It took David Frum 36 paragraphs of The Atlantic's real estate -- the very tail end of the article -- to get all the throat clearing and hand waving and reminding readers of that which they already know all too damn well out of the way before he could finally getting around saying about what he really, really wants to say: If Democrats want to win they need to kick progressives to the curb and hug Liz Cheney harder.
The most immediate task for the anti-Trump coalition in these early months of 2025 is to avoid more mistakes. President Joe Biden ended his presidency by listening to advice to grant clemency to thousands of drug offenders, including heinous murderers. Who offered that advice? Don’t listen to them anymore! Fight Trump where he’s most vulnerable, not where progressive interest groups are most isolated and most dogmatic. Build unity from the center, rather than indulge the factionalism of the ultra-left.
A great many Americans despise Trump for the basic reason that he’s a very nasty person who speaks in demeaning ways and does cruel things. The movement to stop him should look and sound and act nice. If you get reprimanded for “respectability politics,” or caricatured as “cringe,” or scolded for appealing to suburban “wine moms,” that’s when you’ll know you’re doing it right.
Sorry, I don't mean "Democrats" since that is apparently a dirty word that scares suburban wine moms, and not an outfit that a hero like David Frum would ever associate himself with. Instead, as you can see, regardless of what your voter registration card might say, you and I and the +75 million of us who voted for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are now merely a duchy in David Frum's polyglot "anti-Trump coalition".
And our job is to sit down, shut up and let the likes of David Frum run the show.
And if you have been paying attention to the rapid colonization of the media by Never Trumpers like David Frum and noticed who is being elevated (Neocons) and who are being shunned as pariahs (Liberals), it sure as hell looks like the real project here is to turn the Democratic party of 2025 into the Republican party of 2005. The Republican party of the Good Old Days, when David Frum was making his living writing books about the genius of George W. Bush --
-- and the bright future of the Republican Party:
For those of you keeping score at home, the graphic that leads off this post was not whomped up by me this morning. No, it was whomped up by me several years ago for a post I wrote ("David Frum Has Written a Very Long Article to Avoid Saying a Very Short Sentence") deconstructing a nearly identical article, also by Frum also in The Atlantic, also telling Liberals to shut up and sit down.
Were I a betting man, I'd wager a bottle of 15-year-old Redbreast Irish whiskey that, based on this article, Mr. Frum will be a featured guest on several Very Large Political Podcasts in the very near future. And modesty forbids the foul-mouthed, commie Liberal proprietor of a tiny blog in the cornfield of the Midwest from reminding you that this relentless push to turn our party into Republican-lite is exactly what he has been warning about on his tiny cornfield blog for over a decade.
Because (to repeat myself from here) this is not how an ally -- who has been allowed into our midst against the better judgement of several of us and on what should have been a very fucking conditional probation -- talks.
This is how a colonizer tells you to step aside.
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