Amid Column Furor, The American Enterprise Institute Dismisses David Frum

I just saw this on Twitter. Guess Frum wasn’t right wing enough for the AEI. Maybe he can become the next David Brock.

And, I guess that Expanding Liberty principle doesn’t extend to free speech.

Bruce Bartlett on the topic:
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http://capitalgainsandgames.com/blog/bruce-bartlett/1601/groupthink-right-would-make-stalin-proud
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[quote]

As some readers of this blog may know, I was fired by a right wing think tank Called the National Center for Policy Analysis in 2005 for writing a book critical of George W. Bush’s policies, especially his support for Medicare Part D. In the years since, I have lost a great many friends and been shunned by conservative society in Washington, DC.

Now the same thing has happened to David Frum, who has been fired by the American Enterprise Institute. I don’t know all the details, but I presume that his Waterloo post on Sunday condemning Republicans for failing to work with Democrats on healthcare reform was the final straw.

Since, he is no longer affiliated with AEI, I feel free to say publicly something he told me in private a few months ago. He asked if I had noticed any comments by AEI “scholars” on the subject of health care reform. I said no and he said that was because they had been ordered not to speak to the media because they agreed with too much of what Obama was trying to do.

It saddened me to hear this. I have always hoped that my experience was unique. But now I see that I was just the first to suffer from a closing of the conservative mind. Rigid conformity is being enforced, no dissent is allowed, and the conservative brain will slowly shrivel into dementia if it hasn’t already.

Sadly, there is no place for David and me to go. The donor community is only interested in financing organizations that parrot the party line, such as the one recently established by McCain economic adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin.

I will have more to say on this topic later. But I wanted to say that this is a black day for what passes for a conservative movement, scholarship, and the once-respected AEI.[/quote]

Michael Scherer:
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Very, very interesting…

This is sad. This country would greatly benefit from an intellectually honest conservative party.
Even though I’d argue against them most of the time.

BTW, have you read Tunku Varadarajan’s harsh criticism of Frum, Michael Scherer?

He says Frum deserves shunning, represents Beltway “polite-company conservative”. You might want to check it out.
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link to the Daily Beast

The Republicans have a real problem on their hands when they can’t handle the truth. There is part of our collective psychology that is conservative and an equal part that is liberal or progressive. We are not libertarians by nature, but the libertarian strain has gotten way more press than it deserves. David Frum spoke the truth, and the Republican Party is now so accustomed to letting the liars in their party go unchallenged that when a real conservative speaks the truth, one who wants to see a real conservative ideology back in power, the liars drown him out. Just as the Democrats have moved much more towards the center in the last decade and that has given them a lot of political clout, the Republicans are going to have to move towards the center if gthey want to regain power.

Wingnut Meltdown 2010 continues. Awesome.

“There is part of our collective psychology that is conservative and an equal part that is liberal or progressive.”

I don’t know if the quantity equals exactly 50% but the similarity and difference is likely rooted in the fact that from a political philosophy perspective, Democrats and Republicans are both “Liberals.” For example, we both believe in the separation of church and state, the separation of powers, limited government, liberty, freedom, civil rights and so on, all “Liberal” ideas. The main difference, it seems to me, continues to be an argument over the role of gov’t in the economy, hardly something to start a war over, given how much there is in common.

Popcorn?
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(offers bag of popcorn)

DEMS SEEKING TO MEDDLE IN USA PUBLICS MARRIAGES FOR A PROFIT AT EXPENSE OF DESTROYING PUBLICS MARRIAGES….

UNLESS THE PUBLIC THRU SEEKING LEGAL ACTION FORCES THE DEMS TO REPEAL THIS –this is what awaits the public…

Page 489 Sec 1308: The Govt will cover marriage and family therapy. (Which means Govt will insert itself into your marriage even.)

A. THIS WOULD MEAN IF GOV WANTS TO MAKE a buck and your marriage isn’t in trouble and GOV WANTS to claim it is YOU ARE IN TROUBLE AND DON’T GET A SAY IN IT.

how often MISDIAGNOSING occurs is only kept minimal IN OUR CURRENT SYSTEM PRIOR TO VOTE BECAUSE WE HAVE AVENUES TO SUE FOR WRONGFUL DEATH, MALPRACTICE & NEGLIGIENCE—BUT NOT IN THE NEW HEALTHCARE THE DEMS WANT TO PASS….

B THIS also WOULD MEAN FORCED ABORTIONS—consideing the fact that OBAMA & PELOSI & DEMS & PROGRESSIVES and TRUE progressives think anyone under a certain million dollar point is CONSIDERED & LABELED AS AN —UNDESIREABLE— & DOESN’T have a CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO LIFE LIBERTY ETC…

SO-O-O…

IMMANUEL PELOSI & DEMS also believes that ANIMALS lives are/should be DEEMED MORE VALUABLE than children/elderly/handicapped. Sooo, they have wanted to target everyone over 55 and children & vets.

CASS SUSSTEIN & PELOSI & DEMS whom believes and says—children are undesireables and therefore up to the age of 2 years old it should be allowed to KILL THEM only Mr. Susstein DOESN’T WANT TO CALL IT MURDER, OR GENICIDE OR HOLOCAUSTING DEMS & ACLU THINK the public will be stupid enough to just call it ABORTION there as well.

SO DEMS & ACLU want SOC HEALTHCARE WHICH

1. DOES NOT ALLOW public to seek a 2ND OPINION—so WHEN GOV decides to LIE TO CLAIM you are NOT sick and NOT need meds NOT NEED healthcare…guess whaaat YOU CANNOT GET A 2ND OPINION OR TREATMENT. THEREBY effectively PREVENTING PUBLIC from receiving HEALTH RESTORING MEDS & healthcare. effectively SHORTENING the lifespan of PUBLIC.

2. DOES NOT ALLOW public to SUE for MALPRATICE OR NEGLIGIENCE OR WRONGFUL DEATH as a result of being DEPRIVED of MEDS & HEALTHCARE.

3.PAGE 429 GOV SPEEDS UP PUBLICS DEATH IF DYING TOO SLOW GOV ISSUES A GOV ORDER TO FORCE MANDATORY GOV ASSISTED SUICIDE & MANDATORY EUTHANASIA….
GOV WANT TO DICTATE TREATMENT as your health deterioriates ( as GOV has already ASSURED it WILL by DEPRIVING YOU PUBLIC of MEDS & HEALTHCARE AND… dems want ….IF public ISN’T dying FAST ENOUGH TO SUIT GOV then THE GOV will ISSUE a GOV ORDER FOR YOUR end of life treatment to be brought about in a SPEEDY AND TIMELY fashion LEST GOV SHOULD MISS THEIR GOLF GAME while waiting for the PUBLIC to die while THE PUBLIC PAYS GOV MORE MONEY than oru PRESENT SYSTEM.

DEMS SEEKING TO FORCE USA PUBLIC TO ILLEGALLY PAY FOR ILLEGAL ALIENS HC & TAXES–WHILE VETS & SPECIAL NEEDS PEOPLE DENIED COVERAGE AT ALL FOREVER & MORE

WHETHER THEY HAVE A PRE-EXISITING CONDITION OR NOT….

HERE IS WHAT AWAITS THE PUBLIC IF THIS HEALTHCARE ISN’T REPEALED….

A.DUE TO THE DEMS UNBRIDLED SPENDING —the PUBLIC IS LEFT WITHOUT MEDS & HEALTHCARE INDEFINTELY…

INSURERS LOVE—-WHY??? THIS BECAUSE INSURERS & DEMS POCKET THE MORE EXPENSIVE CASH WHILE PUBLIC IS LEFT STRANDED TO DIE WITHOUT MEDS & BRANDED AS INT’L CRIMINALS & JAILED ONCE DENIED MEDS IF THEY SEEK MEDS FOR THEIR FAMILIES & VETRANS WHOM FOUGHT IN THE WAR

SEEK TO REPEAL THIS BOONDOGGLE —THE LIVES YOU SAVE will be your own and YOUR CHILDRENS…

seek legislative and LEGAL action to get SOC HEALTHCARE & stimulus and bailout kicked out see AMERICAN CENTER FOR LAW AND JUSTICE OR GOOGLE the problems with socialized health care OR GOOGLE handsoffmyhealth.org OR GOOGLE bigGovhealth.org OR stoptheaclu.com OR health science institute OR familysecuritymatters.org OR Alliance Defense

So much for “big tent” when they can’t even accept a really dyed in the wool conservative’s truthful opinion.

I wonder if anyone will actually read the post above?

Personally, I just see “all caps” and skip the entire thing. My brain feels much better for it.

Bartlett was the first person I thought of when I heard about Frum.
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Frum’s excommunication is, I think, more shocking than that of Bartlett. Bartlett had primarily policy based grounds for his book criticizing George Bush Jr., at a time when Bush was “the movement and the cause” of conservatism, as Bill Kristol put it. The right wing was unprepared to hear that massive debt spending, as done by the GOP Congress and president/hero, wasn’t actually conservative. I think it was Matt Yglesias who called the GOP the “follow the leader” party. There’s a lot of cult of personality there, and it’s not surprising that it was too emotionally difficult for them to hear that policy criticism of their leader.
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But Frum opposed the health care bill. He wrote that the GOP should have been willing to discuss the bill with Democrats to get a more congenial policy result. And even that political argument gets you shunned from today’s GOP. Unbelievable.
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Frum’s reasons for opposing the HCR bill are critiqued, in passing, here: ( link ). Recall that Bartlett’s follow-up book to Impostor was a book about how the Democrats had really pretty much been the party of Jim Crow. That was a pretty stupid, peripheral thesis, an obvious attempt to generate talking points for the right-wing and get to be pals again with his old colleagues and benefactors.
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It didn’t work, and he’s been condemned to honesty. It will be interesting to see what becomes of Frum. Because the background fact here is that not only does the GOP have zero sane policy ideas, they eject anyone from their circle who tries to say otherwise, or who hints that Obama might not actually be a socialist/fascist/secret Muslim/radical Christian/weak, apology-obsessed autocrat. How will they ever grow up?

Frum responds: http://www.frumforum.com/answering-tunku

Wow. I think they and David Brooks *should* form a party. They are respectful, thinking, sane conservatives. I can handle that.

Some of us are old enough to remember when the Republican Party wasn’t insane and it was even safe to vote for one or two occasionally if they happened to be the best candidate for the position. Sadly those days are long gone. I’m not one to celebrate the current meltdown. We need a sane oppostion.

Do you suppose there is any chance the opposition might ultimately come from a schism in the Democratic party? In the event the republican party really did go the the fringe, might the New Democrats and the liberals part ways, with some shunned or disenchanted Republicans joining the New Democrats?

That’s a very, very interesting thought, iggy.

I respect anyone who has been shunned by AEI and NRO.

I could see that too, iggy. The centrists / corporate politicians seem to blur party lines in favor of representing corporations, not real people. If their Third Way™ became a real third party / movement at least it would be easier to identify them …and avoid them.

How extreme have the republicans become when David Frum is not far enought to the right for them? Wow.

Maybe this healthcare reform can help provide you with the medication you need.

SZ, the one thing I like about Varadarajan’s otherwise noxious attack is where he says Frum has:
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“dedicated himself to being what I call a ‘polite-company conservative’ (or PCC), much like David Brooks and Sam Tanenhaus at the New York Times (where the precocious Ross Douthat is shaping up to be a baby version of the species). A PCC is a conservative who yearns for the goodwill of the liberal elite in the media and in the Beltway—who wishes, always, to have their ear, to be at their dinner parties, to be comforted by a sense that liberal interlocutors believe that they are not like other conservatives, with their intolerance and boorishness, their shrillness and their talk radio”
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Other than his obvious & patent falsehood (misuse of the term “liberal”), doesn’t OUAT McCain or Powell spring immediately to mind? Doesn’t this line up with our views of many faux-liberal reporters/courtiers?

The system is completely cooked so that only two parties will ever exist. There will never be a party just filled with the so-called moderates. If Democratic moderates are not happy with the Left, they can take up residence with the Becks and Limbaugh’s of the world, since that is the only option.

I’m still trying to figure out if this was a rant or a copy of the screenplay of “Fatal Attraction” or “Single White Female”.

“Yes, young Obi-wan. This is the purpose for which the scroll-wheel was intended.”

It’s tough to get New Democrats to be honest about their goals and political philosophy, because their entire existence is rooted in the self-described “Don’t Scare The Bear” politics, as Peter Beinart (one of the centrists who somehow didn’t shove the word “liberal” under the bed, and take up “progressive”) fancifully relates in his version of history (link to “Democrats, Forever Changed” by the tool Beinart):

For close to a decade now, Democrats have been arguing with each other about what kind of country this is, and what kind of party they should be. On one side stands a group of politicians, consultants and wonks who believe that America is, at its core, a pretty conservative place. These Democrats form something of a political generation. In their youth, they saw their party move left during Vietnam and get booted from power in 1968. Then they saw George McGovern, the most left-wing major party presidential candidate of the twentieth century, lose 49 states. Then they saw Jimmy Carter’s presidency destroyed in part because he looked weak during the Iran hostage crisis. Then they saw Ronald Reagan, once considered as an unelectable right-wing nut, become the most popular president of their adult lives.
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In the late 1980s, they responded to these disasters by creating the Democratic Leadership Council, which pushed the party to the right on welfare, taxes, trade, crime and defense. They claimed vindication when a president of the DLC, Bill Clinton, became president, and claimed double vindication when, after Clinton pushed for universal health care and got creamed in 1994, he won reelection two years later by triangulating against the liberals in his own party.
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For this generation of Democrats, which includes Al From, Mark Penn, Joe Lieberman, William Galston, Elaine Kamarck, Dick Morris, Ed Koch, Jane Harman, Evan Bayh, and to some extent Bill and Hillary Clinton, being a liberal is like walking past a bear. Move cautiously and reassuringly and the bear will purr contentedly. But make any sudden or threatening gestures, and you’ll be mauled because, fundamentally, the bear distrusts liberals. As Galston and Kamarck wrote in their famed 1989 essay “The Politics of Evasion”—a document that helped define the “don’t scare the bear” wing of the party—Democrats can pass liberal programs “but these programs must be shaped and defended within an inhospitable ideological climate.” To pretend that the American people are liberal at heart is to evade political reality, with devastating results.
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By the late 1990s, “don’t scare the bear” Democrats pretty much dominated Washington. But in the Bush years, a new faction began to emerge. These Democrats were mostly newer to politics. They had never seen a McGovern or Mondale mauled for being too far to the left. What they had seen was the post-1994 Bill Clinton, who shied away from ambitious liberal reform. And they had seen the Iraq War, which DLC types largely supported, partly out of fear that opposing it would allow Republicans to paint Democrats as soft on defense.

Now, of course Beinart makes an absurdly contradictory set of claims, and in doing so, reveals the weird denial-world in which Third Way centrists live about their ideology.
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First, he correctly claims that Democrats

…responded to these disasters by creating the Democratic Leadership Council, which pushed the party to the right on welfare, taxes, trade, crime and defense…

, but then he says something very odd, indeed:

Democrats can pass liberal programs “but these programs must be shaped and defended within an inhospitable ideological climate.”

The obvious question there is that, if the party has been pushed to the right on all of its key issues, then why would they seek to “pass liberal programs” at all?
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And, of course, these Democrats haven’t sought to sneak liberal programs past the terrifying rightist bear of the American people –people who support a public option 2-1, and opposed the Iraq occupation 2-1– they’ve put forward Something Else.
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That Something Else isn’t a program of liberalism disguised as “moderate conservatism,” but the Third Way program itself, which is its own set of policies and principles as distinct from liberalism as movement conservatism is. It’s not like we wanted them to sneak NAFTA into law for us, or to repeal the New Deal protections against the banksters’ gambling, or to give the telecoms legal immunity from lawsuits brought against them for spying on the American people.
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What’s happened recently, as popular opinion turned against movement conservatism put into real-life practice during the Bush Administration is that “don’t scare the bear” politics were used again, but instead of the bear being the state of Utah superimposed upon the whole nation, the bear became us, the energized base of liberals who reached out to our friends and neighbors and co-workers and colleagues with enthusiasm to elect Barack Obama –the New Democrat– President of the United States.
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We liberals became the bear past which New Democrats had to sneak their Third Way policy, and so we had the fake “public option” debate, and now we have the Dole-Daschle plan via the Bipartisan Policy Center (minus the 20 Republican votes Dole promised) passed into law using our browbeaten support!
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Did we ever expect MoveOn.org to whip us into calling our Congresspeople to demand that the House pass a public option-less Dole health care bill? No, because the bear –in this case us– dutifully slept while the New Democrats triangulated against movement conservatives this time.
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So we’re the new Beinart bear, and it’s going to be a real challenge to get New Democrats to be up front about their policy goals after the exuberance of winning fades for them, and they go back to sneaking around us again.

You got it, JC, of course you would.

David Frum is the kind of non-Republican/non-conservative that leftist political advocacy groups like ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN, MSDNC, the self-described Comedy Central, Entertainment Tonight, ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN News, et al., like to turn to as the “representative” of “Republicans” (i.e., non-Republicans) and “conservatives” (i.e., non-conservatives) (see also Parker, Kathleen; Brooks, David “Gergen”; Gergen, David; that hysterical teabagging leftist and nut job conspiracy theorist Sullivan, Andrew; that unknown fool Smerconish, Michael.) Maybe, someday Frum will hold the non-Republican/non-conservative seat at that execrable, leftist, taxpayer-funded PBS show that has had David Gergen and David “Gergen” Brooks serve in the “Republican”/”conservative” (i.e., non-Republican and non-conservative) seat opposite that clueless, militant leftist nut job Mark Shields. Gotta love that PBS “balance”!

David Frum is as much a “Republican” as that great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great granddaughter of Dwight Eisenhower who supported Obama is. Although the Washington press corps will, predictably, have millions of orgasms over David Frum over the next few days (weeks, months, years, decades?) he’ll have a tough time producing as many orgasms from the American press corps as did Eisenhower’s irrelevant, worthless great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great granddaughter.

I am an Independent and I don’t vote in party primaries. However, I do vote for both independent minded Republicans, Democrats and others, even though I may not agree with them on everything. I am sorry to see an independent thinker cast off because he did not toe the party line.

In my mind, there is no difference between left wingers and right wingers who shout down (or fire) others and won’t give them a chance to speak. Both are two sides of the same coin with metal forged in the fires of intolerance and arrogance. They betray (meaning in the strongest sense of the word) the basic principles of our constitution.

Thomas Jefferson said, “That differences of opinion should arise among men on politics, on religion and on every other topic of human inquiry, and that these should be freely expressed in a country where all our faculties are free, is to be expected. But these valuable privileges are much perverted when permitted to disturb the harmony of social intercourse, and to lessen the tolerance of opinion.”

–Thomas Jefferson: Reply to Citizens of Washington, 1809. ME 16:348

Jefferson’s view of the need and responsibility for all American citizens to nurture our tolerance of opinion just took another hit because of AEI’s apparent, using Jefferson’s terminology, “perversion” towards encouraging intolerance of opinion. They should rename the organization and call it the Un-American Enterprise Institute.