Posted on 03/24/2003 7:27:47 AM PST by CoolGuyVic
When the shooting starts
March 24, 2003
BY ROBERT NOVAK SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
On the day after President Bush delivered his ultimatum, Patrick J. Buchanan stopped debating the war. The former presidential candidate and longtime adversary of the Bushes wrote that ''patriotism commands that when American soldiers face death in the battle, the American people unite behind them.'' On that very day, the country's foremost conservative publication listed Buchanan among ''leading figures in the anti-war movement [who] call themselves 'conservatives' '' but hate their country and want it to lose the war.
To my astonishment, I was among them. David Frum, a Washington journalist and White House speechwriter early in this Bush administration, put Buchanan and me on the top of the dishonor roll in ''Unpatriotic Conservatives: A War Against America,'' the cover story in the current edition of National Review.
We are accused of advocating ''a fearful policy of ignoring threats and appeasing enemies.'' Concluding, he writes of us: ''[T]hey are thinking about defeat, and wishing for it, and they will take pleasure if it should happen. They began by hating the neo-conservatives. They came to hate their party and this president. They have finished by hating their country.''
That demonstrably is not true of Pat Buchanan, and it is certainly not true of me. Anybody who makes a living by dispensing strong comment should be inured to attack, even when the accusations are totally false. During the nearly 40 years that I have been privileged to write this column, I have not subjected readers to my personal controversies. Now, however, I feel constrained to identify myself as a Korean War-vintage Army officer (non-combat) who has always supported our troops and prayed for their success during many wars. This war is no exception. Dealing with statements about me even so calumnious as Frum's might seem petty in time of war. But broader issues are at stake. Frum represents a body of conservative opinion that wants to delegitimize criticism from the right of policy that has led to war against Iraq.
Anti-war activity over the years has come mostly from the left. Those were not conservatives who shut down Times Square on Thursday. Senate Democratic Leader Thomas Daschle went over the line last Monday when he blamed potential American deaths on Bush's failed diplomacy, but he had regrouped by week's end to promise support of ''our troops and our commander-in-chief.''
Like Buchanan, Daschle ended up following the old American custom of supporting the war once the shooting starts. Frum, on the other hand, chose that moment to begin shooting at ''paleo-conservatives.'' He brackets me with his selected paleos--people whom I have never met or read and whose anti-Semitic and white supremacist views I abhor.
Frum cannot find any such statements ever uttered by me. Nor can he find anything I ever have said to indicate hatred for George W. Bush, much less my country. His article cites four quotations from my columns, one reporting that congressional sources predicted the CIA would be unable to find Osama bin Laden, and the other three criticizing an overly close identification of U.S. policy with Israel (especially the Ariel Sharon government). Implicitly, that is unacceptable criticism from a conservative.
''[E]ven Robert Taft and Charles Lindbergh ceased accommodating Axis aggression after Pearl Harbor,'' Frum writes. The implication: After 9/11, conservatives should have refrained from debating the Iraq strategy or questioning Israeli policy.
Nevertheless, Frum's mention of Lindbergh recalls the Lone Eagle's unhappy experience. Gulled by Hitler into regarding the Nazi thugs as saviors of Western civilization, Lindbergh was goaded by Franklin D. Roosevelt into resigning his colonel's commission in the Army Air Corps Reserve. Lindbergh sought active duty after Pearl Harbor but was blocked by a vindictive President Roosevelt. He managed to fly secret combat missions in the Pacific, however illegally, as a civilian. A newly naturalized American, Frum might ponder how Lindbergh handled himself once the shooting started.
The neocons have used similar tactics for decades against anyone who would dare to question their vision of what "conservatism" should be.
That hardly qualifies him as a leading conservative thinker or writer. At best, Frum's claim to fame is not a powerful and moving message, but a three word sound byte that any one of us could have thought up on any given day - "axis of evil." Now that's a good soundbyte and all, and it summarizes a point fairly adequitely, but it's no eulogy to Caesar, nor even one of the better addresses given by some of the more capable members of Congress. As his guilt-by-association smear piece on Novak and others amply demonstrates, the guy is an intellectual lightweight. He essentially shot his mouth off without thinking it through and now he's having it piled back on him by conservatives who dwarf his rational abilities.
He has also begun whining now that his words are returning to haunt him, but that was to be expected. Frum is the epitome of what Ann Coulter once described as the "girlie-boys" of the conservative movement.
Having an ivy league affiliation or a law degree doesn't make one an intellectualy astute individual. Neither does writing for a magazine or newspaper. If you doubt me, just look at all the leftist buffoons who lined up to write defenses of Clinton during impeachment. They were a virtual Harvard/Yale/Princeton law school faculty list, yet their arguments were among the most intellectually dishonest propaganda tripe to appear on the pages of American newspapers in decades.
If Frum desires the credential of intellectual depth, he must demonstrate it in his writings. Penning a soundbyte and launching a guilt-by-association smear on conservatives he disagrees with demonstrates the exact opposite.
And the girly boy slur is just that
To the contrary. It's an accurate description of an individual's childish and whiny behavior carried out in the form of that article. If an individual lies, it is not a slur to call him a liar. If an individual whines when people criticize him, it is not a slur to call him a whiner. If an individual behaves like an adolescent in his editorials, it is not a slur to call him an adolescent. And if he does all of these things, as Frum has indisputably done, it is not a slur, but rather an accurate characterization, to call him a "girly boy."
No. It was stuffed with carefully selected quotes expressing fringe anti-semitism from a select few people who Frum identifies as paleo-cons (i.e. the Francis types from "American Renaissance"). Based upon those quotes, Frum extended the attribute of anti-semitism to all the people he identified as "paleo-cons" - a list that included mainstream conservatives such as Novak, factional conservatives, and libertarians, as well as the Sam Francis types. It was an exercise in guilt-by-association tactics, only even the association Frum made was largely fabricated.
The usual definition of "intellectual lightweight" is one who can't back up his statements with facts, and Frum took care to do just that.
No he didn't. Go re-read the thing and see who those blocked quotes are all from. They're practically all Sam Francis, Fleming, and other American Rennaissancer types. The main exception is Lew Rockwell, and he is not a paleo-con but a libertarian who heads up a think tank that advocates the theories of a Jewish economist.
However, in the last decade or so, he has become consistently anti-Israel to the point of opposing any government action, warlike or peaceful, that might help Israel in any way.
So what's your point? As a conservative who fully supports Israel, I have no problem agreeing to disagree with Novak and neither should Frum. That was the point of David Keene's article.
his attitude on the Middle East is that of a paleocon--and he shares their worst traits.
So he's an anti-semite just because he believes in non-intervention on Israel, and even though he is ethnically Jewish himself? The broad leaps of logic you and Frum engage in by making such implications are bizarre at best.
Show you what?
Wrong again. I said that one last year was legitimate. You had one other thread with another topic where you posted extensively in the course of the last several months and you're an everyday poster. I'd still consider you one-issue.
Rather than admitting that you were WRONG in your fraudulent, abusive, and dishonest lobbing of allegations against myself and others, you simply come up with an "excuse" as to why every single post that proves you wrong "doesn't count."
No, you had one thread where you posted extensively and I said so. I guess you're ignoring that.
Needless to say, I'll happily keep you notified of my posting activities.
If you consider me a sixth grader, why are you going to do that? Do you often report to sixth-graders? I guess I really mean a lot to you for you to go through so much trouble. My opinion must really be "significant" in your life.
And excuse-making on all the others.
I tried reading two of his books, "Dead Right" and "How We Got Here", and couldn't finish them. "How We Got Here" especially read like a cut-and-paste job.
All in all, Frum strikes me as an opportunist a la David Brock who senses that his moment has arrived and now's the time to make a big "splash".
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