[ggekko]

"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.

[Ohioan]

While I do not agree with some of your comments, the most striking thing to me is how much your tone appears to differ from that of the man you would defend. There is another Frum piece posted today, an essay by the fellow himself, and his tone is very different than your more reflective one.

I do not know how you can, however, even seek to define the mainstream of "Conservative thought." We have never been a monolithic movement. Different Conservatives will focus more on conserving one thing or another. We need each other, whenever we can get a group of us concentrated on one fight, but the identification with preserving heritage cannot be seen in quite the same tactical light with identification with one of the specific movements bent upon destroying heritage and replacing it with something different.

Pat Buchanan's dissent from the Republican Party after 1996 does not marginalize Pat except from the standpoint of being a likely Republican candidate in the near future. I will grant you that he is not that--not after the fourth party run. Frankly, more Republicans--as well as most Conservative Democrats and independents--are more in agreement with Pat than they are with the Administration on Immigration. Admittedly, his trade policies are those that were discredited in the Depression of the Thirties, and are contrary to the historic views of at least one major body of the American tradition. But that does not mean they cannot be rationally discussed, without acrimony that disrupts our abilities to work together on most of the other issues with which Pat and the rest of us agree.

I think that you are being too kind with Trent, in one sense. He knew exactly what he was saying at the birthday party, and there was nothing wrong with what he was saying. He simply panicked when someone decided to make an issue of it. Had he handled the hoopla with firm good humor, he would not have been shot down. His flip-flopping all over the map was the worst possible response.

But the significant point is, whom is this Frum to suggest that Southernors may not express nostalgia over the past--especially at a birthday party in honor of the man, who probably more than any other, has made the more conservative outlook in Federal politics in recent decades possible. If Frum does not understand what Strom Thurmond did for the Conservative cause between 1964 and his retirement, it is Frum who is ignorant.

William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site -