group is nearly that negative.” Those fears are not irrational. In postrecession America, employers seem to show a distinct preference for foreign-born workers. Eighty percent of the net new jobs created in the state of Texas since 2009 went to the foreign-born. Nationwide, foreign-born workers have experienced a net 4 percent increase in employment since January 2009, while native-born workers have seen continuing employment declines. Which may explain why President Obama’s approval rating among whites slipped to 41 percent in January 2010 and is now testing a new low of 33 percent. The president’s name and skin color symbolize the emergence of a new America in which many older-stock Americans intuit they will be left behind.

It is precisely these disaffected whites—especially those who didn’t go to college—who form the Republican voting base. John McCain got 58 percent of noncollege-white votes in 2008. The GOP polls even higher among that group today, but the party can only sustain those numbers as long as it gives voice to alienation. Birtherism, the claim that President Obama was not born in the United States, expressed the feeling of many that power has shifted into alien hands. That feeling will not be easily quelled by Republican electoral success, because it is based on a deep sense of dispossession and disinheritance.

3. Fox News and Talk Radio
Extremism and conflict make for bad politics but great TV. Over the past two decades, conservatism has evolved from a political philosophy into a market segment. An industry has grown up to serve that segment—and its stars have become the true thought leaders of the conservative world. The business model of the conservative media is built on two elements: provoking the audience into a fever of indignation (to keep them watching) and fomenting mistrust of all other information sources (so that they never change the channel). As a commercial proposition, this model has worked brilliantly in the Obama era. As journalism, not so much. As a tool of political mobilization, it backfires, by inciting followers to the point at which they force leaders into confrontations where everybody loses, like the summertime showdown over the debt ceiling.

But the thought leaders on talk radio and Fox do more than shape opinion. Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics. Outside this alternative reality, the United States is a country dominated by a strong Christian religiosity. Within it, Christians are a persecuted minority. Outside the system, President Obama—whatever his policy ­errors—is a figure of imposing intellect and dignity. Within the system, he’s a pitiful nothing, unable to speak without a teleprompter, an affirmative-action ­phony doomed to inevitable defeat. Outside the system, social scientists worry that the U.S. is hardening into one of the most rigid class societies in the Western world, in which the children of the poor have less chance of escape than in France, Germany, or even England. Inside the system, the U.S. remains (to borrow the words of Senator Marco Rubio) “the only place in the world where it doesn’t matter who your parents were or where you came from.”

We used to say “You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts.” Now we are all entitled to our own facts, and conservative media use this right to immerse their audience in a total environment of pseudo-facts and pretend information.

When contemplating the ruthless brilliance of this system, it’s tempting to fall back on the theory that the GOP is masterminded by a cadre of sinister billionaires, deftly manipulating the political process for their own benefit. The billionaires do exist, and some do indeed attempt to influence the political process. The bizarre fiasco of campaign-finance reform has perversely empowered them to give unlimited funds anonymously to special entities that can spend limitlessly. (Thanks, Senator ­McCain! Nice job, Senator Feingold!) Yet, for the most part, these Republican billionaires are not acting cynically. They watch Fox News too, and they’re gripped by the same apocalyptic fears as the Republican base. In funding the tea-party movement, they are ­actually acting against their own longer-term interests, for it is the richest who have the most interest in political stability, which depends upon broad societal agreement that the existing distribution of rewards is fair and reasonable. If the social order comes to seem unjust to large numbers of people, what happens next will make Occupy Wall Street look like a street fair.

Republican billionaires are not acting cynically; they watch Fox News too.

Over the past few years, I have left this alternative knowledge system behind me. What is that experience like? A personal story may be relevant here.

Through the debate over health-care reform in 2009–10, I urged that Republicans try to reach some kind of deal. The Democrats had the votes to pass something. They could not afford to lose. Providing health coverage to all is a worthy goal, and the core mechanisms of what we called Obamacare should not have been obnoxious to Republicans. In fact, they were drawn from past Republican plans. Democrats were so eager for Republican votes to provide bipartisan cover that they might well have paid a substantial price to get them, including dropping the surtaxes on work and investment that supposedly financed the Affordable Care Act. My urgings went unheeded, obviously. Senator Jim DeMint predicted that health care would become Obama’s Waterloo, the decisive defeat that would destroy his presidency, and Republicans accepted DeMint’s counsel. So they bet everything—and lost everything. A major new entitlement has been written into law, financed by redistributive new taxes. Changes in the bill that could have been had for the asking will now require years of slow, painful legislative effort, if they ever come at all. Republicans hope that the Supreme Court will overturn the Affordable Care Act. Such a decision would be the most dramatic assertion of judicial power since the thirties, and for that reason alone seems improbable. Yet absent action by the Supreme Court, outright repeal of President Obama’s health-care law is a mirage, requiring not only 60 votes in the Senate but also the withdrawal of benefits that the American people will have gotten used to by 2013.

On the day of the House vote that ensured the enactment of health-care ­reform, I wrote a blog post saying all this—and calling for some accountability for those who had led the GOP to this disaster. For my trouble, I was denounced the next day by my former colleagues at The Wall Street Journal as a turncoat. Three days after that, I was dismissed from the American Enterprise Institute. I’m not a solitary case: In 2005, the economist Bruce Bartlett, a main legislative author of the Kemp-Roth tax cut, was fired from a think tank in Dallas for too loudly denouncing the George W. Bush administration’s record, and I could tell equivalent stories about other major conservative think tanks as well.

I don’t complain from a personal point of view. Happily, I had other economic resources to fall back upon. But the message sent to others with less security was clear: We don’t pay you to think, we pay you to repeat. For myself, the main consequences have been more comic than anything else. Back in 2009, I wrote a piece for Newsweek arguing that Republicans would regret conceding so much power to Rush Limbaugh. Until that point, I’d been a frequent guest on Fox News, but thenceforward some kind of fatwa was laid down upon me. Over the next few months, I’d occasionally receive morning calls from young TV bookers asking if I was available to appear that day. For sport, I’d always answer, “I’m available—but does your senior producer know you’ve called me?” An hour later, I’d receive an embarrassed second call: “We’ve decided to go in a different direction.” Earlier this year, I did some volunteer speechwriting for a Republican contemplating a presidential run. My involvement was treated as a dangerous secret, involving discreet visits to hotel suites at odd hours. Thus are political movements held together. But thus is not how movements grow and govern.

Some call this the closing of the conservative mind. Alas, the conservative mind has proved itself only too open, these past years, to all manner of intellectual pollen. Call it instead the drying up of conservative creativity. It’s clearly true that the country faces daunting economic troubles. It’s also true that the wrong answers to those problems will push the United States toward a future of too much government, too many taxes, and too much regulation. It’s the job of conservatives in this crisis to show a better way. But it’s one thing to point out (accurately) that President Obama’s stimulus plan was mostly a compilation of antique Democratic wish lists, and quite another to argue that the correct response to the worst collapse since the thirties is to wait for the economy to get better on its own. It’s one thing to worry (wisely) about the long-term trend in government spending, and another to demand big, immediate cuts when 25 million are out of full-time work and the government can borrow for ten years at 2 percent. It’s a duty to scrutinize the actions and decisions of the incumbent administration, but an abuse to use the filibuster as a routine tool of legislation or to prevent dozens of presidential appointments from even coming to a vote. It’s fine to be unconcerned that the rich are getting richer, but blind to deny that ­middle-class wages have stagnated or worse over the past dozen years. In the aftershock of 2008, large numbers of Americans feel exploited and abused. Rather than workable solutions, my party is offering low taxes for the currently rich and high spending for the currently old, to be followed by who-knows-what and who-the-hell-cares. This isn’t conservatism; it’s a going-out-of-business sale for the baby-boom generation.

I refuse to believe that I am the only Republican who feels this way. If CNN’s most recent polling is correct, only half of us sympathize with the tea party. However, moderate-minded people dislike conflict—and thus tend to lose to people who relish conflict. The most extreme voices in the GOP now denounce everybody else as Republicans in Name Only. But who elected them as the GOP’s membership committee? What have they done to deserve such an inheritance? In the mid-sixties, when the party split spectacularly between Ripon Republicans, who embraced the civil-rights movement, and Goldwater Republicans, who opposed it, civil-rights Republicans like Michigan governor George Romney spoke forcefully for their point of view. Today, Republicans discomfited by political and media extremism bite their tongues. But if they don’t speak up, they’ll be whipsawed into a choice between an Obama administration that wants to build a permanently bigger government and a conservative movement content with permanently outraged opposition.

This is, unfortunately, not merely a concern for Republican voters. The conservative shift to ever more extreme, ever more fantasy-based ideology has ominous real-world consequences for American society. The American system of government can’t work if the two sides wage all-out war upon each other: House, Senate, president, each has the power to thwart the others. In prior generations, the system evolved norms and habits to prevent this kind of stonewalling. For example: Theoretically, the party that holds the Senate could refuse to confirm any Cabinet nominees of a president of the other party. Yet until recently, this just “wasn’t done.” In fact, quite a lot of things that theoretically could be done just “weren’t done.” Now old inhibitions have given way. Things that weren’t done suddenly are done.

We can debate when the slide began. But what seems beyond argument is that the U.S. political system becomes more polarized and more dysfunctional every cycle, at greater and greater human cost. The next Republican president will surely find himself or herself at least as stymied by this dysfunction as President Obama, as will the people the political system supposedly serves, who must feel they have been subjected to a psychological experiment gone horribly wrong, pressing the red button in 2004 and getting a zap, pressing blue in 2008 for another zap, and now agonizing whether there is any choice that won’t zap them again in 2012. Yet in the interests of avoiding false evenhandedness, it must be admitted: The party with a stronger charge on its zapper right now, the party struggling with more self-­imposed obstacles to responsible governance, the party most in need of a course correction, is the Republican Party. Changing that party will be the fight of a political lifetime. But a great political party is worth fighting for.

[Surlethe]

Almost makes me wish I were a Republican, to join the fight to take back the party from the crazies. The article reminds me of a series of demotivators someone (RedImperator?) made a few years ago, when the posters were a craze here:

Roosevelt: Because once upon a time, the Republican Party had a heart.
Lincoln: Because once upon a time, the Republican Party had a soul.
Eisenhower: Because once upon a time, the Republican Party had a mind.

Of course, Bush was President then, and nobody had any inkling that people like Bachmann or Cain were a few years down the line.

[Terralthra]

I believe that series ended with a picture of Dick Cheney, with the predictable tagline.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

He's funny. He talks about being against "Obama's big government at all costs", then comes around and reacts in horror to all the austerity. He gets what he wants, now he can't eat his pie.

[evilsoup]

I think he's saying that the long-term goal is to get a smaller government, but that austerity measures are going too fast, and going about it wrong. Sort of like how you shouldn't make a heroin addict go cold-turkey.

[Thanas]

And that it all depends on a lot more factors than "austerity now", as his argument about stagnating middle class income etc. shows.

[evilsoup]

If all American conservatives were like this guy (actually sensible and willing to take into account evidence to an extent, instead of screaming talking points in your face and engaging in retarded brinkmanship with the world economy), the US would be a much better place right now.

[Stravo]

Not a lot of sympathy for Republicans who are suddenly waking up to find their party hijacked. It was all well and good when they were in power and riding the tide of the tea party to victory. Now suddenly after a decade of people on the other side and in the middle pointing out the hyteria and hypocrisy of the right they woke up on their own and see a party they don't agree with? I call bullshit on that. If you really cared about the message and mission of your party all the warning signs were loud and clear starting with the Bush presidency and you should have done something then but why act if the party seems successful even if you no longer agree with its actions, right?

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

I think he's saying that the long-term goal is to get a smaller government, but that austerity measures are going too fast, and going about it wrong. Sort of like how you shouldn't make a heroin addict go cold-turkey.

Didn't stop them from going on that platform during the last elections.

So yeah, I am not convinced.

[Simon_Jester]

Re: Stravo:

I think part of it is, for someone like Frum, hindsight.

The people responsible for making the decisions that governed the Republican Party during the Bush years were mostly... for lack of a better term, sane. There was more awareness, more respect, for the need to have actual policy and govern the country. Bush's policy proposals were often (in my opinion) bad, but I don't think he ever tried to do anything that would predictably cause the country to crash and burn in the short term. Most of the people in his administration cut their teeth during the era between Nixon and Reagan, when the quality of governance and willingness of the parties to compromise was, on average, higher.

And so there was less of the foolish absurdity we've seen with Perry's desire to abolish whole Cabinet-level departments, or with Cain's 9-9-9 scheme, or with the post-2010 Republicans' attempt to play chicken with the debt ceiling.

So you could live in that political environment and think:

"Okay, the people around me are all committed to goals I consider reasonable. Some of them may go a bit too far, but we can all get together and talk about the need to limit our policy goals to what's practical. We can think about compromise, we can care what other people think, we can present ourselves to the outside world as a political party which is fit and able to run a large country."

And that was, by and large, true. Whatever long term disasters were building up in the wings, Republican government of the US from 2000-2008 did not cause many short term disasters. Things that went wrong went wrong over time, not because the Republicans were actively bungling day to day crisis response, or doing things that caused the whole system of government to collapse.

But since 2008, the Bush-era politicians have lost a lot of influence, while self-aggrandizing nitwits became powerful, by mastering and internalizing the rhetoric the Bush-era Republicans used to mobilize the base. The problem is that those people believe the rhetoric, and don't have the legacy of experience in actually running a country without crashing it into the ground that their predecessors have. So they propose wildly impractical things because in the environment the party has created, that is how to win... and they don't have the judgment to stop and realize that they can't possibly govern using those tactics.

This is something new- that the Republicans are dominated by people who have drunk the Kool-Aid, not by the people who spiked it in the first place. And I think it's understandable that, like the infamous frog in boiling water, someone like Frum might wind up stuck in that political environment and not noticing the problem until finally, it becomes totally intolerable.

[Thanas]

^The Bush tax cuts called.

Since when was lowering taxes while fighting two huge and expensive wars ever a good idea?

[Simon_Jester]

^The Bush tax cuts called.

Since when was lowering taxes while fighting two huge and expensive wars ever a good idea?

I didn't say it was a good idea.

What I'm getting at is that a basically sober, sane person who wasn't suffering from apocalyptic delusions and didn't have a deliberate policy of peeing all over facts they dislike could think the Bush tax cuts were a good idea. And that the invasion of Afghanistan was a good idea. And maybe even (this is a stretch for me) that the invasion of Iraq was a good idea.

A basically sane person who just happened to believe different things from me could think that the debt resulting from all this would be manageable, that it was actually possible to make Iraq and Afghanistan safe for democracy at gunpoint, and so on. They would be, as many predicted at the time, wrong. But they wouldn't have to be crazy, or a blithering idiot.

I believe all these ideas were bad. But they weren't absolute madness, weren't things that would leave the US in chaos in a matter of months. The 9-9-9 plan, to "I'm going to destroy three government agencies and I can't remember which," or to "let's play chicken with the debt ceiling," makes these Bush policies look sensible by comparison.

That is not a compliment to the Bush policies. We could have done much better in those years. It's a sign of how inane and ridiculous current Republican policy has become.

Which is why you get people like Frum who have left the party as it has grown progressively more insular and absurd.

[Civil War Man]

And maybe even (this is a stretch for me) that the invasion of Iraq was a good idea.

To expand on this a bit and provide an example: Back then cable news channels were filtering out dissenting opinions and contradictory facts regarding the evidence used for the lead-up to Iraq. So unless people went out of their way to independently check the facts on their own, it was difficult to learn about, for example, the faulty intelligence and outright fabrications that were used as justification.

Couple this with the fact that the Bush cabinet was full of people with years of legit experience of diplomatic and military dealings with not only the middle east in general, but Iraq in particular, and it's not hard to imagine how a bystander could be tricked into thinking Iraq was, if not a good idea, something that wouldn't have turned out as badly as it did.

[Simon_Jester]

I'm not just talking about the bystanders. I'm talking about the policy-makers themselves. My argument is simply that Republican leaders of the 2000-2006 period did not need to be gibbering buffoons to do the things they did. The connections between their actions and eventual disaster were subtle enough that an ordinary mix of wishful thinking, bias, and sincere but misguided ideas about what's best for the country could explain their actions. No drastic "I reject your facts and replace them with my own" or "I don't need to know anything about foreign policy" foolishness was required.

That is something new to the party in the past few years- that the most influential voices in the party no longer feel obligated to make sense. It might be that this would have happened sooner if the Republicans had been driven into opposition in 2004 or 2000- imagine a Tea Party protesting Kerry- but as it stands, it didn't really kick in until 2008-09 with the rise of figures like Beck and Palin.

And it was that shift that leaves people like Frum thinking they no longer have a place in the party, because the party no longer has room for thinky moderates.

[BrooklynRedLeg]

Anyone who listens to David Frum needs their fucking heads examined. He's a goddamn NeoCon asshole and doesn't know what in the fuck he is talking about to boot. Fuck him and fuck the NeoCons as they're the goddamn interlopers. I'm sick of hearing shitheels like Frum drone on about how they love 'free markets' and other drek they spew. Newsflash, our Fascistic system is NOT a Free Market, Frummie-pooh.

Frum is among the bat-shit crazy that took over the party and its time people wake up and realize that.

[UnderAGreySky]

Anyone who listens to David Frum needs their fucking heads examined. He's a goddamn NeoCon asshole and doesn't know what in the fuck he is talking about to boot. Fuck him and fuck the NeoCons as they're the goddamn interlopers. I'm sick of hearing shitheels like Frum drone on about how they love 'free markets' and other drek they spew. Newsflash, our Fascistic system is NOT a Free Market, Frummie-pooh.

Frum is among the bat-shit crazy that took over the party and its time people wake up and realize that.

Calm down, kiddo. If you'd read through the whole thing you'd find that he's anything but bat-shit crazy. Yes, he has some opinions and ideas that are reprehensible, but saying "doesn't know what in the fuck he is talking about to boot" without providing an example makes you look foolish. He can go fuck himself for his opinions on Iraq, but he's very right in saying that having openly nutty candidates with a shot at becoming president is bad for the country as a whole too.

[BrooklynRedLeg]

If you'd read through the whole thing you'd find that he's anything but bat-shit crazy.

Wrong.

In the throes of the worst economic crisis since the Depression, Republican politicians demand massive budget cuts and shrug off the concerns of the unemployed.

Massive budget cuts =/= chopping the unemployed and/or poor off at the knees. What in the bloody fuck does not giving Raytheon millions of dollars for more Cruise Missiles have to do with the unemployed? What does not giving goddamn Pakistan billions of dollars have to do with the unemployed? What does not giving Corporations hundreds of millions in grants (ie- Corporate Welfare) have to do with the unemployed? What does bringing our troops home from where they aren't needed, aren't wanted and not bombing the bejezus out of everything in site have to do with the unemployed?

Today, the Fed’s pushing down interest rates in hopes of igniting economic growth is close to treason, according to Governor Rick Perry, coyly seconded by TheWall Street Journal. In 2000, the same policy qualified Alan Greenspan as the “greatest central banker in the history of the world,” according to Perry’s mentor, Senator Phil Gramm.

Yes, Perry is a fucking retard (there is a specific Constitutional defintion to Treason and Greenspan didn't commit it) but Frum thinks the 0% Interest Rate by the Fed is a good thing. The fucking moron does not even understand that is what is caused the massive malinvestment and The Housing Bubble.

Frum has not changed his stripes. He is a 'Big Government Conservative' just like Perry, Cain, Bachmann, Gingrich, Romney, Sanscrotum and Huntsman. Nothing he has said this political season has indicated to me he is anything other than the same asshole he was under Bush.

[Phantasee]

This isn't really about Frum himself. We were trying to discuss Frum's opinions of the Republican party.

[bobalot]

Not a lot of sympathy for Republicans who are suddenly waking up to find their party hijacked. It was all well and good when they were in power and riding the tide of the tea party to victory. Now suddenly after a decade of people on the other side and in the middle pointing out the hyteria and hypocrisy of the right they woke up on their own and see a party they don't agree with? I call bullshit on that. If you really cared about the message and mission of your party all the warning signs were loud and clear starting with the Bush presidency and you should have done something then but why act if the party seems successful even if you no longer agree with its actions, right?

I think Mike Wong put it best when he described a similar realisation by Frank Schaeffer.

His profound revelation is a bit like a guy crawling out of a car wreck, looking at the corpses of his victims, and saying "I'll never drink and drive again!"

Fuck him and the horse he rode in on.

[bobalot]

If you'd read through the whole thing you'd find that he's anything but bat-shit crazy.

Wrong.

In the throes of the worst economic crisis since the Depression, Republican politicians demand massive budget cuts and shrug off the concerns of the unemployed.

Massive budget cuts =/= chopping the unemployed and/or poor off at the knees. What in the bloody fuck does not giving Raytheon millions of dollars for more Cruise Missiles have to do with the unemployed? What does not giving goddamn Pakistan billions of dollars have to do with the unemployed? What does not giving Corporations hundreds of millions in grants (ie- Corporate Welfare) have to do with the unemployed? What does bringing our troops home from where they aren't needed, aren't wanted and not bombing the bejezus out of everything in site have to do with the unemployed?

Today, the Fed’s pushing down interest rates in hopes of igniting economic growth is close to treason, according to Governor Rick Perry, coyly seconded by TheWall Street Journal. In 2000, the same policy qualified Alan Greenspan as the “greatest central banker in the history of the world,” according to Perry’s mentor, Senator Phil Gramm.

Yes, Perry is a fucking retard (there is a specific Constitutional defintion to Treason and Greenspan didn't commit it) but Frum thinks the 0% Interest Rate by the Fed is a good thing. The fucking moron does not even understand that is what is caused the massive malinvestment and The Housing Bubble.

Frum has not changed his stripes. He is a 'Big Government Conservative' just like Perry, Cain, Bachmann, Gingrich, Romney, Sanscrotum and Huntsman. Nothing he has said this political season has indicated to me he is anything other than the same asshole he was under Bush.

Thanks for derailing the thread with unrelated bullshit to the topic, douchenozzle.

[Patrick Degan]

Count me as among those having a hard time feeling sympathy for David Frum as he cries over the trainwreck he helped bring along. Anybody with half a brain could have seen this coming years ago: a conservative movement that increasingly cut itself off from all contrary opinion and inconvenient fact until they built an entire alternative intellectual artifice entirely of, by, and for, themselves. As I've maintained, the GOP have steadily woven around themselves what Robert Anton Wilson described as a disinformation loop and now that loop has closed around American conservatism completely. Though Wilson wrote mainly about fear of punishment being the mechanism feeding such a loop, fear of the Other combined with cynical opportunism and magickal thinking have achieved the exact same result: a complete detachment from reality which has engulfed all the players, including the leadership of the Republican Party.

[Coop D'etat]

While you may not feel much sympathy for the man, I don't particularly either, focusing on that is, I think, missing the point. The point is that he should at the very least be commended for breaking ranks with the Republican echo chamber and publicly call his side out for drinking the kool aid. It certainly wasn't a good career move compared to what most pundits that toe the party line and make a good living as salesmen for the American counter-revolutionary (they aren't conservative by the normal sense of the word) right.

I also think that a lot of people under-estimate how difficult for people ideologically committed their "team" to admit that they are wrong. Look at how much less fuss American liberals are making about civil liberties under Obama versus Bush. People of every ideological stamp are guilty to one extent or another of being stupidly tribal.

Grading on the curve of his peers, which I know is damning by faint praise, he's a pinnacle of intellectual honesty. From where I sit, American politics needs a lot more David Frums if its going to un-fuck itself. The far-right won't go away until an awful lot of people get convinced that they were wrong, or at least not as correct as they thought they were.

[Simon_Jester]

Not a lot of sympathy for Republicans who are suddenly waking up to find their party hijacked. It was all well and good when they were in power and riding the tide of the tea party to victory. Now suddenly after a decade of people on the other side and in the middle pointing out the hyteria and hypocrisy of the right they woke up on their own and see a party they don't agree with? I call bullshit on that. If you really cared about the message and mission of your party all the warning signs were loud and clear starting with the Bush presidency and you should have done something then but why act if the party seems successful even if you no longer agree with its actions, right?

I think Mike Wong put it best when he described a similar realisation by Frank Schaeffer.

His profound revelation is a bit like a guy crawling out of a car wreck, looking at the corpses of his victims, and saying "I'll never drink and drive again!"
Fuck him and the horse he rode in on.

You may despise him personally, but he's probably forgotten more about the internal dynamics of the Republican Party than you'll ever learn. So it's advisable to at least take note of the words coming out of his mouth, as they're of historical interest.

Which is the same I'd say of Albert Speer, so don't think I'm giving him much of a break.

[The Romulan Republic]

Not a lot of sympathy for Republicans who are suddenly waking up to find their party hijacked. It was all well and good when they were in power and riding the tide of the tea party to victory. Now suddenly after a decade of people on the other side and in the middle pointing out the hyteria and hypocrisy of the right they woke up on their own and see a party they don't agree with? I call bullshit on that. If you really cared about the message and mission of your party all the warning signs were loud and clear starting with the Bush presidency and you should have done something then but why act if the party seems successful even if you no longer agree with its actions, right?

I think Mike Wong put it best when he described a similar realisation by Frank Schaeffer.

His profound revelation is a bit like a guy crawling out of a car wreck, looking at the corpses of his victims, and saying "I'll never drink and drive again!"

Fuck him and the horse he rode in on.

I think that's a bit too harsh and unforgiving an attitude, and counter-productive.

Everyone makes mistakes. If someone realizes they were wrong and does differently in the future, insisting on condemning them and hating them forevermore comes off as hateful and bitter. Also, how many Rightwingers who might otherwise be willing to admit they were wrong will be willing to do so in the face of such unremitting hostility?

[bobalot]

Not a lot of sympathy for Republicans who are suddenly waking up to find their party hijacked. It was all well and good when they were in power and riding the tide of the tea party to victory. Now suddenly after a decade of people on the other side and in the middle pointing out the hyteria and hypocrisy of the right they woke up on their own and see a party they don't agree with? I call bullshit on that. If you really cared about the message and mission of your party all the warning signs were loud and clear starting with the Bush presidency and you should have done something then but why act if the party seems successful even if you no longer agree with its actions, right?

I think Mike Wong put it best when he described a similar realisation by Frank Schaeffer.

His profound revelation is a bit like a guy crawling out of a car wreck, looking at the corpses of his victims, and saying "I'll never drink and drive again!"
Fuck him and the horse he rode in on.

You may despise him personally, but he's probably forgotten more about the internal dynamics of the Republican Party than you'll ever learn. So it's advisable to at least take note of the words coming out of his mouth, as they're of historical interest.

Which is the same I'd say of Albert Speer, so don't think I'm giving him much of a break.

Really? And what new information has he provided to us that hasn't been posted on this board before? Shit, I don't live in America and even I know most of the crap he wrote in that article. What makes this article interesting is not what has been written but who wrote it. A prominent conservative braking rank with his party is what is news here.