One by one, America's soft-handed, soft-headed life-long, keyboard-warriors of Ivory Tower "Conservatism" are being dragged -- kicking screaming -- towards the horrifying realization that they have been wrong all along about Real Conservatism, and that, just maybe, others people -- people they have spent a considerable about of time, energy and professional capital mocking and marginalizing -- have been right all along.
A few days ago, David Frum put a carefully hedged, question-mark-encrusted toe into that water:
Were Our Enemies Right?
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When people tell me that I’ve changed my mind too much about too many things over the past four years, I can only point to the devastation wrought by this crisis and wonder: How closed must your thinking be if it isn’t affected by a disaster of such magnitude? And in fact, almost all of our thinking has been somehow affected: hence the drift of so many conservatives away from what used to be the mainstream market-oriented Washington Consensus toward Austrian economics and Ron Paul style hard-money libertarianism. The ground they and I used to occupy stands increasingly empty.
If I can’t follow where most of my friends have gone, it is because I keep hearing Susan Sontag’s question in my ears. Or rather, a revised and updated version of that question:
Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Wall Street Journal editorial page between 2000 and 2011, and someone in the same period who read only the collected columns of Paul Krugman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of the current economic crisis? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?
Which, among other things, is certainly a powerful proof-of-concept that nothing so sharpens the mind of an Ivory Tower "Conservative" as getting kicked out of the Wingnut Welfare chow line.
AEI hits David Frum where it hurts
Those Republican brutes! It’s bad enough not to tolerate David Frum’s dissent on health care -- especially since his judgments have been stunningly correct. But in ousting him after a mad overnight revolt among its donors, the American Enterprise Institute has put Frum’s family into precisely the health care hell that Obamacare seeks to remedy. What many people don’t realize about the think tank world is that the policy types who serve as modestly paid fellows do so in large part for the health coverage. In our antiquated employer-based system, middle-aged wonks simply have to be attached to a group to be insurable. If you and your spouse have reached your 40s and have had even modest health bumps along the way, you'll never be able to get coverage in the pre-Obamacare individual market (as my wife and I discovered and documented in this New York Times Magazine piece a few years ago).
Luckily for the Frums, big government is here to save them.
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Talk about a two-fer. In one stroke, David Frum has become not only the poster boy for the Republican party’s incoherent tantrums, but for the need for Obamacare itself!
Real take men care of their families. Real men will crawl through shit to take care of their families. Period.
Ah, but what to do about the men and women who have been taking care of their families by selling poison and lies to the public for money? Who have made their daily bread by aiding an army of loathsome thugs whose political ideology is built on tearing the daily bread from the families of millions and millions of other men and women? Who have made their bones mocking and reviling those who fought on the side of the angels for "the least of these"?
For the sake of amusement if for no other reason, one thing you can do is wait.
Just wait...
Because in 3...2...1...
... that toe will be coming right back out again.
"Once more and with feeling: I am not a supporter of this president or his policies."Morally malformed wads like the David "Axis of Evil" Frum cannot change: cannot hide Dubya's tramp-stamp on his soul or the reek of Cheney-Neocon-bitch on his flabby ass, and when he pines "If I can’t follow where most of my friends have gone..." he of course never mentions that his "friends" are only headed where it has painfully obvious the have been goosestepping all along.
He just expects the general public to be too uninformed about his contemptible history or to know what a complete ethical wind-sock he is for anyone to ever hold him accountable for anything he says or does.
Needless to say, he has a special place in Andrew Sullivan's heart:
HereFrum celebrates the neocon high priest's deviationism. Of course I agree with both.HereOnce again, David Frum says what needs to be said:And hereAs is obvious by now, I agree with [Frum].
Of course, its hard to keep track of which side of the waterfront David Frum is working during any given hour of the day, so it's hard to track which David Frum Mr. Sullivan is lathering over.
But as Mr. Sullivan's Ivory Tower "Conservatism" has never amounted to much more than "People who agree with me at the moment" plus "Oh, shiny!" I suppose it hardly matters.
Perestroika (literally: Restructuring) was a political movement within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during 1980s, widely associated with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Its literal meaning is "restructuring", referring to the restructuring of the Soviet political and economic system.
Glasnost (Openness) was the policy of maximal publicity, openness, and transparency in the activities of all government institutions in the Soviet Union, together with freedom of information, introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev in the second half of the 1980s.
