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Secondly, Frum and Goldberg were very trenchant and effective commentators against the corruption of the Clinton administration. I don't recall people on Free Republic wanting to drum them out of the conservative movement at that time.

I am not familiar with this Frum, except as to seeing this essay and one earlier on his apparent approach. If the essayist is correct, and he did try to purge more traditional Conservatives, he is a largely disruptive force, who should be given very little encouragement. That he may have been useful in exposing personal corruption of a particular "liberal" administration, hardly gives him credentials beyond that usefulness.

While Trent Lott was hardly a Conservative bulwark, his Thurmond comments were at least nostalgicly conservative. If Frum took umbrage at them, I would take umbrage at Frum. If the lead essayist is correct, Frum is little better than a silly snit, with more impudence than reason, who deserves the comeuppance being applied.

William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site

"If the essayist is correct, and he did try to purge more traditional Conservatives, he is a largely disruptive force, who should be given very little encouragement...."

David Frum doesn't have the power to "purge" anyone. What is he going to do put Pat Buchanan in a gulag? Pat still writes books and he still appears on TV; he hardly seems purged.

If anyone is repsonsible for marginalizing himself it is Pat Buchanan himself. Since the end of the Cold War Pat has taken a series of positions on foreign policy, freed trade, and immigartion that have placed him outside the mainstream of conservative thought. He may be right on these issues but his views are not the mainstream views at the moment.

Trent Lott is a politician and should have been more attuned to what he was saying. Frum's critique of Trent Lott's praise of Strom Thurmond was based upon Lott's own apparent ignorgance, based on what on Lott said about it afterwards, of what Thurmond's State's Rights Party advocated in the 1948 election. For a politician such tone deafness and outright ignorance is inexcusable.

Mr Zmiak's article about Frum strikes me as armchair psychoanalysis. It is always better to criticize someone's ideas; it is arrogant to impute motives to someone at such an arms length basis.

Frum is published in National Review, has a best-selling book on Dubya, and is being criticized by the ultra-eccentric Rockwell website crowd who include Raimondo who manages to be both red and lavender simultaneously. Some comeuppance! We should all suffer so! I am not normally a Frum enthusiast but when he is right, he is right!

I understand that Raimondo writes part-time for Pravda, that's the real Pravda, the one in Moscow, ummm not renowned for holding, ummm, conservative views or tolerating them. If you review his craven columns on his Antiwar.com website, it is pretty obvious that he is a phony if he claims to be part of the right. If Raimondo wants to reclaim any movement it would be one where his allies will be George McGovern and CPUSA and the Lambda Legal Defense Fund or perhaps the Rockford Institute and not anything cognizeably conservative.

War is a justifiable exercise of statecraft (even against Saddamites who steal your children to force you to shoot American soldiers by threatening to kill the kids if you don't), whether Justine likes it or not. If Zmirak (who was and probably still is a fine, principled and often misguided young man who is motivated by his idea of Catholicism) met Justine he would flee in terror.

Trent Lott is mixed up with "paleoconservatives" like the atheist Sam Francis, fired by the Washington Times for addressing Holocaust Denial groups favorably. Francis now earns his daily bread editing the monthly rag of the "Conservative Citizens' Council" in Missouri, the lineal descendant of the White Citizen's Council of Mississippi of which Lott's uncle is a leader. Lott contributed a monthly column. As many have noted here, Lott was also a spineless wimp as Majority Leader and good riddance to bad trash as Dr. Frist is far better regardless of any remarks by Lott, who is so dim that he could not remember who the other candidates were in 1948 whom Strom stood against.

Racism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, homosexuality, eccentricity, curmudgeonliness, utter obsolescence of views circa 1935, isolationist neo-ostrichism, a few snobby tastes shared with the culturati, terminal nerdiness and a willingness to associate with an antiwar neo-Americong that includes International A.N.S.W.E.R, the National Lawyers' Guild, Ramsey Clark, Michael Gun-grabbing Moore and the usual gang of anti-American suspects is not the description that first comes to mind when one hears the word "conservative." And, hopefully, it never will.

Frum is attacking the Rockford Institute in a city near me. Access their website: Chroniclesmagazine.com and read for yourself the looney tune ramblings offered in the column "Hard Right" by the eccentric in chief, Tom Fleming. Special prizes for anyone who can find two correct assertions in his scribblings on the outhouse wall.

Pro-Serbian instead of pro-American, he writes in a recent column that France ought not be criticized by mere Americans (yahoos that we are) because France is a far greater country than ever America will be (puts away full barf bag and returns to keyboard) and that it is a lie that we bailed them out in WWII (and I think he also said WWI, but check for yourself the column America's Flailing Francophiles).

Fleming also doubts the crimes of Milosevic (not that we should have intervened there but Milosevic's status as a second generation communist boss does not phase Fleming in the slightest since Milosevic is anti-American and therefore an ally unlike Bill Buckley or the late Frank Meyer or Norman Podhoretz or William Kristol or the late James Burnham or anyone associated with National Review. Also, Joe McCarthy, according to Fleming, was no more than a drunken lout who (read any leftist attack to fill in the rest) ruined people's reputations as sensitive intellectuals without scruple.

As Frum pointed out in his article, Fleming has brought his mini-magazine all the way from a readership of 20,000 in 1987 to a readership of 5,000 today as he advances ever deeper into Serbophilian inanity. Can anyone come up with a single reason why any-non-Serbian grownup cares a feather or a fig over Serbia? Serbia? He should get a life. At that rate, his dimwitted anti-American magazine and Institute will be gone in about five more years and not a moment too soon. Buh-bye!!!!