Showing posts with label David Frum. Show all posts
Showing posts with label David Frum. Show all posts

Thursday, February 20, 2020

Friday, December 22, 2017

David Frum is not a conservative


Ideas are not artifacts, especially the kind of collective ideas we know as ideologies. Conservatives in 1964 opposed civil-rights laws. Conservatives in 1974 opposed tax cuts unless paid for by spending cuts. Conservatives in 1984 opposed same-sex marriage. Conservatives in 1994 opposed trade protectionism. Conservatives in 2004 opposed people who equated the FBI and Soviet Union’s KGB. All those statements of conservative ideology have gone by the boards, and one could easily write a similar list of amended views for liberals.

Conservatism is what conservatives think, say, and do. As conservatives change—as much through the harsh fact of death and birth as by the fluctuations of opinion—so does what it means to be a conservative.

On the contray, conservatives believe in a transcendent moral order populated by eternal truths to which they seek to conform human affairs. Jews, for example, recognize these in the Decalogue, Platonists in the Ideas and Hindus in dharma. Infractions committed against the eternal truths do not change the truths, the infractions change us, sometimes for the better but more often for the worse.

Like the sophists, David Frum has chosen the worse, peddling his opinions in a world composed of mere opinion, as changeable as a pair of pants.

That's not conservatism.

Monday, October 16, 2017

25 "conservatives" worth following I already avoided long before Rush Limbaugh told me to

Hell, I've never even heard of some of 'em. The list includes people like David Frum and Jennifer Rubin. You know, them.

Recommended here by Salon.

Thursday, January 21, 2016

David Frum thinks Sarah Palin will be important for Trump in Iowa: they're kind of made of the same stuff


"Endorsements are usually said not to matter much in today’s politics—but if any endorsement in any contest ever can matter, Palin’s endorsement in the Republican Iowa caucuses will. ... In the contrast between Cruz’s support and Trump’s, one sees something truly new and disrupting—a battle between those for whom conservatism is an ideology, and those for whom conservatism is an identity. Since Donald Trump entered the race, one opponent after another has attacked him as not a real conservative. They’ve been right, too! And the same could have been said about Sarah Palin in 2008. Palin knew little and cared less about most of the issues that excited conservative activists and media." 

Sunday, January 26, 2014

Republicans Preach Unity After Eating Their Own

Republicans were preaching unity this week at their meetings, as reported here by TheHill.com, but those few of us out here who have politicians who actually represent us in our values and ideas can only cry, "Hypocrites! Liars! Cannibals!"

Republicans these days specialize in nothing if not eating their own. Unfortunately they always choose unwisely from the menu. They enjoy a soupçon of conservatism here, and another there, when what they should be devouring is a full plate of Bushmen.

That's because there's only one kind of unity in the Republican Party anymore: Republican Establishment dictated unity, which is to say, rallying around liberalism in the vain hope of forestalling criticism from Democrats.

If you are a social conservative like Gov. Mike Huckabee or Republican National Committeeman Dave Agema of Michigan or Rep. Todd Akin of Missouri, then shut the hell up, which is just what Democrats yell in the direction of Republicans all the time. It is another aspect of the way in which there isn't a dime's worth of difference between the parties.

The moment in history when this sorry fact became memorialized was in the 1920s when Democrats and Republicans conspired to fix representation at 435 so that they didn't have to listen anymore to the voices of the great unwashed from central and southern Europe who had swelled the population for forty years, nor have to rub shoulders with them in the House of Representatives.

If you want to hear that kind of crap on a regular basis, tune in to the likes of Royalist Republican David Frum. But I, for one, am sick of it. As far as I'm concerned the Axis of Evil runs from the Speaker's office to Reince Priebus' office to wherever Jeb Bush happens to be at the moment.

Republicans can go to hell with the Democrats for all I care. Democrats never get my votes, and this year Republicans won't.

Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Kook Fringe Republican Comes Out For Gun Control

David Frum, here.

Guns don't kill people, Canadians do.

Saturday, November 10, 2012

David Frum Loves The 47%

Here

"To be a patriot is to love your country as it is. Those who seem to despise half of America will never be trusted to govern any of it. Those who cherish only the country's past will not be entrusted with its future."

David Frum should know a thing or two about patriotism. He's from Canada.

Did the Founders love England as it was, or any of the huddled masses yearning to be free love the hellholes they came from as they were?

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Mitt Romney Just Lost My Vote

If anyone should quit the 2012 race it's Gov. Mitt Romney, not Rep. Todd Akin. Even with the clothespin on my nose I won't be able to do it.

Romney should quit not just for the good of the Republican Party, but for the good of the nation. Surely the Republican convention can come up with someone better than this man Romney, whose political convictions are as uncertain as Barack Obama's biography.

Otherwise Romney is certainly going to lead the Republican Party to defeat in November, just like John McCain did in 2008, and a bunch of us who haven't gone broke already will promptly do so while the likes of David Frum tell us it's no debacle. Only in the Republican Party can conservatism be transformed from opposition to the welfare state in 1965 into support for Medicare as a matter of principle in 2012. And you feared Barack Obama would transform America.

The only thing Romney is proving in the case of Rep. Akin is that Republicans once again don't know how to fight, and don't understand how politics works.

Winning parties like the Democrat Party rally around their own when they are in trouble, and at the minimum do not make things worse for themselves by joining in on the criticism of individuals who make mistakes. A good recent example is Rep. Charlie Rangel who has been censured by the US House but is still standing, and quite happily so. Republicans, by contrast, have a habit of rushing at the first sign of trouble to distance themselves from members who come under fire, and end up isolated and alone, resorting to their own devices to survive.

No one but a fool wants such for friends. The voters can smell that smell for what it is: lack of self-confidence. And then they vote accordingly.

My hunch is Missouri will have a new senator named Todd Akin come November, and America will have another four years of Barack Obama.

We deserve it.

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Remember People! Only An Ultra-Conservative Losing Would Be A GOP Debacle!

A Mitt Romney loss? Well, that wouldn't be a debacle; that would be just a loss.

So said David Frum, spokesman for the non-Tea-Party-type Republican, last October, here:

Back-to-back losses under John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012 will open the way to an ultra-conservative nominee in 2016 -- and a true party debacle.

It's just like Keynesianism, see. If massive spending doesn't succeed, it's because we didn't spend enough. How do we know that? Well, we failed, so we didn't spend enough.

Faith is by definition not falsifiable.