Two Never Trumpers Walk Into a Podcast…

Like a some Conservative version of the Casimir Effect*, I believe I can prove, to a scientific certainty, that when two old-school neocon Never Trumpers are put in close proximity to one another, eventually at least two of the most odious and deeply held core tenets of their ideological faith will always manifest themselves out of the air.

First element to emerge will be sanctimonious Both Siderism.  An above-it-all certainty that because Both Sides are pretty terrible they are now "politically homeless".

The second element to emerge will be condescension.  The airy dismissal of any prior criticism from the Left of their now-former party, which, in actual fact, will turn out to be just blatant Straw Man bullshit.  We know this because such derision never involves interviewing any actual Liberals or citing anything that anyone on the Left has ever actually written. Instead, the entire constellation of thoughtful, detailed and brutally accurate analysis of the long, ugly trajectory of the Republican party -- decades of labor by hundreds of smart, savvy lefties -- is sneered at and waved off as, "Well, you know how those people are."  

And thanks to whoever it was that had the bright idea of putting old-school Neocon Never Trumper Mona Charen and  old-school Neocon Never Trumper David Frum together on Frum's podcast, we now had a perfect opportunity to either confirm or disprove my hypothesis by experiment and observation!

Let's see what happened.

First test: Emergent Both Siderism:

Frum: What Trump is doing to poison the social conversation here at home, to allow in these voices, to really mainstream people like Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson, that is deeply frightening. That’s where we live. (Laughs.) And it is opening the door to the kind of—there’s a lot of left-wing anti-Semitism, but frankly, the right-wing variety still scares me a little more because it is truly Nazi-like in its ferocity against Jews.

There is quite a bit of that.  Sure, the right is awful, but they only scare Frum "a little more" than the left.

Also Frum:  On the other hand, assuming there is an election and J. D. Vance is the Republican nominee, he will be running against a nominee from a party that just vetoed the most plausible-looking running mate for Kamala Harris because he was Jewish and because he wouldn’t renounce his support for Israel and wouldn’t hedge his condemnation of anti-Semitic outbursts on American college campuses, and where important voices in that party are saying that the test, their most important test for their support in 2028 is Holocaust inversion...

Charen:  As you say, J. D. Vance is very close to Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens is a huge influencer, and all of that. On the left, it is, for now, the precinct of the hard-left progressives. It’s untested as to whether that will become the dominant strain in the Democratic Party. We’ll see. That would be very, very worrisome. 

So, Both Siderism?  Check.

On to the second test:  The Straw Man.

Frum:  ...I think there’s something important that we [Never Trump Republicans] bring, and that is a sense of that this is a group that has a unique sense of the uniqueness of what is happening now. And I’m sure you’ve seen often in the comments you get from readers or viewers or listeners, they’ll say something [like], Aha, we warned you that the moment Dwight Eisenhower beat Adlai Stevenson, Trump was the inevitable outcome—

Charen: Absolutely. All the time.

Really?  You've heard Liberals blaming Ike for Trump?  "All the time"?  

Because I am one of a whole army of Liberals who've spent decades warning you fuckers of the dangerous trajectory your party was on and I have never heard anyone say this. Not a single serious historian.  Not a single political theorist.  Not a single potty-mouth blogger. There is no record whatsoever of anyone arguing that the moment Dwight D. Eisenhower defeated Adlai Stevenson in 1952, the eventual rise of Donald Trump became “inevitable.”

Of course what Frum and Charen are desperate to do here is avoid talking about things like Goldwater and the seismic ideological shift he represented in 1964 as the GOP began devolving through various stages, towards Trump-era populism.  

They don't want to talk about Nixon's Southern Strategy.  Or the Powell Memo.  Or the red carpet the party rolled out for southern white conservative Evangelical segregationists like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.  

They'd like you to forget Paul Weyrich too, and Lee Atwater, and Karl Rove.  

They'd really appreciate it if you'd also forget about Newt Gingrich.  And Tom DeLay.  

They're also praying that no one mentions the profound, malignant influence of the Right's most popular bigot, Rush Limbaugh, or his hundreds of imitators, or the fact that George H. W. Bush was so thirsty for Limbaugh's support that he invited him to the White House for a Lincoln Bedroom sleepover and carried in Limbaugh's baggage personally.  

In fact, they'd be eternally grateful if you'd agree to forget the rise of the entire Conservative media ecosystem -- talk radio, cable news, online platforms, church pulpits, direct mailing lists -- emerging from the 1980s onward.

Instead, Frum rolls out one of the stupidest Straw Men I've ever heard of, and he and Charen deal with their barely sublimated guilt and shame by taking turns punching it.  

Frum: No, he’s not the inevitable outcome of Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush and George W. He’s different. And we’re here to tell you that as people who liked all those people. He’s different. And because we liked all those people, we can tell you how and why he’s different in a way that the typical commenter who’s blaming Dwight Eisenhower for being the start of Donald Trump can’t tell you.

Charen: Well, yeah, the people who are kind of—and I’ll say this—I think they’re kind of smug, and they say, This was always conservatism, and this is just the full flowering of all the things that conservatism always was. I say that is absolutely not the case...

So,  Straw Man?  Check.

Cowards?  Check.

Experiment complete.

Theory confirmed by observation.

Submitted for peer review this day, February 20, 2026, by your pal driftglass.

*The Casimir effect is a weird little consequence of quantum physics that says even “empty” space isn’t really empty. Imagine putting two perfectly smooth metal plates extremely close together in a vacuum. You’d think nothing would happen — but tiny quantum fluctuations are constantly flickering in and out of existence everywhere. Between the plates, only certain fluctuations can fit, while outside them, more kinds can pop up. That imbalance creates a tiny pressure pushing the plates together. So the Casimir effect is basically proof that empty space has a kind of restless energy, and if you confine it just right, it can produce a measurable force.

I Am The Liberal Media

The Triumphant Return of the Tone Police: David Frum Edition

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.

Burn The Lifeboats

David Frum and the Praxis of Evil

 

He had a little uh-oh.
And now he's writing about it in The Atlantic.
Because he's a senior editor at The Atlantic.

You just can't stop lying about WMD.

Your 2nd sentence is a lie. That "arsenal" of chemical weapons? Some old rusty old munitions given to Iraq by the Reagan admin in the 80s.

Your 3rd sentence is also a lie. Saddam swore he had no WMD and allowed UN inspectors in to prove it. pic.twitter.com/GWvw1n0AqE

— Seth Harp (@sethharpesq) March 14, 2023

This Is Why We Burn The Lifeboats

David Frum Has Written a Very Long Article to Avoid Saying a Very Short Sentence

And that sentence is, "The Left was right about the Right all along." 

And I will stack those nine little words up against any article of any length by anyone in any publication who's goal is to write their way around that very simple fact so that they can get on to the important business of explaining the many way in which they believe the Left must bend a knee to the Never Trumpers.  

What the Never Trumpers Want Now

The former cultural core of the GOP is exiting the party. The Democrats should keep those voters in their corner. Here’s how to do it.

What our policies should be.  

What our priorities should be.  

But for me the real fun begins when, after 1,785 paragraphs, Mr. Frum goes full Tone Police, lecturing us what our vocabulary should be.  

Because as every mooching, Murrica-hating, terrorist-loving, dirty Commie libtard can tell you, all Republicans  -- current and former and nearly-former -- are known far and wide for the incredible delicacy of their fee-fees and their reverence for civility and respectful discourse.

From The Rolling Stone:

Rush Limbaugh Did His Best to Ruin America

How the right-wing talk radio icon corrupted the Republican Party, spread hate, racism, and lies, and laid the groundwork for Trumpism

Oops.  Sorry.  Wrong article.  

Here we go.

Oops.  Sorry.  I did it again.

Here we go.

Bill O’Reilly’s Dangerous War Against Dr. Tiller

O’Reilly waged an unflagging harassment campaign against the abortion provider before Tiller was murdered in 2009

Damn.  What is wrong with me this morning?  Probably the bad night's sleep I had, tossing and turning and worrying about how my +16 years of salty comments about the Party of Bigots and Imbeciles may have offended the sensibilities of our extremely fragile Republican fellow citizens.

So let's give this another try.  David Frum's stern rebuking of my wicked ways in  3...2...1...

 Is the horse dead yet...

Quick hit: Ann Coulter is the worst person in the world

...or should I go on...

...beating it?

The Politics of Slash and Burn

Published: September 20, 1990

'Sick.'' ''Traitors.'' ''Bizarre.'' ''Self-serving.'' ''Shallow.'' ''Corrupt.'' ''Pathetic.'' ''Shame.'' The group that urged political candidates to use these epithets has since regretted suggesting the word ''traitors,'' in response to inquiries from the press. But the others were allowed to stand; they appear in a glossary that a conservative Republican group recently mailed to Republican state legislative candidates.

The group is Gopac, the G.O.P. Political Action Committee. Its general chairman is Representative Newt Gingrich. With the pamphlet, ''Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,'' comes a letter from Mr. Gingrich himself. Its message to candidates: Step up invective. Use words like these to describe opponents. These words work.

Mr. Gingrich's injunction represents the worst of American political discourse...

The Gopac glossary may herald a descent into even lower levels of discourse. It comes blessed by a politician of some influence - the Republican whip in the House - and it is intended for candidates on the state level, many of them presumably running for the first time. Even though Mr. Gingrich himself may not have seen the list before it was mailed, this is a disturbing document...

Ok, Ok, having taxed your patience long enough, here, at last, is Mr. Frum uncovering the terrible truth that we Liberal bloggers have tried so hard and so successfully for so long to keep hidden from the public.

Here’s the warning for the future: The Democratic Party is also home to some abrasive loudmouths.

Honestly I never feel more seen than I do when some former Bush administration wordmonger struggles to find a way to call people like me "asshole Libtards" without saying "asshole Libtard".

And although none of those abrasive loudmouths has mounted a serious campaign for the presidency, some hold other high offices, and others occupy visible places in the media. Liberal communities tolerate and even approve of language about white men like Mike Baker [a fence-straddling Republican goof who is torn agonizingly between voting for fascists who promise to cut his taxes and turn women in to baby factories for the Fatherland...or voting for not-fascists] that they would never tolerate or approve of about anybody else.

Really? "language...that they would never tolerate or approve of about anybody else"? Have you ever read a Liberal blog Mr. Frum?

And please note that Mr. Frum takes enormous pains to not call out any "abrasive loudmouth" by name.  Which is passing strange, considering how free and easy Mr. Frum was with his language of allies and enemies back when he was helping Dubya lie us into the wrong war.  You'd thing that if this tiny handful of abrasive loudmouths really has the ability to single-handedly destroy the Biden administration, drive millions of waffling Republicans in the arms of Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott and plunge this country into a 1,000 years of fascist darkness, he'd feel that it was his urgent, patriotic duty to identify these dangerous malefactors:

That language exacts immense political costs.

An absolute majority of white Americans believe that white people face adverse discrimination in the United States. They are not reacting to personal experiences of mistreatment; only one-fifth to one-tenth of white Americans report anything like that. They seem instead to be reacting to a more generalized drumbeat of derision and hostility.

Fun Fact:  Generalized Drumbeat was the original working title of this blog.  Then for awhile I toyed around with calling it Cokie's Law.  Then Kathleen Turner Overdrive.   Then driftglass.

The influx of anti-Trump Republicans into the Biden coalition should highlight the importance of discouraging that kind of talk. 

And here Mr. Frum has uncovered the other half of the terrible truth that we Liberal bloggers have tried so hard and so successfully for so long to keep hidden from the public.  The terrible truth that we Liberal bloggers are just too damn powerful.  That we are Thanos-level beings who, with a snap of our Cheeto-stained fingers, could destroy American democracy on a whim.  

Obviously such power cannot be allowed to run wild and unchecked.  So if, for the good of the country, we Liberal bloggers must give up our dominant presence on cable news and our virtual monopoly of talk radio, then so be it.   If the cost of Democracy means surrendering our mighty, coast-to-coast radio empire, our book publishing corporations and our stranglehold on the op-ed pages of America's most respected newspapers, then so be it.  

Of course we'll all miss seeing Digby whipping the shit out of Joe Scarborough three hours every morning on MSNBC, as well as Atrios' hour's long conversations with Noam Chomsky, George Soros and the ghost of Eugene Debs about the merits of public transit every night on the 11th Hour.  And speaking selfishly, I'll miss the extra few dollars that come my way each month from my long-running New York Times column.... and my PBS gig... and my NPR gig... and my college lecture gigs... and my NBC contributor contract.

But damnit, it's a small price to pay when Freedom on the line.  

On The Owning Of Things

Republicans now own this

Deathcare. But I'd prefer people get health care over punishing Republicans politically. Human life is precious.

— Eugene Gu, MD (@eugenegu) October 12, 2017

I don't know Dr. Gu, but he seems like a thoughtful, decent man.  In fact, imma go out on a limb and say that all of the people I have seen across social media today declaring that the Republicans now "own" this fiasco are probably thoughtful. 

And decent. 

And wrong.

Because if there is one thing at which the Republican Party (and their enablers in the media) excel at above everything else it is blowing shit up and then not owning it.  In fact, the last 40 year of American politics has been one, long, escalating cycle of Republican lying, cheating, plundering the government and killing everything they touch, and then being promptly and completely excused from taking any responsibility for any of it by their stooges, PR flacks and eager enablers in the press.

It is the foundation on which the entire High and Holy Church of Both Siderism was built, and I see no sign that any of the fundamentals of this toxic codependency have changed.  Believe me, I wish I could report little green shoots of Independence growing up between the cracks on the old media institutions, but I see no such thing.  For example. the corporations who own our media are now aggressively using the Rise of Trump not as an object lesson in the dangers of letting Republicans anywhere near the levers of power, but as an opportunity to give every unreconstructed Bush Regime Dead-Ender who is willing to say mean things about Il Douche a quick tuck-and-roll credibility rehab.

Even in the face of President Stupid's daily, public molestation of the basic norms of democracy and civilization our corporate media has used brute economic for to refused to permit our national public political dialogue to expand to create a genuine debate between the creators of the GOP Pretty Hate Machine that manifested Donald Trump, and those who have been warning about the trajectory the Republican Party has been taking for decades.   Instead, our corporate media has constricted the spectrum to A) Republicans Who Get Paid To Defend Trump and, B) Republicans Who Get Paid To Say Mean Things About Trump But Would Be Defending Marco Rubio If He Were Enacting The Same Depraved Policies But Without The Tweets.

As was true during the Age of Clinton, the Age of Bush and the Age of Obama, our corporate media has no place for those who were right all along, but always has plenty of room for, say, the latest tome by the author of such searing works of political truth as The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush and An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror (with Richard Perle)

Proof reading pic.twitter.com/yLgepd5z09

— David Frum (@davidfrum) October 12, 2017

I understand the opening is quite riveting

Call me Pishmael. Some years ago - let's all agree to forget how long precisely or what I was doing - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me in Canada, I thought I would come to the United States and work very hard to get the worst people in the world elected to high political office...

Behold, a Tip Jar!

In The Beginning...

"The junk [heroin] merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client."

-- William S. Burroughs, "Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness" with a big h/t to Neo Tuxedo for this quote.

For the record, I am perfectly aware that the roots of our long and tortured political history go back to Beringa, Eric the Red and Strom Thurmond quitting the Democratic Party in 1948 to form the segregationist States' Rights Democratic Party also known as the "Dixiecrats" (note:  The Dixiecrats were later dissolved and then gradually reconstituted into a much larger, more powerful and better-funded segregationist party called "The Republicans".)

But because this post will not be one billion words long, it will not cover anything like a territory that vast.  (I just told you that to trick you into reading this far! Insert Evil Laugh here!) So pedants and "whatabouters" take it elsewhere, preferably to Blogger or Wordpress where you can start your own blog and publish your own sweeping and comprehensive history of American politics.  Which I will gladly read and carp about :-)

Instead what you'll get for the price of admission is a simplified overview of  "How We Got Here" spanning roughly one human generation:

In population biology and demography, the generation time is the average time between two consecutive generations in the lineages of a population. In human populations, the generation time typically ranges from 22 to 32 years.

Let us begin.

David Frum's From Outer Space

And I also know that—despite the American faith in happy endings—the rewards of politics don’t usually go to those who do the right thing. They’re more often scooped up by those who arrive on the scene just after the right thing is done. Throughout the 2015-2016 season, I’ve often had the déjà experience of being presented with ideas—and even phrases—that I published half a dozen years ago, as if they were brave and new. As Tom Wolfe wisely said, “It’s no good being even ten minutes ahead of the times.”

--  David Frum, professional unreliable narrator and current senior editor at The Atlantic, with emphasis added to underscore the bits that cracked me up.

Mr. Frum goes on to elaborate on the Great Pain of Being Right.  It cost him a job and some friends but damn it Jim, it was the right thing to do!

I sympathize. I found myself in a similar place a half-dozen years ago. In my case, it was the Tea Party of 2009-2010 that I couldn’t accept. People I had known, trusted, and admired for years lurched toward a dangerous and self-defeating radicalism. When I could not follow the lurch, I would lose a job and friends and find myself consigned to a strange unmentionable unpersonhood by people with whom I’d worked for two decades. I know well the price of the policy I’m recommending.

Great Lord Kinbote, it's practically the Dreyfus Affair!

But no, it's actually not. Because while Mr. Frum's shaggy blog stories about his Heroic Stand Against Barbarism get shaggier and more heroic every year, those of us who have actually paid attention to the arc of Mr. Frum's career remember things a little differently. From Mark Oppenheimer's article, "The Prodigal Frum":

... 

Raised a cosseted Canadian prince, Frum became, in his early 20s, a wide-eyed convert to American exceptionalism. “I’m a Hamiltonian, and I always have been,” Frum says. “I believe in an American-led world order. I believe in the strength and power of America. It rests on economic and industrial power. And the evidence is strong that free markets generate more economic and industrial power than other systems.”

In Mr. Oppenheimer's vivid description of of Mr. Frum's career since shaking hands with the devil -- 

David Frum has been cuddled as lovingly in the ample bosom of the great Republican establishment—and derived as much nourishment from its plump teats—as any other man in the last thirty years. The Canadian immigrant, who turned 52 in June, has been a Wall Street Journal editorial writer, an editor at Forbes, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a speechwriter for George W. Bush—Frum helped write the “axis of evil” line—and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. The last of those jobs, the AEI fellowship, paid him $100,000 a year, and it did not actually require any work.

Also, David, There. Is. No. Tea. Party.  There never was,  It was just another Republican responsibility-dodging scam. It was only ever the same wingnut base which you were only too happy to supply with slabs of raw, red, partisan meat for most of your professional career.

Yes, Mr. Frum had a brief and scary moment of underemployment and professional unpersonhood, which was quickly remedied by Mr. Frum's many, many Beltway friends and fellow travelers. They not only put out bowls of water and food for him on their porches and took him to the vet for a worming twice a year, but they also found him paying jobs at places like The Daily Beast, got him regular teevee gigs at CNN and MSNBC, snagged him the chairmanship of an outfit called The Policy Exchange and secured for him the perch from which he now expounds -- a Senior Editor at The Atlantic.

So while Mr. Frum says a number of true things in his article, including this take-down of the Myth of Centrism which has been Beltway's golden goose for a very, very long time now (a myth Mr. Frum was only too happy to parlay into a paycheck when he worked at The Daily Beast) --

...

To date, talk of third-party candidates has been the sport of TV green rooms and conferences in pleasant locations. The old-line parties are too extreme, the complaint goes, and what’s needed is an Independent candidate to bust the corrupt duopoly, disrupt outdated ideologies, and at last represent the great American center. The people who advance this notion imagine the great American as looking very much like themselves: socially liberal, at ease with globalization, committed to sensible moderate problem-solving ideas like reducing entitlements, liberalizing immigration, keeping guns out of the wrong hands, and campaign-finance reforms. These are the people who talk about a Michael Bloomberg candidacy, as before that they talked about a Colin Powell candidacy.

The trouble is: 2016 was the year that the great American center actually did rise up against the extremism of the corrupt two-party duopoly and actually did disrupt outdated ideologies. A secular businessman who backed both parties, who denounced big money in politics, who promised to do deals and bring back jobs—isn’t that what you had in mind? No? And if, like J. Alfred Prufrock, you murmur, “That is not it at all, That is not what I meant, at all” then it’s time to reckon with the fact that the great American center wasn’t what you imagined it was at all either.

-- I just cannot get past the cartoonist narcissism of casting himself the fearless True Conservative martyr who was too far ahead of the mob, without pointing out that at no point has Mr. Frum ever written this simple and true sentence:  "The Liberals were right about the Right all along."

Over the last 30 years, as the Republican party has sunk ever deeper into a swamp of Hate Radio/Fox News bigotry, incoherent rage and madness, Mr. Frum had a thousand chances to walk away from Conservative Omelas and joint America's real, unemployable political outcasts out here in the Liberal wilderness.  But he didn't, because the benefits of working for Team Evil were just too damn good. As I wrote about Mr. Frum's running buddy and sometimes-benefactor, Andrew Sullivan, many years ago:

...So it turns out that virtually all of Mr. Sullivan's hard-won epiphanies amount to little more than the well-thumbed history and plainsong lore of our Fucked Up Modern Age as it has been long understood and passed down among those awful Liberals...

Likewise, even though Mr. Sullivan now, belatedly comes to believe much of what Liberals believe and finally deigns to notice a horde of grotesque truths about his Conservative Movement about which Liberals have been sounding the alarm for 30 years, Andrew Sullivan nonetheless looks us all straight in that eye and argues that he could not possibly be some mere Liberal.

Because in Mr. Sullivan's world, "Liberal" does not refer to a political ideology, but to an impoverishing political ghetto from which no amount of "being right about everything" will permit you to achieve escape velocity. In Mr. Sullivan's world, "Liberal" is a terrible disease that afflicts losers who do not get invited to spout their views on teevee.

Mr. Sullivan regularly receives such largess, therefore he must not be a Liberal.

He instead must be the lone member be of some rare and singular new species; some miraculous form of haploid political minotaur.

Because if he is not something spontaneously-generated and utterly sui generis, then he is just another Lefty-Come-Very-Lately, showing up at our door at 3:00 A.M., 20 years late and trailing toxic baggage behind him like a Halley Comet.

And who in the world would pay him to do his little dance then?

Joe Klein, David Frum and a BBC News Reader Walk Into an Alternate Universe

For those of you who don't remember him, Joe Klein (aka. "Jokeline") is the Button Gwinnett of American media Both Siderism -- definitely one of it's Founding Fathers, but if you threatened the average American at knife-point they could not tell you who he was or what he did.

So, a quick history.

Once upon a time Joe Klein wrote one article in which he very grudgingly acknowledged that on one, specific occasion the Left kinda, sorta had a point (cited via my post on this subject from 2009):

The dyspepsia of the left blogosphere is less easily explained, though. It has its roots in an issue the left got right and almost everyone else got wrong: the war in Iraq. There is still intense, unabated anger on the left because its opposition to the war was often ridiculed and almost always ignored in 2003

But to keep the icky hippie off of his clothes he buried his extremely reluctant acknowledgement of the Left being right in a typically long, bitchy Jokeline tirade against the otherwise unrelieved idiocy of the Left, which started with the title --

The Left's Idiocy on Health Reform

-- and grumped along, one defensive, snide, "Please don't hit me, I swear I hate Libruls tooooo!" paragraph after another. Here is a sample:

But there is a great irony here: villagery is a trope more applicable to those making the accusation than to those being snarked upon. The left-wing blogosphere, at its worst, is a claustrophobic hamlet of the well educated, less interested in meaningful debate than the "village" it mocks. (At its best, it is a source of clever and well-informed anti-Establishment commentary.) Indeed, it resembles nothing so much as that other, more populous hamlet, the right-wing Fox News and Limbaugh slum ...

Which is why, seven years later, for reasons known only God and the ghost of Henry Luce, Time Magazine still pays Jokeline actual money to be part of the Beltway's own “madogiwa zoku" -- those who sit idly by the window...and crank out ridiculous Both Siderism piece-work.

And why, like the poorly weighted remains of an incompetent mob hit, Jokeline still bobs to the surface of the great Beltway swamp every now and then, all bloated and awful.  This time around, we find Jokeline sitting for an "debate" yesterday with David Frum on the BBC where he said this:

BBC news reader:  ...How would you define the Trump voter?

Klein:  Well, according to the polls, the Trump voter is  white, less educated and angry.  It is an anger that has been fed for the last 10 or 20 years from right wing talk radio...

(wait for it)

(wait for it)

...but also from left wing demagogues.

Attaboy, Joe!  For that you get a cookie, a pat on the head and you get to keep charging his hotel bar tab to Time magazine.

But what is really amazing in this exchange is former George Bush speechwriter, glowing Bush Administration hagiographer, and political wind-sock, David Frum, who -- without ever acknowledging or apologizing for his role in the Bush clusterfuck -- has figured out which way the wind is blowing now and has completely o'erleaped his colleagues and remade himself as...

...a Liberal blogger from 2006.

Which, first, wow.

And second, did I miss the big cattle call for people to step forward and speak terrible truths about the Bush Administration and the Republican party base? Because if there are now suddenly openings for people to say things out loud and on camera for which Liberal bloggers were being either roundly ignored or loudly vilified by hacks like David Frum and Joe Klein back in 2006. why not bring in some, I dunno, Liberals who were blogging back in 2006 instead of Time magazine Both Siderist madogiwa zoku like Joe Klein and a former George Bush speechwriter, Bush Administration hagiographer, and political wind-sock like David Frum?

Today In Republican Detachment Disorder News: David Frum

For those unfamiliar with his work, David Frum currently enjoys a recurring role as the wacky-but-cagey unshaven Both Siderist Conservative hobo on MSNBC, a role he has played with greater frequency ever since MSNBC decided to switch its business model to "Drive away as many Liberal viewers as possible".

Before that, Mr. Frum was a speechwriter for George W. Bush and writer of several books including "The Right Man: An Inside Account of the Bush White House", which Amazon blurbs in part as follows:

...Frum worked with President Bush in the Oval Office, traveled with him aboard Air Force One, and studied him closely at meetings and events. He describes how Bush thinks—what this conservative president believes about religion, race, the environment, Jews, Muslims, and America’s future. Frum takes us behind the scenes of one of the most secretive administrations in recent history, with revealing portraits of Karl Rove, Karen Hughes, Condoleezza Rice, and many others. Most significant, he tells the story of the transformation of George W. Bush: how a president whose administration began in uncertainty became one of the most decisive, successful, and popular leaders of our time.

Before becoming a White House speechwriter, David Frum was a highly regarded author of books and political commentary and an influential voice on the pages of The Wall Street Journal and The Weekly Standard.

...

And now?

9) Correction. 1 analysis was allowed of Bush presidency. “Too much domestic spending.” As if that were any actual voter’s top 10 concern!

— David Frum (@davidfrum) February 27, 2016

The thing is, Mr. Frum is right. There never was a reckoning for those who brought us the Worst Administration in Modern History. And there never will be, because the GOP (in collusion with our supine Beltway( decided to pretend that Bush Administration just sorta never happened so that they could all get on with the important business of sabotaging the Obama Administration from Day One.

And how do we know the tab for the Worst Administration in Modern History was never paid?

Because if it had been, former Bush Administration hacks like David Frum would be unemployable for the rest of their lives.

And I must say, I continue to find it both maddening and fucking hilarious that Conservatives who are now dining out on their bold willingness to state plainly obvious facts about the Republican Party are doing literally nothing more than catching up with what those awful, America-hating Liberals have been saying for decades.

Today In Republican Detachment Disorder News: David Frum

Now that Donald Barnum Trump, Failgunner Ted Cruz and the caravan of benighted shoutycracker GOP candidate wannabes that follow them around have removed any lingering doubt that nothing short of the Bến Tre Option --

'It became necessary to destroy the town to save it'

-- will ever "fix" what is actually wrong with the GOP, the Republican establishment's most obedient and reliable public avatars have all suddenly come down with the same, tragic affliction: Republican Detachment Disorder.

Symptoms include adopting the basic Liberal critique of the Right chapter-and-verse while forgetting to acknowledgment that "Liberals" as such even exist, and pretending that "the Republican establishment" is some mysterious directorate that you barely know which meets in a secret lair far, far away instead of a club which you have been a card-carrying member of for your entire adult life.

Today's spotlight Republican Detachment Disorder sufferer: David Frum.

Maybe the Republican Establishment Can’t Have It All

Given their failure to take down Donald Trump, is it time for GOP elites to let go of some cherished inward-facing policy priorities? 

...

Maybe it’s time for the party’s elites to let go of some of their cherished inward-facing policy priorities.

Notice how RDD particularly affects the speech centers of the brain. "[T]he Republican Establishment" instead of "we". "Given their failure" instead of "Given our failure." "[T]he party's elite" instead of "Me and David Brooks and Micheal Gerson and Ross Douthat and the rich fuckers we work for".

Sad, really.

But there is hope!

With your generous support, blogs like this can continue working tirelessly towards the goal of eliminating RDD in our lifetime!

Imagine there's no Donald

It's easy if you try

No Frum below us

Above us, only pie...

Conservative Farmers Despondent Over Bumper Crop of Conservatism

So there you are, a lifelong member of the Conservative Elite.  Loyal writer of speeches and tanker of thinks, who has logged enough hours trashing Liberals and prostrating yourself at St. Ronald Reagan's reliquary of terrible ideas that you have become a minor but fixed point in the Wingnut Welfare firmament.  

And now that you have tilled the Conservative soil under the blazing LED screen and planted and fertilized and watered and weeded your fields with care -- now that you have lived to see what you have help grow from tiny seedlings of hate and paranoia into something so tall and strong that it blots out the sun...

...you run from your creation as fast as your little legs can carry you.

As a former Dubya speechwriter and author of such books as The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush and An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror (with the monstrous Richard Perle)  Mr. David Frum is well-positioned to write a long article for The Atlantic (where he is now employed as a Senior Editor, because that is how the world works) about how fucked up the Republican party is...

...without any unpleasant or inconvenient references as to how it got that way.

Mr. Frum's article gives the reader a decent snapshot of what is happening right now inside moldering corpse of the Party of Lincoln, but it is also carefully calculated to leave the impression that the GOP just wandered in from out of town sometime around 2009, fully formed and neatly bisected between a hapless, out-of-touch donor class --

Yet even as the Republican Main Street protested Obamacare, it rejected the hardening ideological orthodoxy of Republican donors and elected officials. A substantial minority of Republicans—almost 30 percent—said they would welcome “heavy” taxes on the wealthy, according to Gallup. Within the party that made Paul Ryan’s entitlement-slashing budget plan a centerpiece of policy, only 21 percent favored cuts in Medicare and only 17 percent wanted to see spending on Social Security reduced, according to Pew. Less than a third of ordinary Republicans supported a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants (again according to Pew); a majority, by contrast, favored stepped-up deportation. 

As a class, big Republican donors could not see any of this, or would not. So neither did the politicians who depend upon them. Against all evidence, both groups interpreted the Tea Party as a mass movement in favor of the agenda of the Wall Street Journal editorial page. One of the more dangerous pleasures of great wealth is that you never have to hear anyone tell you that you are completely wrong.

-- and just-plain-white-folks who have grown intractably bitter and cynical for some reason.

Christ on a flaming hover board, Mr. Frum, of course the Conservative Brain Caste thought they could tell the party base how to hate and who to vote for.  Who do you think invested 30 years and untold billions of dollars to manufacture that malleable, ignorant, bigoted cesspit of humanity in the first place, Mr. Frum?  Where do you think the money was coming from all those years you were drawing a salary from Bloody Bill Kristol's Weekly Standard, Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal and the American Enterprise Institute, Mr. Frum?  Who do you think invented the fucking Tea Party out of thin air so the Republican base could have a safe space in which to burn their Bush/Cheney '04 lawn signs and learn to pretend they had never even heard of the GOP, Mr. Frum?

The most darkly hilarious part of this whole farce is that you could open almost any vituperative, foul-mouthed, America-hating, terrorist-loving Liberal blog from almost any point dating back to the dawn of blogging and find us pointing out the Gigantic And Blinding Obvious Thing which Mr. Frum and the rest of his ilk are still struggling mightily to ignore (from remarks I made in the comment section of the late Steve Gilliard's News Blog more than ten years ago, and which Mr. Gilliard saw fit to haul up to his front page):

Monday, March 28, 2005

They are serious

Driftglass posted this in comments and it's too damn funny to stay there.

IMHO it’s as simple as: “Never jump into bed with someone who’s crazier than you are.”

For the Suburban Gated, the non-deranged gunnies and the Tax Cuts Uber Alles Republicans, it’s all jolly good fun having a romp with the Fundies…as long as they keep delivering the 20% margin the GOP must have to win anything and as long as they stay the fuck away from my house and family, its all just good kinky fun…

…until the sun comes up, and you realize that the Electoral Candy you were offered was just bait to get you into the Windowless Fundy Panel Truck. Oops.

And now you’re waaaay out in the country somewhere you don’t recognize without your pants, and you start to figure our that all the Burning Crosses and Swastikas and Apocalyptic Paraphernalia that tricks out the inside of the van isn't tatted-up Goth Chick posturing.

And Randall Terry and Tom DeLay wave to you from the front seat and say, “Mornin’ shug! Get ready; we gonna burn us some ‘a them Chirst Hatin’ Abortionists today.” Or Fags. Or Negros. Or Liberals. Or Ay-rabs. Or Jews. Or, really, Anybody.

And all of the slack-jawed yokels who were so eagerly helpful while you were passing you’re Lovely Tax Cuts are sitting around you giggling…and armed to their snaggled teeth.

And then you hear, “Bring Out The Gimp.” (Which, for my money, should be the Democrats’ Lead Media Message for the next four months.)

Oh. God. You mean these crazy fucks were serious? Like, really, really serious?!

No shit they’re serious, Suburban Weekend Bad-Ass -- and it's not exactly like you weren't given Ample Warning: Now they have your shriveled nuts in a razor-lined C-clamp, they want the very high interest vig on the Electoral Loan they made you to pay for your Optional War and Drunken Safety Net Shredding Good Times.

As I've been saying, the devil wants his due, and he's come to collect.

They thought they could play them forever. I guess forever is today.

Or one could read Dr. Krugman in the New York Times this very week for a less vivid and profane version of the same diagnosis:

...

But how can this be happening? After all, the antiestablishment candidates now dominating the field, aside from being deeply ignorant about policy, have a habit of making false claims, then refusing to acknowledge error. Why don’t Republican voters seem to care?

Well, part of the answer has to be that the party taught them not to care. Bluster and belligerence as substitutes for analysis, disdain for any kind of measured response, dismissal of inconvenient facts reported by the “liberal media” didn’t suddenly arrive on the Republican scene last summer. On the contrary, they have long been key elements of the party brand. So how are voters supposed to know where to draw the line?

...

To speak in the language of your people, they paid for those microbrains, Mr. Frum!   

And if the donor class lost control of the chumps they created to a craftier and more entertaining demagogue, well tough titties on them.

Look Who's Suddenly Interested

In playing the "See, I was right all along!" game?

It’s been an interesting 5 years since WSJ demanded - and got! - my head for writing that O’care was here to stay https://t.co/uIBO3rqE9o

— David Frum (@davidfrum) May 22, 2015

WSJ urges Rs to maintain Obamacare subsidies through 2017 even if Supreme Court strikes down exchanges in June http://t.co/VJPP0KDevR

— David Frum (@davidfrum) May 22, 2015

Golly, David, I had no idea you wanted to play this game, but that's great!



Let's start with George W. Bush and Iraq, shall we?

Ten Years Later, David Frum Can't Get the Most Basic Facts About Iraq Right

Disgraced Unshaven Neocon Hobo Says What?

it’s not just CEOs and hedge fund managers who are being paid more & more money for worse & worse results http://t.co/oamWBz8ite

— David Frum (@davidfrum) May 19, 2015

For a wildly overpaid professional writer (former Bush Regime speechwriter, Iraq war pimp and author of such scintillating works of scholarship as "The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush") David Frum seems to have a severe problem grasping the meaning of very simple, everyday English words.

Words like "irony".

And "hypocrisy".

Good News, Citizens!

To serve you better, at our New and Improved MSNBC, disgraced, unshaven, neocon hobos eat free!

David Frum's Awesome Imaginary Conservatism

When Andrew Sullivan shuttered his site and declared "I will blog no more forever", Imaginary Conservatism lost one of its most prominent voices.  But Imaginary Conservatism is growth industry and a very lucrative one, so matter how many of its outlets stores go out of business, there will always be another one adding inventory to make up the difference.

Today's example: David "Axis of Evil" Frum who has added yet another another contribution to the already crowded "If only the Republican Party weren't full of Republicans!" genre of Conservative masturbatory fiction. Mr. Frum remains inexplicably employed as a senior editor at The Atlantic, a regular on CNN and MSNBC and chairman of an outfit called The Policy Exchange -- a UK think tank which appears to specialize in generic clip art, recycled slogans from 1993 and a donation button.

Here is the headline from Mr. Frum's column:

What Republicans Can Learn From British Conservatives

Several of the world’s center-right parties have modernized in ways the GOP hasn’t.

Here is a sample paragraph:

Center-right leaders are in charge of every one of America’s closest English-speaking allies. Only in the United States does the liberal left govern. With Hillary Clinton holding strong leads in the polls over all her likely opponents, this form of “American exceptionalism” looks likely to persist for some time to come. Why?

Here is another sample paragraph:

Unlike their U.S. counterparts, these conservatives don’t fetishize the music, fashion, or religious practices of some of their voters in a way that prevents them from reaching all of their potential voters. Unlike their U.S. counterparts, they accept that healthcare security actually supports—rather than inhibits—the entrepreneurial risk-taking of a dynamic free-market economy. Unlike their U.S. counterparts, they have found ways to both enforce immigration laws and to make immigrant populations feel at home politically.

The sad part here is not that Mr. Frum is lying.  Of course he is lying.  I mean, what else does he have?

No; the sad part is how well-compensated David Frum is for lying so incompetently.  There is no style to it.  No cleverness.  Just a ludicrous assertion that a terrible and non-existent "liberal left" governs our country: an invocation which "moderate conservative" weasels like Mr. Frum are obliged to make so they won't be punched in the face by the bigots and lunatics who make up 99.999% of "their" American Conservative movement every time they go out in public.

What follows this incompetent lie is a promise that if the modern Republican Party would just forswear every single issue on which the modern Republican Party was built then they could start winning elections!

Yay!

David, the United States already has a center-right party and you fucking well know it.

They're called Democrats.

But good on you for scamming a national magazine into paying you to extruding tripe like this. 

Q: Is There Any Both-Siderist Fad So Flimsy

That former Bush Administration myrmidons will not jump on it like Wimpy going after a free hamburger?

A:  Of course not.

I had kinda lost track of nationally syndicated former Bush Administration Employee Michael Gerson David Frum for awhile.  Too much to do and there are only so many weasels one can reasonably be expected to keep an eye on at any given time.

Thankfully, like all Conservatives of his caste, David Frum is an entirely predictable schlub conducting his hackwork within entirely predictable parameters, and so I made a little bet with myself that, given all the myriad, legitimate burning issues confronting Murrica in these here modern times, I could guess to within six significant digits which giant, ridiculous Liberal straw man he would glom onto in order to simultaneously keep his Both-Siderist cred fresh and avoid talking about any of those myriad, legitimate burning issues confronting Murrica in these here modern times.

Turns out, I owe myself a Coke, because once again here comes those Evil Liberal Speech Codes in 3...2...1... (with the choicest cut emphasizes for you viewing pleasure):

Liberals and the Illiberal Left

When Democrats don't stand up to the policing of speech, they surrender control of their party to its most extreme elements.

DAVID FRUM

JAN 29 2015, 2:57 PM ET

...

All of this is background to understand yesterday’s Internet dust-up over Jonathan Chait’s powerful new article in New York magazine. Chait is a liberal’s liberal

...Chait condemned the goals of this new political correctness as verging on the totalitarian.

Politically correct leftism is more than a challenge to liberalism. It is a test of liberalism.

America’s most effective liberals—from Harry Truman to Rahm Emanuel—have known how and when to defy the illiberal left, whether that illiberal left was communist or Third Worldist or, as it is today, infatuated with the jargon of “intersectionality.”

Republicans have suffered greatly over the past six years from their visible terror of their more extreme associates. The evolution toward a more responsible Republicanism remains incomplete, but is visibly under way. Now it seems to be the turn of liberals and Democrats to veer off into their own ideological fever-swamps.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I am not at all reassured by predictions about the imminent end of the GOP Age of Crazy coming from the inventor of the "Axis of Evil", the author of " A Series of Unfortunate Impeachable Offenses The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush" and the co-author (with blood-sucking ghoul Richard Fucking Perle) of a pop-up book for Neocons called, I believe, The Big Book of Winning the War against Existential Evil for Dummies.

Then again, six years after the end of the Bush Pandimensional Fiasco. Frum still collects a large paycheck for what he writes and I do not, so what the fuck do I know?

Mr. "Axis of Evil" Is Still Full Of Martial Advice

Which he is still proffering from one of the many media platforms onto which he is still inexplicably invited.

The money quote:

The question before the nation is, “What is the benefit of this war to America and to Americans?”

That was the question the speech left unanswered. And the ominous suspicion left behind is that the question was unanswered because it is unanswerable—at least, not answerable in any terms likely to be acceptable to the people watching the speech and paying the taxes to finance the fight ahead.

I think it's adorable that one of America's most useless Iraq War cheerleaders is suddenly so overcome with concern over how much all of this war stuff is gonna cost the Murrican taxpayer that he just has to share his worries with the world.  

It's Not Who I Am Underneath

But What I Do That Defines Me

Andrew Sullivan gets this exactly backwards:

It’s an honorable apology and correction. But it’s hard not to see in the eight tweets that David [Frum] sent out questioning the integrity of these harrowing images of grief and murder a desperate need not to see what is in front of our noses. The mind-boggling trauma and terror that Gazan civilians are now experiencing is so very hard to watch, when this country is partly financing it. For those attached to Israel, the experience must be particularly wrenching...

Another day, another stab by Andrew Sullivan at hanging onto his Reformocon Superfriends delusions and feed his own "desperate need not to see what is in front of our noses" by continuing to treat the intentions of people like David Frum as fundamentally honorable even as their actions scream otherwise.

From Gawker:

David Frum's Apology for His Nutty Theory Links to More Nutty Theories

...

So, to sum up: In responding to criticism of his credulous perpetuation of dumb conspiracy theories, David Frum wrote a post on the website of one of America's oldest magazines congratulating himself for his skepticism of Palestinian claims, and as evidence he relied on a website so thoroughly discredited that Wikipedia won't use it. A website that maintains something called "The Ultimate Online Archive of Unflattering Hillary Clinton Photos." A website that has hooked in pro-Israel stalwarts like Frum before with similar tinfoil-hat theories on "faked" photos of Israeli military victims.

Frum's unapologetic impulse to re-order facts in accordance with his ideological commitments, and his subsequent reliance on insano bloggers as evidence when mainstream facts flat-out contradict his intuitions, would not be remarkable if he were just another free radical floating about the blogosphere. But he is not; he is a Very Important Person in Magazines and on Twitter, the type whose intellectual musings are both taken seriously and spread widely.

On the other hand, Frum's celebrity is based on his role as one of the Iraq War's original cheerleaders and as the creator of the "Axis of Evil" meme, so if anybody should fall for bullshit on the internet, it's him. It's just a question of whether he should be remunerated for his credulity—and whether The Atlantic should maybe reconsider if his "apology" post, and his continued inability to appraise his biases, are up to its standards of integrity.

Erik Wemple takes several bites out of Mr. Frum's apology here: "The difficulty with David Frum’s apology for bogus photo-fakery allegations".

And the estimable James Fallows takes a longer, scholarly look at the profession of journalism through the lens of David Frum's snap judgement and excruciatingly hedged walk-back here: "On David Frum, The New York Times, and the Non-Faked 'Fake' Gaza Photos"

When one prominent Conservative hack somewhere someday pays some actual, measurable price for being a serial truth-molester, I will start to get interested in the nuances of the media's "honorable apology" gavotte.

Because as far as I am concerned from my tiny perch out here in the fields and farms of middle America, it's what these people do that defines them.