Friday, March 29, AD 2024 4:07am

Frum Is an Idiot, as Always

David Frum presented himself as a libertarian ca. 1994, then as the foreign policy militant and scourge of the alt-right ca. 2002, then as the recrudescence of the 1950s modern Republican ca. 2009. I’m not sure what he’s flogging now. I think he shut down FrumForum and I never read it anyway. Antecedent to all this, he went to law school and, on graduating, set himself up as a journeyman writer, landing a position in the public relations apparat of the elder George Bush. The man’s had as many incarnations as Dr. Who (though, as a character, I’d liken him more to The Rani). Wet that finger and stick it in the wind…

Art Deco, April 15, 2015

 

 

Dave Griffey At Daffey Thoughts takes a look at the latest brain droppings of David Frum, the Never Trumper of Never Trumpers:

 

So I’ve seen this making the rounds.  Frum is, of course, what’s known as a Never Trumper.  That is largely those Republicans, conservatives, or others who are not to the left or Democrats who nonetheless fully oppose Donald Trump.

It’s possible that more than Democrats, Never Trumpers invest almost everything they have in criticizing and attacking Trump no matter what.  Some have become more or less liberal Democrats, leading you to think that’s where they wanted to go all along, and Trump is merely their excuse.  John Kasich, for example, was swinging to the left long before Trump jumped into the 2016 campaign.

Frum is in that group who isn’t a Democrat yet, but finds nothing good in Trump.  It’s been said that if Trump cured cancer, Never Trumpers would complain he’s threatened the job prospects of cancer researchers. 

Nonetheless, I didn’t watch or read the speech, and Frum did.  So I wonder if it’s a fair take.  That it would be a disjointed speech, or not particularly well written, I can believe.  Trump does not give great speech.  Neither did GW Bush.  For that matter, neither did Obama.  In fact, Obama was far worse at extemporaneous speech than either Bush or Trump.  His endless ‘ums’ and ‘uhs’ (which his supporters insisted was the result of his superior intellect being slowed down by an obligation to consider the weak minded masses), was grating to the point of distraction.  Obama also became dull and dour by the end.  It’s one of the ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ moments that everyone praised Obama as the Great Orator no matter how bad he was.  Compared to Bush?  Trump?   Yeah he was better.  But only by comparing him to the worst, not the best.

Still, the content of his Trump’s speech as some Napoleon as Hitler imperialist conqueror is something I wonder about.  Is that a fair critique?  Was it too much power not enough virtue?  I can see that as a possibility in just the snippets I did read. Or is it fair to say it balances the Lefts ‘America as Nazi genocidal racist nation of evil and failure and ineptness’?  Is it fair to consider apart from eight years of Obama’s ‘no matter how bad the world is, America is always as bad if not worse’?  For that matter, Clinton also peddled that notion.  On a Christian level, Pope Francis seems content to assure the word that we have seen evil, and it’s usually in the pews of Christian churches – especially in the Western democracies.

So just curious.

Go here to comment.  Long before Trump came on the political scene, the Frumper was a kidney stone of a commenter.  Let’s take a trip down memory lane:

Somebody had faxed over a copy of the article before the issue hit newsstand. Kathleen in the office made copies for everyone in the office to read. I had been expecting forceful disagreement from those conservatives who favored invading Iraq, but I never expected anything like this — the vitriol, the name-calling, the smears, and tendentiousness.

Unpatriotic Conservatives” was the headline of what I will always regard as David Frum’s magnum opus — a 4,000-word cover page for  National Review. The piece targeted a motley crew of libertarians and conservatives who had dissented from George W. Bush’s plans for invasion, regime change, and nation-building in Iraq.

Notably to me, it targeted my boss and mentor, Bob Novak.

Go here to read the rest.  To David Frum people who do not think in lockstep with him are always unpatriotic and a danger to the Republic, even as his views are ever-shifting.  His self-o-centric view of the world reminds me of this bit of dialogue from the movie Friendly Persuasion (1956):

 

Purdy:  Some of Morgan's thieving men
burnt my barn...
...stole my horses
and cleaned out my smokehouse.
Jess Birdwell:  I'm sorry to hear that.
Thee is welcome to anything I've got.
Purdy:  No, thanks. If thee wants to help...
...pick up a gun and fight...
...the same as I'm doing.
Jess Birdwell:  I'm not ready to do that.
Purdy:  What does thee aim to do?
Sit here and turn the other cheek?
Jess Birdwell:  That's what I aim to do...
...if I can.
Purdy:  Thee's got to face the fact that wartime
calls for another kind of thinking.
Sam Jordan:  Your thinking may have changed,
but you haven't.
Last week, you told my son
he'd go to hell for fighting.
This week you tell Jess to fight.
Whatever's right for Purdy's got
to be right for everybody else?


 

 

 

 

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Nate Winchester
Nate Winchester
Thursday, July 11, AD 2019 7:09am

I immediately grew suspicious when I saw Shea praising it:
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/markshea/2019/07/david-frum-performs-the-autopsy-on-what-was-really-wrong-with-trumps-july-4-speech.html

Here’s what bugs me about the not-Trump types (there we go, Jonah, I’m not calling you a never-Trumper). I’ve heard it a few times in the podcasts, Shea always goes on about it – they will level every accusation against Trump then when you try to point out his innocence to 90% of them, will object that “you defend every single thing the man does!” It is a new form of Kafka trap I’ve come to realize explain a lot about how witch hunts run out of control.

Art Deco
Art Deco
Thursday, July 11, AD 2019 8:05am

Did I say that? I used to be more eloquent.

==

I’d have to re-read it, but I don’t recall his article in National Review in 2003 had the ordinary run of Iraq War skeptics as it’s targets, but a specific circle associated with the Rockford Institute. Contributors to the Institute’s magazine, Chronicles were a varied bunch (the editor Thomas Fleming did manage to recruit a small stable of sensible academics to write for Chronicles, e.g. Phillip Jenkins), but the editor of the publication and several of the leading producers of its editorial matter (Samuel Francis, Llewelyn Rockwell, and Joseph Sobran) were an obnoxious crew. Writing in to second Frum’s opinion was the historian Stephen Tonsor (who had a history as a critic of ‘courtier intellectuals’ of a sort you can find on salary at AEI, Heritage, and EPPC) and Mrs. Leopold Tyrmand, whose husband had founded Chronicles in 1976. Mrs. Tyrmand said her late husband would have been disgusted with what Thomas Fleming had made of his magazine and Tonsor dismissed Fleming, et al as ‘flaky cranks’. By way of example, Fleming had devoted scads of space in the magazine to articles making the case for Radovan Karadzic and other Serb politicians in Bosnia; that would be an odd hobby in any circumstance, but he was doing so when that sort of particularism was in its most bloodthirsty phase; the magazine lost 70% of its paid circulation during those years. As of about 2012 (a couple years short of retirement), he was still butt-hurt that Serbia’s Army and security services had been ejected from Kosovo (a territory which has had an Albanian majority since the late 19th c).

==

What gets you about NeverTrumpers is that they seem to have no interest in policy or significant current events. Frum apparently has nothing better to do, so devotes his time to producing copy for liberal publications who have nothing better to do than to attack the president for a ceremonial address whose content was of the sort you’d expect to find in a ceremonial address. Andrew Bacevich had occasion to produce articles where he critiqued the ceremonial remarks of George W. Bush as if they were inter-office memoranda, now we have David Frum complaining that ceremonial remarks aren’t policy white papers. The authors are either playing dumb or it’s not an act. You never quite know.

Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus
Thursday, July 11, AD 2019 11:36am

I don’t like Trump. He doesn’t know a darn thing about the Constitution or the Bible. And he can’t speak coherently unless its from a staged script. And he has been a womanizer in the best (or worst) tradition of nuclear submarine sailors (having been one, I know whereof I speak). And he’s ten times worse than I was on Twitter (my 15 year old son asked why Twitter banned me for life and not Trump – Ha! Ha!). But darn it, Trump’s DONE good for the country regardless of what fee fi foo Frum says. Taxes are down, employment is up, my paycheck is up, North Korea is at the table, Iran’s been warned, Mexico has compromised, and my nuclear company is getting 100s of millions of dollars from the US DOE under his leadership to design and build new (carbon-free, no global warming!) passively safe small modular reactors to keep your lights on, your computers energized and your air conditioners working. What the frack is not to like? The guy can’t talk lucidly and he’s a horny old goat? Heck, sounds like me (just ask my wife) and most other fairly normal men. Yes, darn it, I’ll vote for him in 2020 even if I have to hold my nose. God bless Donald Trump.

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