David Frum is starting to figure it out:
In the days since I stumbled into this controversy, I’ve received a great deal of e-mail. (Most of it on days when Levin or Hannity or Hugh Hewitt or Limbaugh himself has had something especially disobliging to say about me.) Most of these e-mails say some version of the same thing: if you don’t agree with Rush, quit calling yourself a conservative and get out of the Republican Party. There’s the perfect culmination of the outlook Rush Limbaugh has taught his fans and followers: we want to transform the party of Lincoln, Eisenhower and Reagan into a party of unanimous dittoheads—and we don’t care how much the party has to shrink to do it. That’s not the language of politics. It’s the language of a cult.
The problem is he thinks he can deprogram this cult. Good luck with that.
Comrade Stuck
LOL, he’s gonna need a passel of Palin Witch Doctors to turn that worm.
El Cid
And how is this different than the actual Republican leaders who were in charge of the entire f***ing government from 2002 – 2006? Does Frum want to re-visit, say, 2003, and show us the diverse, multi-voice party before it was stolen by that mean old Rush cult?
These awful bastards just want to keep pretending their last 8 to 28 years never happened and that there was some awesome, better Republican Party that we’re now forgetting in favor of the crazies.
Your part was led by the crazies. The crazies weren’t the outsiders.
Comrade Jake
I think once you feel the need to list your support for Clinton impeachment to help establish your conservative bona fides, you should start to ask yourself some questions.
aimai
"Asshole blind squirrel finds a nut?" Might be a better headline. Perhaps Frum didn’t notice it, what with the whole "Axis of Evil" speech writing work, but the us vs them, smaller tent philosophy was explicitly Bush’s and Frum’s philosophy for the eight years that it did them some personal profit. Abandoning it now can’t be seen as anything other than self interested, profit driven, special pleading.
aimai
aimai
Damn,
When I posted it said there were no other comments but as usual I find El Cid has said it better than me, and first.
aimai
dmsilev
My heart bleeds for all of these "serious" conservatives who are engaging in a beautiful display of synchronized pearl-clutching. Newsflash to Mr. Frum, Mr. Brooks, etc., etc.: You may have been deluding yourself about the nature of a very large chunk of the GOP, but you’re about the last people in the country to hold that delusion. That’s a large part of the reason why the GOP got its ass handed to it two elections in a row.
-dms
DougJ
I give anyone who leaves a cult he once belonged to a lot of credit.
Better late than never.
Michael D.
I’m not a big fan of David Frum, but among conservatives, he is the most sane, if somewhat delusional.
I talked to a co-worker the other day who I know to be a conservative. I asked her how she felt about Limbaugh being portrayed as the leader or the Republican Party.
Without hesitation, and almost before I finished asking, she gleefully told me she was thrilled and absolutely loved it.
I was actually thrilled she felt that way. It meant we are winning. And it is less work we have to do during the next election.
Good luck rebuilding that party.
But it needs to be rebuilt. I think we’re in for a one-party system for awhile, and I think that is absolutely dangerous.
aimai
But dougj,
He’s not leaving the cult. He’s just asking the cult leader to let him keep a franchise on the fringe in order, specifically in order, to better sell the product. Its like asking the amway guy to let you diversify and sell another product using the same old scams and lies to a new market. Just the other day an op ed appeared in the Boston Globe written by some guy from (and I’m not making this up exactly) the "New policy prescriptions association" where he is the " new person for researching the utterly n ew newness of new policy ideas" and lo and behold when you googled him and his new newness you found it was a Republican front and he’d always been a Republican apparatchik. Frum realizes that Republican ideas and policy prescriptions are dead/ Mr. New new realizes they are dead. Frum wants to modulate the hysteria a bit to capture some voters. MR. NEw New wants to simply eradicate the word republican but keep selling the same ideas. Neither of them is willing to address the fact that the g-damn cult is taking poison before their very eyes because it is constitutionally incapable of prescribing real medicine for the country.
aimai
Comrade Jake
FWIW, Frum nails it here IMO:
Incertus
@DougJ: Yeah, but it’s hard to say he’s really left the cult, isn’t it? It’s like he’s gone from being a Jehovah’s Witness to being Mormon–not much of a journey.
dan robinson
Frum should not protest so loudly. Rush is merely reaping the fruit of the seeds planted by Frum. Frum and others have hewed closely to the idea that government was the problem. He should not disparage those who actually believed those words.
AmIDreaming
A pox on both their houses.
DougJ
I guess it’s true he’s not leaving the cult. I still think it’s good that he’s speaking out at least.
dan robinson
I was going to drive up to the pass and get some video of my kids skiing. They had gone ahead on the ski bus while I stopped off at work to start some chip simulations. I made it as far as North Bend, when the snow was coming down sideways and there were too many rookie drivers on the road. I went back to my office and said that it was ‘whiter than a Republican convention’ and the other guys knew what I meant.
MS-4
"With us or against us"
It is really working out very well; isn’t it Mr. Frum?
joe from Lowell
I wish Barack Obama and Robert Gibbs would stop making those people write emails to David Frum.
Such jerks, just like Bush!
/snark
Faux News
Michael: You’re right. As the Republicans wind the cocoon tighter and become even more crazy and shrill (peak wignut may never be reached) it will only help the Democratic party.
It’s way too early to talk about the election of 2012 but if the Wignut R’s keep going down this road with CAPT Rush then it will be a replay of the election of 1936 for the R’s and may they wander in exile for another 40 years.
As for that asshole Frum I believe General Tommy Franks hit the nail on the head when he called Frum "the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the Earth". I guess General Franks was not impressed by the Armchair Warrior Frum’s plans for Iraq.
BTW Frum’s infamous "axis of evil" quip basically destroyed the fragile progress Clinton had made with North Korea.
MattF
I guess Frum is now having a learning experience, which I guess is a good thing. Maybe soon he’ll have a thinking experience, but– I’m not betting on it.
Comrade Darkness
@aimai, interesting take. I wonder, though, if packaging the notion that nascar fans should pay for rich people to get richer as long as they are allowed to shoot the ghey on sight will work without the banner of "Republican" to sell it under. Right now they can use the brand for the usual marketing shorthand and avoid the messy details. Without it they’d have to actually explain what they are selling, which could be troublesome. Or perhaps that’s the stage we are in now.
kid bitzer
tommy franks said that about dougy feith.
and you democrats can have your laughs now, but wait til the midterm elections; the rnc is comin atcha, and it’s off the hook.
p.a.
believe Franks was referring to Doug Feith.
So where will the Frumistas end up? Is there a demand for a party of true fiscal conservatism added to gay bashing-anti choice-anti civil rights-anti science-anti everything since the 20th century conservatism? Talk about cutting on the margins. Maybe Frum better just STFU and enjoy the ride.
calipygian
Word, yo.
4tehlulz
In before apology.
Michael D.
@Faux News: the thing is, my friend at work – she is a really smart woman (othwerwise).
Hell, my PARTNER would have voted for John McCain if he was a citizen. Talk about wanting to beat the snot out of someone!
When I was a kid, I did something really dumb in class – I won’t go into it.. My English teacher took an interest in my life and dragged me out into the hall. He said to me:
“How can someone so smart be so stupid?”
I apply that question to a lot of people. Mostly to me for believing in “The Party” for so long. But it’s relevant to a lot of people.
zoe kentucky
Two people I used to really dislike– Frum and Peggy Noonan– have actually redeemed themselves lately in my opinion. Both have bucked their party and have been admonished for doing so. Noonan openly acknowledged that Palin was a joke, Frum has been warning the GOP for a while that they are risking turning off all of the "intellecutal" conservatives and moderate republicans. They are confirming something that we have been noticing for a while– the republican tent is shrinking and people like themselves don’t feel as though they are welcome anymore. The days of Buckley-style conservatives are fading fast. In fact, I can’t think of anyone who even comes close to representing that model of republicanism.
Do I like Frum or Noonan? No. But as Reagan-worshipping non-poo-throwing conservatives it must be tough for them to watch the party dissolving into Rush Limbaugh-style, poo-throwing bloviating. None of this bodes well for their party in the near or even distant future, at least they’re willing to acknowledge it.
MattF
@zoe kentucky
Noonan can be interesting– when she’s not, um, nuts.
Faux News
believe Franks was referring to Doug Feith.
My bad. All these imperial neocons look alike to me and are basically interchangeable.
Michael: I was a registered Republican from age 18 to 28 and voted for Reagan twice. But by 1988 the sheer craziness and homophobia and hysteria around HIV/AIDS of the Party of Lincoln became too much for me. As a Gay man I felt I had no choice but to leave the party and become a Democrat. I have no regrets and it was the best thing I could have done. You and John just figured it out later than I did. If the Republican Party can someday manage to stop being a cult then perhaps you and John can return. As for me the Republican Party will always be the party of Jesse Helms. I can never go back.
John Cole
Nonsense. She savaged her when she thought the microphones were off, then went back to penning paeans to her immediately after her RNC speech.
joe from Lowell
zoe kentucky,
Kathleen Parker, too.
It’s the same thing that happened to John Cole. The Republican edifice is like the stack of oranges at the supermarket; it’s sturdy and self-supporting to outside force, but if one little orange is pulled out, it all falls down.
Once a GOPer somehow becomes aware of a flaw in the Republican stance on an issue, and realizes the faulty logic behind that stance, they can’t help but start seeing that same intellectual failure throughout the conservative world view. For some, this process began when they saw Palin’s self-immolation described as a brilliant political performance by a brilliant mind. For others, it’s the current Limbroglio. For still others, it goes back to the happy talk about Iraq circa 2005-2006. But really, it doesn’t matter which particular orange you pull out.
Cat Lady
It’s hard for me as a woman to imagine any woman choosing to be on Team Rush. His optics are so bad – I hope they show him in his shiny black open neck shirt pounding his fleshy chest nodding his slicked back porcine head at CPAC forever. He is every oily clueless leering fat loudmouth at every bar everywhere, and if that’s how Republicans want to identify, they’ll lose a whole generation’s worth of votes into the foreseeable future.
Peter J
Shouldn’t Rush be going Galt? Has he ever brought it up on his show? Any in the going Galt crowd who has proposed the idea of him doing that?
Cause it would be great.
Either he would disappear.
Or if he would chose to go Galt light, he would take a 99.5% pay cut.
burnspbesq
I keep seeing parallels between the effect of the 2008 Presidential election on the Republican Party and the effect of the 1852 Presidential election on the Whig Party. The Whigs were essentially gone by 1854, and by 1856 the Republican Party was a national force.
We could surely use an intelligent and principled conservative opposition party in this country, and the Republican Party is now utterly incapable of being that. But my fear is that my analogy will prove false, and that the current Republican Party will linger for a very long time. I’m not sure we have yet identified the stake that can be driven through its heart to kill it forever.
Another point worth remembering: as easy as it seemingly is for folks like us to see through the Republican nonsense, over 56 million people voted for John McCain, and very few of them think they made a mistake. In fact, many of the McCain voters see the events of Obama’s first 46 days in office as confirming that they did the right thing on 11/4/08. There is still a lot of deprogramming to be done.
Fulcanelli
The fact that it took so long for beltway pundits to use the "cult" word is indicative of how isolated from day to day reality these self-important fools are as to how deeply the lunacy and mental rot pervades the base on the right.
It hasn’t been about a valid, sound political philosophy for years for joe-sixpack. It hasn’t been about good governance or US fiscal policy either. They’re just not that into you, Mr. Frum.
The idea of even attempting to implement genuine, old school, traditional conservative values and principles to the American government after the last 28 years, and especially after the last 8 years, is as useless and makes about as much sense as trying to reuse a condom. And will likely be as successful.
Radon Chong
The Republicans seem to be doing to their entire party what the brain trust at Red State did to their website with all the bannings for anyone who disagrees. That is, make it irrelevant.
jcricket
With people like Frum or Card (or whomever is suddenly growing a conscience) I am reminded of that scene in the Wedding Singer, where Adam Sandler’s fiance (who jilted him at the altar the day before) stops by to explain herself. After saying how she’s not in love with him "now" because he’s a loser wedding singer, as opposed to a cool high-school rocker when she fell in love, he yells:
"Thanks, that’s information that would have been helpful YESTERDAY!"
wasabi gasp
Frum’s bounds of reason appear to be inversely proportional to the proximity of bombs at his feet.
jcricket
If Galt’s Gulch is located in the Dominican Republic near some underage prostitutes and a "ask no questions" pharmacy then perhaps he’d think about it.
superdestroyer
Since the Republicans are in a death spiral that has left them irrelevant to politics, the real quesiton is what will happen in the future since the U.S. now has only one relevant political party.
Look at how hard it is for liberal bloggers like John to give up writing about the irrelevant Republicans and actually post things about the Obama Administration and the Democrats.
Look at how the Democrats are still wanting to add to seats in the Senate and House when adding a few more moderate Democratic seats will have zero affect on policy, the budget, or the government.
Instead of writing ten more worthless blog posts about the irrelevant Republicans, why not write a few about what policy will look like under the coming one party state.
joe from Lowell
We could surely use an intelligent and principled conservative opposition party in this country
Sadly, the most likely alternative – the Libertarians – have defined themselves precisely by those attributes (going Galt, blaming the financial meltdown on loans to minorities, denying the economy was in a recession throughout 2008, insisting that a depression is precisely the right time to slash public expenditures, frothing about how terrible it is to be happy that the color barrier was smashed in the last election, whining about "socialism" because the richest people in the country will have to pay Clinton-era tax rates, calling for the privatization of Social Security, praising deregulation, blocking universal health care, denying global warming, tut-tutting over condemnation of TARP recipients blowing the money on bonuses and luxuries for top executives) that have driven the Republicans into the ground.
I guess the Blue Dogs are the only relevant conservative opposition left.
joe from Lowell
Aw, crap, I wrote "so-boner drug-m," and now I’m getting moderated.
joe from Lowell
Look at how the Democrats are still wanting to add to seats in the Senate and House when adding a few more moderate Democratic seats will have zero affect on policy, the budget, or the government.
B.S. One more Democratic senator would have meant the stimulus bill replaced the AMT fix with more jobs, to the tune of $100,000,000,000 or more.
Svensker
@jcricket:
Coffee on the screen alert.
Ash Can
Veering off topic here, but still on the subject of right-wing wackos and, in my view, fairly important:
The FBI and Secret Service are most definitely sitting up and taking notice of the sizeable volume of personal threats directed at the president.
Yes, this link is to a GOS article, but read it anyway. It’s written by someone with some insight into the workings of the FBI, and it’s blissfully devoid of any semblance of screeching and flailing. (I’m not going to make the same guarantee about the comments, which I did not read.) Also, at the end of the article is contact information for the FBI and Secret Service. The article left me with the impression that these authorities appreciate it when sane people bring instances of potentially dangerous lunacy to their attention.
jcricket
Welcome to Japan and Mexico. Both of those countries had 70 years or so of single party rule (Mexico shifted recently), but it didn’t result in a drag far to the left because of that.
Basically if Republicans went down to 20% of Congress, my bet is you’d have a lot of formerly moderate Republicans running as conservative Democrats in "red states" and doing what they do now (blocking progressive legislation).
I suppose the other alternative is for Republicans to moderate and "blue dogs" to go back to that party, but that would require Republicans to embrace all kinds of reality (global warming, gays, muslims with rights, etc). I don’t even see there being a real debate about that, as the 90% of the Republican chatter seems to be about the lack of sufficient conservatism resulting in the losses.
jcricket
@Svensker: Thanks, I try. Rush makes it easy. Seriously, he’s a walking punch-line.
Chuck Butcher
I read a Frum article about the dust up with Levin over Rush and he closed with something along the lines of "I’m trying to expand the Party."
I left a comment wishing him lots of luck with that…considering the ‘Comments’ section. He extolls he ‘greats’ of the past, St Ronnie, Buckley, ad nauseum and pays no attention to their actuality. Buckley was a racist pig with one good idea, drugs and St Ronnie during HUAC sure showed his guts – later reflected in Lebanon. I could go on and on about their myths, but the project is really about persuading Americans that there is a better way to do things.
Pointing to the election results might also have to include the "black guy thing," but those number still stand. McCain ran a shitty campaign on the back of war and economic meltdown based on stay the course and got more than 25% of the vote. Obama is in the 60s on the economy in polls as a new President, that can evaporate in a heart beat. This is not a done deal, R meltdown and all, the public needs to be persuaded and blogging comments won’t do the job. It doesn’t take a lot of work to do LTEs or persuade your more ‘reasonable’ Republican friends, but it does take a bit more than self-congratualtion.
superdestroyer
Chuck,
Actually it is a done deal. Considering that less than half the children in the U.S. are white, the Repubicans have zero long term prospects. With every election cycle there will be more districts that the Republicans have zero chance of winning.
And if you look at California or Maryland, in the U.S., as a political body becomes Democratic Party dominant, it does move to the left. Partially because many conservative move someone else and because people start voting in the Democratic Party primary so that they can have some say in government.
Also, asking people to talk to their Republican friends is somehting that only middle class and upper middle class whites can do. Blacks and Hispanics do not have any friends that are Republicans. That shows you why the Republicans have no chance in the long run.
For all of the upper class whites who want to go into politicis, they have to worry about their being enough districts where a white can win given that by 2040, most districts will be majority non-white.
amocz
Regardless of the fact that the target of Tommy Franks’ bon mot was actually Doug Feith, doesn’t Frum at least get some recognition for, with Richard Perle, writing the book with the stupidest title on the face of the earth… to wit, The End of Evil ?
priscianus jr
I think he deserves special recognition just for being stupid enough to write a book with Richard Perle, whatever the title.
Chuck Butcher
Super
let me say it again, the vote was 53/47 which is an asskicking in most political contests, 3 pts makes it 50/50. Yep, the Rs are on their heels right now – and they are pissed. I’ve seen the Democrats adopt this same mind set and get handed their asses for it. Rs managed to keep a strong hand in power from St Ronnie until 06 by never stopping and what got them killed was GWB and their hubris. Permanent majority my ass – that statement was when I knew they were cooked.
You’re making it now. You’re wrong. You want it, you work for it, you make your case and you make it the reasonable one and you back it up with shit that works. When it works you tout it. You’re putting stock in demographics that don’t turn out on a regular basis. You’ve got an off-year election coming and that’s base time – you better be building an active base.
If you’re thinking I deserve to catch my breath – I’m sorry, you don’t. You don’t deserve anything in this arena except to get to keep working at it. So far what you’ve got is TARP and a stimulus bill. You want more? Obama can go exactly as far as the public will stand for with an active opposition. It makes no difference that they’re liars with old ideas, they’re not shutting up and going away.