Posted on 11/16/2010 11:43:38 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
One of the Times’ favorite putative conservatives, former Bush speechwriter and book author David Frum, has gotten a lot of play in the paper by criticizing conservatives for rejecting Obama-care and listening to Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. Now Frum has become the paper’s idea of a conservative idea man. Just like the paper’s occasionally-right-of-center David Brooks, he’s a “conservative” that Obama and the Times can tolerate -- the kind who is constantly criticizing his alleged fellow conservatives.
The latest Times Sunday Magazine features an “Idea Lab” article by Frum, “Post-Tea-Party Nation,” illustrated with a drawing of a sleeping elephant. The subhed: “If conservatives are going to wield power responsibly, they first have to learn some hard lessons.”
Frum certainly can’t be accused of pro-Bush partisanship in passages like this:
Republicans lost the presidency in 2008 in large part because of the worst economic crisis since World War II. Republicans have now regained the House of Representatives for the same reason. In the interval, Republicans ferociously attacked the Obama administration’s economic remedies, and there certainly was a lot to attack. But the impulse to attack, it must be recognized, was based on more than ideology; it also served important psychological imperatives. Not since Jimmy Carter handed the office to Ronald Reagan -- arguably not since Herbert Hoover yielded to Franklin Roosevelt -- had a president of one party bequeathed a successor from another party so utter an economic disaster as George W. Bush bequeathed to Barack Obama. And while the Bush administration took wise and bold steps to correct the disaster, the unpopularity of its Troubled Asset Relief Program bequeathed the Obama administration a political disaster alongside the economic disaster.
Frum passed along five “lessons” for conservatives:
Too often, conservatives dupe themselves. They wrap themselves in closed information systems based upon pretend information. In this closed information system, banks can collapse without injuring the rest of the economy, tax cuts always pay for themselves and Congressional earmarks cause the federal budget deficit. Even the market collapse has not shaken some conservatives out of their closed information system. It enfolded them more closely within it. This is how to understand the Glenn Beck phenomenon. Every day, Beck offers alternative knowledge -- an alternative history of the United States and the world, an alternative system of economics, an alternative reality. As corporate profits soar, the closed information system insists that the free-enterprise system is under assault. As prices slump, we are warned of imminent hyperinflation. As black Americans are crushed under Depression-level unemployment, the administration’s policies are condemned by some conservatives as an outburst of Kenyan racial revenge against the white overlord.
By Lesson 5, Frum had become personal and rather offensive, demeaning the Tea Party and fans of Bill O’Reilly and Sarah Palin as well-off know-nothings.
Non-Tea Party Americans may marvel that any group can think of itself as egalitarian when its main political goals are to cut off government assistance to the poorest and reduce taxes for the richest. But American populism has almost always concentrated its anger against the educated rather than the wealthy. So much so that you might describe contemporary American politics as a class struggle between those with more education than money against those with more money than education: Jon Stewart’s America versus Bill O’Reilly’s, Barack Obama versus Sarah Palin.
No wonder the Times likes him so much.
more education than money against those with more money than education
whoa whoa whoa!
Who is in favor of teaching phonics so that kids can actually read real books before first grade? Not liberals.
Who is in favor of teaching traditional algorithms such as long division and column multiplication? Not liberals.
Who is in favor of bring back the classical trivium of G Logic and Rhetoric? Once again, not the liberals.
The Left wants to dumb down education and the popular culture and they have the chutzpah to say that they are more educated?
G=Grammar
We need to continue on the Congressional front, win the Presidential race in 2014, and then totally destroy the academic infrastructure the democrat party has built with hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars over the past forty years. If we can do that along with putting an end to the fiction of issue specific tax-exempt foundations, we'll then be able to completely dismantle the democrat party once and for all they way it should have been destroyed after the Civil War.
Regards
What a flood of memories that photo brings up. We may never see a team that good again. Worked for President Reagan and General Haig at different times. Director Casey was old school WWII OSS.
IMO, he took a payoff like Brooks and Charles Johnson.
Once upon a time, the adults were in charge...
Things are different now, being lectured to by Frum has lost its appeal.
American politics as a class struggle between those with more education than money against those with more money than education:
__________________________________________________
Perhaps that’s a problem—look at this country— we are dead broke.
Maybe we NEED these people with less education and more money than we need people with more education and less money.
At least the people with less education and more money KNOW how to earn, save, invest etc...that’s JUST what’s needed.
We need people with more education, not less. But they need to be educated in free markets and real science.
“Not since Jimmy Carter handed the office to Ronald Reagan — arguably not since Herbert Hoover yielded to Franklin Roosevelt — had a president of one party bequeathed a successor from another party so utter an economic disaster as George W. Bush bequeathed to Barack Obama.”
And who “handed” Obama the mortgage meltdown? Was it those darn racist Republicans who didn’t want minorities to own homes ... or was it the Democrats who wanted people to own homes whether they could afford it or not?
And which way did Obama vote on the matter? Gosh, let me guess!
We really need to dispel the myth that the Republicans were the primarily architects of the financial meltdown. We need to remind people of which party FILIBUSTERED attempts to bring Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac under control way back in 2005. Hint: it wasn’t the Republicans — but the public is almost completely unaware of that fact.
The public assumes that the Republicans were to blame because they were in power at the time. But the public in general is unaware of how the minority party can use the filibuster in the Senate to block the will of the majority. That ignorance is a huge problem for democracy.
Jeb is a moderate Too!
I don’t have a problem with education, I had a problem with his argument. He worships education and never mentions experience. All education isn’t spoon-fed by a university or found completely in books. Experience is a fine education.
I think what we could use most...are people who have good values and morals—the backbone to stay honest. People who put country first, not their pocketbooks or their political welfare and egos.
Personal experience isn’t enough because it is so limited. People have to study the experiences of many people, cultures and institutions throughout history in order to learn from their mistakes and successes.
Now what the academics do is forget the history, forget the experiences that were tested, tried and true and approach everything from a blank slate.
Frum is a Canadian lib poser.
When I hear Cheney speak... I know I am listening to an adult.
All we do is add and subtract. We do not understand advanced Ponzinomic Theory.
F=(L)+(P) ...when F=Failure...L=Liberalism... and P=Power
Frum is Canadian.
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