Free Republic

My new book White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement places conservatism within the big picture of modern American history. The book traces the origins of modern conservatism to the 1920s. It explains why conservativism triumphed in the late twentieth century and why it is has fallen into disarray under the leadership of President George W. Bush. The review of my book in the New York Times by former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum shows that at least some diehard defenders of the Bush administration do not wish to enter into in a serious conversation about...

In Saudi Arabia, the government refused to allow the question to be asked at all. Pro-American feeling does not necessarily translate into pro-American action. People across Western Europe mourned the 9/11 attack. But a Gallup poll conducted the week after 9/11 found that only 29% of the French, 21% of Italians, 18% of the British, 17% of Germans and 12% of Spaniards supported military action against countries that harboured terrorists. Iraq is not the reason that NATO has trouble persuading European governments to send troops to fight in Afghanistan. Anti-American feeling is often an artefact of propaganda. Anti-Americanism becomes stronger...

David Frum on Scott McClellan's new book: George Bush got the team he deserved Posted: May 30, 2008, 3:47 PM by Marni Soupcoff David Frum Except maybe for MSNBC’s wild-eyed commentator Keith Olbermann, nobody in politics or media seems to have a good word to say for Scott McClellan, the former George W. Bush press secretary turned ferocious Bush critic. The right complains of McClellan's disloyalty. The left complains that McClellan’s change of heart arrived too late. The old Washington hands shake their heads at a press secretary writing a book at all: FDR’s and Eisenhower’s men took their secrets...

Mystery solved. On Sept. 6 of last year, Israeli warplanes struck a facility in the deserts of eastern Syria. The Israelis refused to explain what they had hit or why. The Syrians immediately bulldozed the site to block all further investigation. The U.S. government acknowledged the attack but declined otherwise to comment. And the world was left to speculate. On Thursday, the Bush administration at last confirmed what had long been rumored: The Syrian facility was indeed a nuclear plant. The plant followed the same design as the Yongbyon plant in North Korea, and North Korean engineers and workers had...

What the hell is going on in Basra? According to the major media outlets in New York and London, the answer is: a major defeat for U.S. and British policy in Iraq. This is how the well-regarded Michael Gordon of The New York Times reported the story: "…Mr. Maliki overestimated his military's abilities and underestimated the scale of the resistance. The Iraqi prime minister also displayed an impulsive leadership style that did not give his forces or that of his most powerful allies, the American and British military, time to prepare. " 'He went in with a stick and he...

David Frum might not be every conservative's cup of tea. But un-fans of John McCain will find plenty to like in Frum's biting analysis of the Republican front-runner. The former Bush speechwriter and author of Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again, was a guest on this evening's Tucker. View video here.

If you listened only to talk radio, you might not realize that behind the conservative ascendancy were some powerful intellectual ideas, honed by political thinkers such as David Frum. They were the people who gave direction to the “Reagan Revolution,” but they had been disappointed by George H.W. Bush and had been stymied by the political skills of Bill Clinton. And they expected the world of George W. Bush. In George W. Bush, they felt they had a pure Republican, an untrammeled conservative – a man who would make America respected abroad and rich at home. As Newt Gingrich, the...

No Nukes, No War By David Frum December 12, 2007 America's new intelligence estimate on Iran changes nothing--and it changes everything. Last week, the Bush administration released large portions of its latest National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on the Iranian nuclear program. The NIE concluded that Iran had shut down its nuclear weapons program in 2003. The NIE cautioned that there remained much to worry about. Iran could revive its weapons program at any time. And Iran continues to enrich uranium to levels that could serve as the fuel for a nuclear weapon. Still, the NIE went far to lift the...

Since the 1960s, conservatives have chafed and seethed against liberal elitism. Liberals have used their influence in the courts and government bureaucracies to win political victories they never could have won at the ballot box. Conservatives have reacted by turning to populism -- to a defence of the commonsense wisdom of ordinary voters against the pretensions of know-it-alls. Conservatives have drawn strength from populism. But you can overdo any good thing --and I am beginning to think that on this one, we've zoomed the car into the red zone. For me, the lights started flashing in 2005, during the battle...

Mr Frum is a former speechwriter of President Bush and currently adviser of presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani. I contacted author David Frum today and he wrote to me that he thought America won't attack Iran in 2008. He didn't elaborate much, because he was "pressed for time" but I thought if Frum thinks Bush won't do it, there is little chance Bush will do anyway. Bad news, folks... Bush has just become a dove and Israel is in danger.

The prevailing assumption is that the tapes were destroyed to conceal harsh CIA interrogation methods. Gerald Posner suggests another possible explanation: Re the breaking news that the CIA destroyed the videotapes of interrogations with 2 terror suspects, you might have seen that the tapes of the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah were destroyed. You might also recall that in my 2003 NYT bestseller (reached #2), Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11, my last chapter was titled, "The Interrogation." Based on two active US intelligence sources, I was the first to disclose Zubaydah's interrogation. To date, I am the only...

Just when we thought we'd seen the back of one axis of evil, up pops another one to give us all sleepless nights. The original axis of evil, as defined by President George W Bush in his State of the Union address in January 2002, consisted of Iraq, Iran and North Korea. In fact, this axis was always an unlikely amalgam, conjured from the imagination of David Frum, the President's chief speechwriter at the time, who was casting around for a suitably demonic phrase to capture the gravity of the threat America was said to face from its combined enemies...

As a political strategist, Karl Rove offered a brilliant answer to the wrong question. The question he answered so successfully was a political one: How could Republicans win elections after Bill Clinton steered the Democrats to the center? The question he unfortunately ignored was a policy question: What does the nation need — and how can conservatives achieve it? Mr. Rove answered his chosen question by courting carefully selected constituencies with poll-tested promises: tax cuts for traditional conservatives; the No Child Left Behind law for suburban moderates; prescription drugs for anxious seniors; open immigration for Hispanics; faith-based programs for evangelicals...

Imagine you are running Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. You start with some great advantages: a smart and knowledgeable candidate, twice elected by the voters of the nation's third-biggest state. She wears one of the most famous names in American politics: the most popular name among Democrats. She is a prodigious fundraiser, works hard and the very idea of her candidacy inspires large numbers of women voters. On the other hand, your candidate is also one of the most polarizing figures in American life. She is a dreadful speaker: boring, grating, often condescending. The left wing of her own party despises...

I also began to learn that you could hardly name a social problem without discovering that immigration was aggravating it to the point of unsolvability. Health insurance? Immigrants accounted for about one-quarter of the uninsured in the early 1990s, and about one-third of the increase in the uninsured population at that time. Social spending? The Urban Institute estimated in 1994 that educating the children of illegal aliens cost the State of California almost $1.5 billion per year. Wage pressure on the less-skilled? The wages of less-skilled Americans had come under ferocious pressure since 1970. How could you even begin to...

Editor's Note: On Friday, Vanity Fair issued a press release highlighting excerpts of a piece in their January issue on “neoconservative” supporters of the war in Iraq who today, unsurprisingly, have some negative things to say about how the war is going and how the Bush administration has been handling it. In the wake of the press release – which has gotten considerable play on the Internet – some of those “neoconservatives” highlighted in the article have responded to the excerpts and its misrepresentations, in some cases, of what they said. We collect some of those reactions — including from...

THE North Korean nuclear test — if that indeed is what it was — signals the catastrophic collapse of a dozen years of American policy. Over that period, two of the world’s most dangerous regimes, Pakistan and North Korea, have developed nuclear weapons and the missiles to launch them. Iran, arguably the most dangerous of them all, will surely follow, unless some dramatic action is soon taken. It is, alas, an iron law of modern diplomacy that the failure of any diplomatic process only proves the need for more of the process that has just failed. Thus those who have...

Sep. 29, 2006: A Deal With Iran? What follows is not reporting. It is not a leak. It is informed speculation - informed in part by stories like this one and this one . That acknowledged, let me venture a prediction:Sometime in the next 6 to 12 months, there will be laid on President Bush's desk a draft agreement between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran. My guess: the agreement will contain terms more or less along the following lines: 1) Iran will indefinitely suspend its uranium enrichment program. Such a term will be easy for Iran...

This was a week of clever manoeuvres. First, George Bush announced that he would at last bring the captured 9/11 plotters to trial by military commission -- if Congress would give him the authority to do so. That puts Democrats in Congress in a very awkward spot. The voters will want justice executed; the Democrats' key constituencies and big donors are calling the commissions "kangaroo courts." Then, Senator John McCain (the presumptive front-runner for the Republican nomination) revealed his trick: He immediately produced his own version of the President's bill -- but one calculated to appeal more to Democrats and...

Has a Washington scandal ever ended with a more anti-climactic splat than the Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson affair? This week it was at last fully and finally confirmed that it was former deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage who had leaked the name of CIA agent Valerie Plame. Put like that, the story sounds pretty bare. So let me put it another way. Imagine that Ken Starr's investigation had concluded that Monica Lewinsky had made the whole thing up -- and that it was established beyond all possible doubt that at the very moment Monica claimed she was experiencing ecstasy in...