That has to beat who's driving now.
Posted on 09/03/2010 6:34:18 AM PDT by EternalVigilance
David Frum’s blog post connects his dismissal from AEI with Brink Lindsey’s and Will Wilkinson’s departures from Cato. In the post, Frum makes some important and well-articulated points about the GOP’s lack of direction and what a Republican majority could yield:
We are likely soon to have a Republican majority in the House of Representatives, maybe the U.S. Senate too. And what will that majority do? The answer seems to be: They have not a clue. Unlike the Republican House and Senate majorities of 1994, unlike the Republican Senate majority of 1980, these new majorities will arrive with only slogans for a policy agenda. After staging a for-the-record vote against Obamacare, and after re-enacting the Bush tax cuts, it will be policy mission accomplished.
There’s little other policy inventory, because the think tanks have not done their proper work. Without a think tank agenda, the new majority will rapidly decline into a brokerage service for K Street.
After the GOP lost its majority in 2006, a leading think tanker said to me: “Somehow I always thought we’d get more done before we became completely corrupt.” How much will we get done next time given the poverty of our think tank work over the past half decade?
This is one of my concerns, and the GOP’s recent courting of Wall Street and hedge funds leaves me plenty worried.
But I must say, Frum’s concerns about purges are a bit rich. Frum writes:
But in the Lindsey-Wilkinson case, we confront the problem of the closing of the conservative mind in its purest form….
The waters are surging in the conservative world, and conservative institutions must either ride the wave or be swamped. But if wave-riding is all that these very expensive institutions are doing, who needs them?…
The right-of-center world is poorer for the dessication of the institutions that used to act as the right’s brains.
Perhaps Frum has learned a lesson in the past seven and a half years, when he was the one doing the dessicating; he was the one trying to spur the wave and tell everyone on the Right to get on board with the party line or be damned; he was the one who saw an open mind as a sign of treason.
David Frum was the one who wrote this about those conservatives who dared oppose the invasion of Iraq:
There is, however, a fringe attached to the conservative world that cannot overcome its despair and alienation. The resentments are too intense, the bitterness too unappeasable. Only the boldest of them as yet explicitly acknowledge their wish to see the United States defeated in the War on Terror. But they are thinking about defeat, and wishing for it, and they will take pleasure in it if it should happen.
They began by hating the neoconservatives. They came to hate their party and this president. They have finished by hating their country.
War is a great clarifier. It forces people to take sides. The paleoconservatives have chosen — and the rest of us must choose too. In a time of danger, they have turned their backs on their country. Now we turn our backs on them.
I was one of those conservatives who supposedly turned my back my country by opposing a war based on bad intelligence and bad foreign policy. More to the point, my boss at the time, Bob Novak, was branded in Frum’s purge article as a “defeatist,” a “terror-denialist” (because he suggested al Qaeda was a greater threat to Americans than Hamas was), and “unpatriotic.”
Frum is very correct that the GOP and the conservative movement is in danger of taking control of the car with no idea how to steer. I just hope David Frum’s current worries about rigid dogma reflects a lesson learned rather than a rank lack of self-awareness.
Just because my appease and surrender advice is about to be discredited in the most forceful bitch slapping imaginable, you hicks should realize my way is the right way and stop ignoring me. Because if you guys ignore me and laugh at my foolisness thirteen or fourteen more times I am out of here. You can just try to get by without me. I really mean it. Seriously. I'm not kidding.
Just because my appease and surrender advice is about to be discredited in the most forceful bitch slapping imaginable, you hicks should realize my way is the right way and stop ignoring me. Because if you guys ignore me and laugh at my foolisness thirteen or fourteen more times I am out of here. You can just try to get by without me. I really mean it. Seriously. I'm not kidding.
bttt
LOL!
Whoops. Sorry about that. Wrong url attached to the story.
Moderator, could you please replace the link at the top of the story with the proper one?
My apologies.
A. Morgan, thank you very much for catching that.
LOL - That’s a fairly cogent translation!
Not a bad translation at all. Good job.
At some point...the logic of paying each of the 535 Members of Congress a BILLION dollars a year to stay home and quit legislatin’ on “behalf” of the nation ..will become eviden and obvious to all...but the deepest denizon of DC.
It is the Frum/Noonan/Brooks/Parker cabal of elitists that need to come up with a policy.
So far as one can determine, their policy is to hate Palin, dismiss the Tea Party conservatives, praise illegal immigration, encourage “compassionate” spending, and support the grand old dinosaurs who believe the Republican party should be a lighter version of the Democrat party which permits them to be insiders at the Washington banquet of the ruking class.
“Somehow I always thought we’d get more done before we became completely corrupt.” How much will we get done next time given the poverty of our think tank work over the past half decade?”
How much did the founders rely on think tanks for their vision of government?
If we do get true conservative majorities in both chambers just ending this reaching across the aisle bipartisan nonsense along with some serious rollbacks will be a huge victory.
It’s gonna take a while to undo the damage.
You’re right.
Fact is, even if the Republicans take control of the Congress in this election cycle, that will NOT represent a conservative majority.
So, yes, it’s going to take awhile to undo the damage.
It’s going to take awhile before we can bring about a true conservative majority.
The danger is that many will go back to sleep if the Republicans win, not realizing that the work has only just begun.
You’re right.
Fact is, even if the Republicans take control of the Congress in this election cycle, that will NOT represent a conservative majority.
So, yes, it’s going to take awhile to undo the damage.
It’s going to take awhile before we can bring about a true conservative majority.
The danger is that many will go back to sleep if the Republicans win, not realizing that the work has only just begun.
I am with you on that. I wish the US Congress met once for a short session every two years like the Texas legislature does. I think the country would be much better off if they followed that model. Lawmakers cannot cause trouble when they are not in session.
That has to beat who's driving now.
That has to beat who's driving now.
GFYS Frum!
Oh please.
You get an idea of the pukes good-cop-bad-cop act when you know Timothy Carney is the one who outed Rahm Emanuel as a G/S plant in the WH.
BTW, there is a reward out for anyone who can determine what Frum, Billy Kristol and the rest of the pukeneos actually do for a living. None of the pukeneos have any visible means of support, unless you count:
(1) media prostitution,
(2) editing stupid magazines subsidized by offshore wire transfers,
(3) infiltratng the US government,
(4) endless think-tank pontificating on how nice it is to goad the US military into invading foreign countries of the pukes choosing,
(5) cheerleading amnesty, National Greatness, America as Empire, endless war, and John McCain,
(6) squatting in the Repub Party, hoping to destroy it from within,
(7) religious cleansing of the Repub Party, and,
(8) kicking so/con Repubs to the curb.
?
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