"Writing is a skill, not a talent, and thus one's ability as a writer can be improved by thoughtful effort. The problem with some people is that they graduate college as good writers, experience early success on account of that, and thus never devote themselves diligently to the relentless quest for improvement that could make them great writers."
For the record, the floozy has denied the Enquirer story, but who can trust a floozy to tell the truth? More disturbing is the possibility that the golf champion took a mulligan on his wedding vows to Swedish beauty Elin Nordegren.
My advice to you, Tiger? Plead insanity. Because you'd have to be crazy to cheat on her.
Even though those nude photos turned out to be a hoax (we pride ourselves on careful research here), Elin's still a genuine Swedish super-model, not to mention the mother of your children.
The Rod Stewart Celebrity Cheating Rule applies here: If you're going to cheat on a Swedish super-model, it's got to be at least an equal exchange, and a notorious floozy is way below the acceptable exhange rate for Swedish super-models.
Stick with the insanity defense, Tiger. Your car accident? That was obviously a cry for help. This is a good time to reference one of the most inspirational scenes in American motion picture history:
Otter: I'll tell you what. We'll tell Fred you were doing a great job taking care of his car, but you parked it out back last night and in the morning, it was gone. We report it to the police, your brother's insurance company buys him a new car. D-Day takes care of the wreck. Flounder: Will that work? Otter: Hey, it's gotta work better than the truth. Bluto: My advice to you is to start drinking heavily. Otter: Better listen to him, Flounder, he's in pre-med.
UPDATE:David Frum laments that cable TV news doesn't talk about serious issues. As if the possibility of Tiger Woods cheating on sexy Elin Nordegren wasn't a serious issue. And as if cable TV news could survive without celebrity sex scandals.
It is elitism to suppose that political news is the only news worth reporting. As a professional journalist, I've always appreciated the New York Post, which mixes real political reporting with garish celebrity tabloid news. Why does that work? Rule 5(B) explains it:
All politics all the time gets boring after a while. . . . Even a stone political junkie cannot subsist on a 24/7 diet of politics. The occasional joke, the occasional hot babe, the occasional joke about a hot babe -- it's a safety valve to make sure we don't become humorless right-wing clones of those Democratic Underground moonbats.
UPDATE IV:Left Coast Rebel tries to cash in on the Google-bomb action. He raises an important question: Did the pressures of fame cause Tiger to stray? I doubt it. Tiger had been world-famous for several years when he married Elin in 2004.
A more likely scenario: The routine of marriage began to feel uncomfortably repetitive to the popular bachelor who had become accustomed to swinging his club freely on the world's finest courses. IYKWIMAITYD.
Tiger Woods certainly wouldn't be the first hubby who, after a few years of golfing the same par-4 over and over, couldn't resist an invitation to tee off on another fairway. At which point, Mrs. Woods decided to remind him of that "death do us part" vow by going upside his head with a 5 iron.
Let's hope this attitude adjustment had the desired effect. Remember, Tiger: She's got a kitchen full of knives, and you've got to sleep sometime.
Sullivan got over his unrequited Dubya man-crush, and maybe his current see-no-evil attitude toward Israel's enemies will fade if Sullivan discovers that his new presidential idol also has feet of clay. So while I have called Sullivan a menace to society and advocated his deportation, he's probably not a Holocaust denier or a peddler of blood libel.
My friend Dan Riehl called attention to this accusation against Sullivan, by way of firing a shot at Conor Friedersdorf. I've fired my share of shots at Conor, but I certainly would never accuse him of Jew-hating. The extremely toxic nature of the "anti-Semite" label is such that I am extremely hesitant to apply it.
Consider the case of Taki Theodoracopulos, for example. Taki has been called an anti-Semite so often that some people accept the accusation at face value. But when National Review published David Frum's "Unpatriotic Conservatives" -- one of many ill-advised editorial decisions in the erratic career of Rich Lowry -- Taki responded in memorable fashion:
If this bum Frum thinks he's the only one who cannot see a belt without hitting below it, he's got another thing coming. . . . He is a cheap Canadian careerist who jumped on the neocon bandwagon and is now using anti-Semitism as a stick to beat us with. Mind you, to be called "unpatriotic" and an "anti-Semite" by this shameless publicity hound has to be a compliment.
Because Taki is independently wealthy, he has no need to fear that his career will be damaged by these accusations, and so he seldom even bothers to notice the charges and only rarely responds to them. This has, unfortunately, resulted in Taki's name being used -- as my own name has sometimes been used -- as a sort of Rosetta Stone that allows liberal mind-readers to decrypt the otherwise Secret Code Of Hate that allegedly unites the Right.
This business of liberals trying to tell conservatives who is "acceptable" has bothered me for years, and I don't like it any better when conservatives play the same game. Despite Frum's misguided centrist tendencies, for example, I have risked my populist street-cred by continuing to be his friend (unlike David Brooks, who is the Living Embodiment Of All Things Unholy.) If I can be Frum's friend, shall I allow him to say that Taki is "unacceptable"?
My own indirect connection with Taki has horrified some of my friends, though the explanation is innocent enough. A couple years ago, I was invited to speak about media bias in a panel discussion of the Duke lacrosse rape hoax, where Duke graduate student Richard Spencer was one of my fellow panelists. Spencer subsequently became editor of Taki's Magazine.
Did I fear the accusation that, by publishing at Taki's Magazine, I was thereby endorsing the alleged anti-Semitism of Taki or some of his magazine's other contributors? Of course not. My philo-Semitic bona fides are so impregnable that I rather suspect Taki and Spencer have caught more grief than I have: "How dare you publish that Jew-loving Zionist fanatic?"
My Zionist fanaticism -- Netanyahu is a pacifist squish by comparison -- once led me to advance a bit of strategic military advice for the IDF, a war-game scenario contingent upon the hypothetical event of my becoming the first Gentile prime minister of Israel.
You might suppose that a thought-experiment so farfetched would be immune to misinterpretation -- as fools often misinterpret hypotheticals -- as wishful thinking, but you would be wrong. Andrew Sullivan gave me a Malkin Award nomination (my third such honor, though I may have lost count) and Sully has subsequently accused me of advocating genocide of the Palestinians.
"Peace Through Genocide" might be profitably marketed as the title of a comic novel by Chris Buckley, or as one of those ironic T-shirt slogans beloved by clever university students, but it clearly has shortcomings as a serious policy proposal.
It should therefore be unnecessary for me to deny that I am advocate of Palestinian genocide but, alas, there is the problem of the irony-impaired Andrew Sullivan, who has spent 15 months fomenting bizarre speculations about Sarah Palin's uterus. To be accused of genocidal hatred by such a notorious fool is an accusation that requires no denial.
Having been slimed by Sully for the indulgence of a far-fetched hypothetical, let me take another wild risk:
If Conor Friedersdorf were a wealthy Greek shipping magnate, so that he could speak his mind without fear of career repercussion, what would he say about Jews?
Nothing bad, I hope, and so I gladly stipulate that Conor Friedersdorf is no more a Jew-hater than Taki.
Or Pat Buchanan. Or Joe Sobran. Or Paul Gottfried. IYKWIMAITYD. Nudge, nudge. Wink, wink.
Welch has claimed that he and Breitbart are merely "friends," while insinuating that "respectable news outlets" should avoid the brewing imbroglio. However, the Enquirer can now reveal that there is new proof of other furtive right-wing rendezvous . . . Breitbart (left) with Stephen Hayes (far right) of the neocon Weekly Standard. The mysterious figure in the center has yet to be positively identified.
Enquirer sources say Welch has been known to cavort at parties with girls barely out of their teens. Welch (left) with a 20-year-old named McCain (far right). Breitbart's association with young girls is also notorious, as he is alleged to have used 20-year-old Hannah Giles in a scheme to secure non-profit funding to import South American teen prostitutes to work for infamous pimp, James O'Keefe. Miss Giles may also have other connections to the Welch/Breitbart neocon conspiracy, as shown by this stunning new Enquirer photo . . . Left to far-right: Neoconservative author David Frum, Hannah Giles, nefarious right-wing operatives Tom Qualtere and Sergio Gor, and Lynn Vincent, infamous collaborator with Sarah Palin.
Furthermore, while it has been alleged by Kejda Germani that the woman in this photo is, in fact, married to the arch-conspirator Breitbart, the mysterious man shown with her (far right) has yet to be positively identified. He is, however, reputed to be an extremely social conservative.
The Enquireris devoted to bringing you exclusive coverage of this emerging scandal that "respectable news outlets" refuse to touch . . . .
I've been thinking lately that conservative elites are reaching a moment similar to that which confronted liberal elites in the late 1960s. At first they saw the rise of SDS, the Black Panthers and other extreme left groups as cannon fodder that could be used to achieve liberal goals. . . . But one day liberals realized that the extremists couldn't be controlled and threatened anarchy. . . . I think conservative elites today see the teabaggers, birthers and other kooks as cannon fodder for larger conservative goals the same way liberals originally saw student radicals in the 1960s. I think one day soon something like the Harvard library burning is going to make conservatives realize that these people present more of a threat than a tool for advancing conservative goals. . . . [Y]ou can’t pour fuel on the fires of peoples' emotions the way Glenn Beck does on a daily basis without getting an explosion at some point.
Hey, Bruce, I love hyperbolic analogies as much as the next guy, but . . . nah. Bill Ayers and Mark Rudd were never TV stars. They were not leaders of a populist mass movement.
The New Left was almost entirely a rebellion by spoiled brats, the impudent offspring of the elite. The anti-war radicals weren't even a majority of college students in the '60s, much less a majority of the entire Baby Boom generation.
Taxpayers raising hell at congressional town halls are not the same as 19-year-old punks burning draft cards. The Tea Party movement is not the new "Mobe" and Birthers aren't the Merry Pranksters.
In general, the Left is not the Right. It is therefore an error when the Left supposes that Howard Dean was their Goldwater and Obama is their Reagan, just as it is an error to confuse Sean Hannity's "Freedom Concerts" with Woodstock. At some point, the fundamental differences overwhelm the superficial similarities.
But thanks for giving conservative bloggers an excuse to link The New Majority. (C'mon, Dave, denounce me, buddy. "Unserious" is a good place to start. And inarguably accurate, too. But a full-out flame-war would be good for both of us.)
It's been seven months since Frum parted ways with National Review to launch his own website -- NewMajority.com -- in an effort to rally new voices and cure the Republican Party of its "psychotic episode." It's a long-term project that's fighting against the tide. ... On a practical level, the Internet is proving to be a little more complicated than Frum first thought it would be, he says. He admits to shortcomings in his Web acumen, and NewMajority.com has already undergone a redesign since it went online. The site has gotten about 800,000 unique visitors. By comparison, the conservative site Townhall.com receives 2 million unique visitors per month.
Well, what does David Copperfield have to do with politics or policy? Nothing, except maybe as a pretty solid argument for tort reform when a show business superstar gets sued after inviting a beauty-pageant contestant to his own private tropical island.
However, my point is, people who don't normally read political news might be interested in what you have to say about "Jon and Kate Plus Eight," Donald Trump or Miley Cyrus. And even people who are interested in political news sometimes get bored with all-politics-all-the-time. So if you can find some pretext to criticize these tabloid-TV people -- "Will ObamaCare Cover Donald Trump's Hair?" -- go for it.
Game the algorithms.
This goes back to the "Carrie Prejean Nude" thing. A certain level of what I call "residual traffic" -- random Google hits produced by Web-surfers searching for some odd phrase and clicking onto your old posts -- will accumulate over time at any site.
However, the clever blogger can inject steroids into his residual traffic by employing certain words -- "nude" and "naked" and "sex" -- that will reliably draw a certain level of 3 a.m. traffic from perverts.
Some have criticized the ethics of getting traffic that way. Ethics, schmethics. If some pervert overly enthusiastic heterosexual wants to see Carrie Prejean nude -- and I'd say nearly 300,000 visitors here in May constitute reliable evidence that this isn't purely a hypothetical scenario -- why should TMZ and Perez Hilton monopolize that traffic?
Maybe some of those perverts overly enthusiastic heterosexuals actually agree with Carrie Prejean's stance in defense of traditional marriage. They may also approve of her silicon breast implants, which I don't, but it would be un-American to stifle dissent on such important issues.
Also, maybe the computer porn freaks will feel a twinge of conscience after their search for topless jailbait pictures of Carrie Prejean lead them to a conservative site. "Why am I wasting my life wanking to porn," the freak asks himself, "when I could become a right-wing blogger and actually make money from my sick obsessions?"
Whether or not this explains the phenomenon of TrogloPundit, I refuse to speculate. But I figure not all porn freaks are into high taxes and bad foreign policy, so maybe if some conservative bloggers are pervertsoverly enthusiastic heterosexuals6-foot-7 Wisconsinians with Megan Fox obsessions . . . well, NTTAWWT. IYKWIMAITYD.
No blog is an island.
This is what the Rule 2 FMJRA is all about. Unless you're Glenn Reynolds (and maybe even if you are Glenn Reynolds) your blog traffic is dependent in great measure on getting other blogs to link you.
"But wait," you say, "people should be linking me because I'm a genius who is always right about everything."
If the only sites you ever link as source material are "legitimate" news sources like the New York Times, the Atlantic Monthly and the Wall Street Journal, where is the incentive for bloggers to link you? Other than the fact that you are a complete genius, I mean.
Install Site Meter, Technorati and E-Referrer, and pay attention to who's linking you. Try to analyze and develop strategic uses for that data. If I hadn't been checking my Site Meter today, I wouldn't have known I'd been linked by Kathy Shaidle, which inspired this whole freaking rant. If you don't work to improve what Moe Lane calls blog-fu, your only source of traffic will be (a) the small universe of Republicans so obsessed with politics they'll read anything, and (b) the occasional "pity-lanche."
Robert Novak was respected and liked by many, and their memories of him are the memories that deserve hearing today. But there is one thing about Robert Novak that I have had in mind for some time, and today seems the appropriate moment to say it. Novak was one of the people I discussed in a still-controversial 2003 article for National Review, “Unpatriotic Conservatives.” That piece analyzed a group of conservatives so radically alienated from their country that not even the events of 9/11 could rally them to her cause. . . .
OK, I'll stop there and if anyone wants to read the rest, they can. But David, do you not see what was wrong with your 2003 article, and what is even more wrong with your untimely defense of it?
First, you did not "discuss" or "analyze" Novak, Buchanan, et al., you attacked them, and in exactly the same manner that liberals have attacked conservatives as far back as Barry Goldwater or even Joe McCarthy.
You did what a friend of mine calls the "Ransom Note Method," cutting and pasting like a kidnapper gluing together words clipped from magazines. You then presented this assemblage as if it constituted a complete file of the essential facts that told us who these men really were.
Nudge, nudge: "They're all Jew-haters!"
Unfair and unfortunate, especially considering that on the issue which was even then being weighed in the balance -- the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq -- their doubts were ultimately vindicated.
'Cakewalks' Have Consequences More than 3,000 U.S. troops died to implement that policy, thousands more were wounded, billions of taxpayer dollars were expended and, while the eradication of Saddam's Ba'athist regime was inarguably a good thing, patriotic Americans may reasonably ask, "Was it really worth the cost?"
The domestic political consequences have included the mobilization of a powerful left-wing grassroots movement, the loss of a congressional majority it had taken Republicans 40 years to gain, and the election of the most left-wing Democrat president in our nation's history. As to the foreign-policy results, we can only speculate what mischief may ensue in however many years it takes for American voters to get their bellyful of liberal misrule and regain their traditional good sense. (Assuming, of course, that the Bush-damaged GOP can yet be salvaged as a workable majority coalition, which is at this point a hypothetical proposition.)
For these multiple woes, then, leading advocates of the Iraq invasion must bear responsibility just as, had the invasion turned out to be the "cakewalk" that Ken Adelman notoriously predicted, its advocates would now be fighting over who should get credit for its success.
While future developments might conceivably lead historians to conclude that the Bush administration's policy was altogether wise and beneficial, as matters stand now, the Iraq invasion bids fair to rank as the most tragic folly of imperial overreach since the Athenian expedition to Sicily in 415 B.C.
How, then, can you possibly consider it "appropriate" on the occasion of Novak's death, to attempt to defend your foolish attack on him and others when even many of the most staunch Republican loyalists -- men and women who defended the Bush administration through thick and thin -- now freely admit that Novak, et al., were right all along?
Say what you will, David, but facts are stubborn things, and the facts are not on your side.
Ex-Democrats and GOP Cliques Let us now leave to future historians to argue the merits of the Iraq invasion, just as Civil War buffs still endlessly argue whether Longstreet or Lee was correct about the tactical situation on July 2, 1863. (Most folks down home derogate Longstreet as a faithless scalawag, but I believe Lee was both sincere and correct when he said he was entirely responsible for that defeat.)
Military considerations aside, then, what of your attempt to smear Novak, along with Buchanan and others both living and dead, with the odious taint of anti-Semitism?
This involves an old intra-Republican feud to which I'd paid little attention before arriving in Washington. Having been a Democrat all my life until 1994 (a story I've told in bits and pieces over the past 18 months, including a thumbnail version at The American Spectator), I little suspected that what I had once dreaded as a mighty Republican monolith was in actuality a middle-school playground of antagonistic cliques.
David Horowitz and Peter Collier have described their own shock, upon leaving their New Left allegiances to support Reagan in the mid-1980s, at discovering the vicious factionalism inside the GOP. To its enemies, the Republican Party inevitably appears to be a carefully managed, well-funded, brutally efficient political machine, staffed entirely by ruthless automatons acting in synchronized lockstep.
This powerful illusion of Republican unity vanishes as soon as, dillusioned by the latest Democratic Party betrayal, the ex-Democrat ventures inside the GOP camp and tries to join up. Immediately, the arriviste finds himself pulled this way and that, urged to pledge his loyalty to one clique, one cause, one ideological posse within the intramural league of Republican rivalries.
Paleo, Neo, Me-o, My-o Little did I suspect, while yet a Democrat, how bitterly Republicans were torn by Operation Desert Storm. While I thrilled at this brilliant military victory that vanquished the Vietnam Syndrome, from my purely political standpoint as a moderate Democrat, that war had the tragic consequence of destroying the presidential hopes of Sam Nunn.
Meanwhile, unknown to me, the GOP faction led by Buchanan had opposed Desert Storm from the beginning. By the nature of the arguments the Buchanan faction made against that war, they left themselves exposed to the charge of anti-Semitism. We might say, as Antony said of the accusation that Caesar was ambitious, "If it were so, it was a grievous fault, and grievously hath Buchanan answer'd it."
As in every previous and subsequent engagement between the paleocons and neocons, the paleos emerged the embittered losers, while the neos went on to new heights of prestige and influence.
However, allow me now to suggest, David, that in the Babylonian debacle that destroyed Karl Rove's "permanent Republican majority," the neocons have now suffered their Philippi.
You cannot recover from this self-inficted disaster, my friend. Whatever the future holds for the GOP, if the Republicans should recapture their Reaganesque mojo, displace the vaunting Pelosi Democrats and roll onward to new glories, I pray that they will never again commit the errors of Bushism, failing to discern wise counsel from folly merely because the fools were clever enough to accuse the wise of crude bigotry.
Plagiarize Yourself Much? Your 2003 "Unpatriotic Conservatives" article that defamed Novak and other critics of the Iraq war -- some of them arguable less innocent than Novak -- was not your first exercise in that sort of attack. I am grateful to my friend Daniel McCarthy for having filled the gap in my knowledge on this score:
While at the [Wall Street] Journal, Frum accepted the freelance assignment that would make his name: a 1991 cover story for The American Spectator attacking Pat Buchanan. The article, "Conservative Bully Boy," described Buchanan as "everything couth conservatives want to escape" and took aim not just at Buchanan himself -- then contemplating a run against George H.W. Bush for the 1992 Republican presidential nomination -- but also at his paleoconservative and libertarian supporters, including Paul Gottfried, Murray Rothbard, and Thomas Fleming, among others. Frum accused Buchanan of "sly Jew-baiting" -- so sly, evidently, that it slipped past Jewish intellectuals Rothbard and Gottfried, but not the ever vigilant Frum. . . . The hit on Buchanan earned Frum a book deal with The New Republic's imprint at Basic Books; indeed, Frum reused much of his material on Buchanan and the paleos for Dead Right's chapter on "Nationalists."
So, a dozen years before your 2003 National Review cover, you had deployed the same theme in the same situation. When America was at war under a Republican president, you denounced conservative critics of the war in a way calculated to inflict maximum damage on their influence. What could be more damaging than the suspicion of anti-Semitism?
It is worth mentioning here that I have various disagreements with Buchanan and some of his supporters. For starters, I am a philo-Semite so staunchly pro-Israel as to make Netanyahu look like a squish. Also, as was true of Novak, I am a resolute free-marketeer who has no use for tariffs, labor unionism, and other such economic deviations to which the Buchananites are sadly prone. (I admit an uncouth nostalgia for the gold standard, but some Austrian School friends assure me that this is actually quite orthodox.)
Despite these various disagreements, however, I cannot bring myself to say that Buchanan and his followers are evil. Nor, in the grand scheme of things, would I consider their support for the Republican Party a net liability to the GOP. If you take a look at the Tea Party crowds and townhall "angry mobs" now striking terror in Democratic hearts, they look a lot more like Buchananites than Frumians.
All of which is to say, as I look at the conservative movement going forward, I think we have seen an end to the era when populists and traditionalists -- Bradford, Sobran, Brimelow, etc. -- would periodically be scapegoated and purged to maintain the standard of "respectability" necessary to sustain the support of a tiny clique of highbrow elitists.
We Don't Need No Stinkin' Elitists! No more of that. From here on out -- and I think I speak now for a very broad consensus of conservative opinion -- we're rolling like the Hell's Angels on a Labor Day weekend run to Monterrey. If this flagrant contempt for elite opinion causes panic among the effete snobs at the Wall Street Journal, if it offends the tender sensibilities of gentle souls like Peggy Noonan, David Brooks and Rich Lowry -- well, screw them.
And in an ironic way, David, you have helped make possible the new bad-boy conservatism of the future. Let's list a few names of those you have denounced in recent months:
Having done your best to alienate the widest possible swath of conservatives -- thinking that Obama's popularity would justify a purge of those clamorous talk-radio types -- you now deem the occasion of Novak's demise "appropriate" to revisit your old grudge against conservative critics of the Iraq war.
Alas, no one important to the GOP's future is listening to you now. If your conservative credibility were a bank, David, the FDIC would shut it down. So far as any ability to influence rank-and-file conservative Republicans is concerned, you're as bankrupt as Kathleen Parker.
What really makes your renewed ax-grinding against Novak's ghost so risible, David, is your accusation that Novak and friends were "so radically alienated from their country that not even the events of 9/11 could rally them to her cause."
David: You're Canadian.
Case closed. Court adjourned. You are remanded to the custody of Judge Ann Coulter for sentencing.
He is one of the most loyal contributors that The American Spectator has ever had. Some who have written for us never let it be known in their bios lest they give offense to polite company. Bob never hid his relationship with us and mentions it often in his stupendously informative memoir, The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years Reporting in Washington. . . . He served on our Board of Directors, never flinching when the government haled us before a grand jury or when and the Clintonistas infiltrated into the media tales of our treasonous behavior. During all this hullabaloo I innocently asked Bob what the mainstream journalists thought of us. The mortar fire was pretty heavy. "They think you're obnoxious," he responded. Gee, Bob have a heart! He actually did have a heart and a strong conscience. On the one matter that temporarily ended our friendship he was proved wrong or at least sort of wrong. When that became apparent to him he suggested we dine and smoke the peace pipe. He admitted he had been wrong. I insisted that he had only been a bit wrong. Our friendship was renewed. In all my years as an editor I have only known one other acquaintance to come forward and admit to being wrong. And again, Bob was only sort of wrong, but he had the self-confidence to admit error. He also had the intellect and general competence to fall into error rarely.
Read the whole thing. Meanwhile, Mr. Tyrrell's indefatiguable right-hand man, Wlady Pleszczynski, posts this video tribute: Special note to David Frum: I noticed your most recent e-mail in my inbox but, due to my chronic e-mail overflow (which my intern has promised to fix as soon as he returns from his holiday jaunt to Florida), it was auto-deleted before I had a chance to read it.
Please don't take a non-reply, or the reiteration of my criticisms, as unfriendly gestures. I still want to be your friend, but your relentless ax-grinding against the paleos and populists is passed its sell-by date. I have done what I can to try to persuade my paleo friends to relinquish their own ax-grinding, and intend to do more in that direction.
However, if there is to be a "New Majority" -- a conservatism that can win again, as you say -- it cannot be built on the basis of an elitist disdain for those unruly grassroots activists. Majority coalitions are not built by a process of subtraction, which is what your anti-populist agenda represents. The fact that Bill Kristol continues to say nice things about Sarah Palin should be a warning signal of how badly you're isolating yourself.
I'll be in town Thursday, if you'd like to upbraid me in person for this criticism.
It was Novak's criticism of the Bush administration's Iraq policy, and especially his agreement with Buchanan on that subject, that earned him inclusion in David Frum's notorious 2003 catalog of "Unpatriotic Conservatives." Since then, Frum has gone on to attack others, including Mark Levin. . . . As a result of the Bush policy -- and the rhetoric that attended the political defense of that policy -- every consideration of the U.S. position in the Middle East became a crude referendum on anti-Semitism, so that all dissenters were suspected of being closet Jew-haters in "unpatriotic" allegiance with terrorists. This Manichean rhetorical escalation was both unfortunate and unjust, even if some of the dissenters (including Buchanan) had unwisely given their critics ammunition with which to arm accusations of mala fides. When discussions of policy become clouded by such damaging insinuations, when disagreement is cited as evidence of moral inferiority -- can anyone but a child molester be worse than an anti-Semite? -- then honest discussion becomes impossible. . . . Today, of course, Novak can no longer be harmed by accusations that he, born at Jew, was guilty of aiding and abetting anti-Semites. Whatever his faults and errors, Bob Novak now awaits the judgment of a higher authority than David Frum. Let us pray that Frum will now pause to consider that he, too, shall one day be judged by the same authority.
Last night, I got a message from a veteran conservative communications professional, a friend who on Friday had tried to contact me about Frum's attack on Levin. Over the weekend, my attention had been consumed by other news, and so I had not responded to an earlier e-mail.
Nothing is more harmful to the legacy of Ronald Reagan than when a conservative, engaged in good-faith discussions of politics and policy, is publicly accused of dangerous malice, immorality or irresponsibility by another who purports similarly to revere the worthy cause to which Reagan dedicated his life.
Frum's attack on Levin was such an occasion, as was his "Unpatriotic Conservatives" article that attacked Novak and others. If a colleague in the conservative cause has erred in judgment, he should certainly expect criticism. Yet Frum has so clearly crossed a line -- and crossed it more than once -- that I wish he would entertain the hypothetical possibility that he has himself made errors of judgment.
Our nation is now in circumstances too desperate for good men to be silent while sincere conservatives like Mark Levin (who did honorable service under Ed Meese in the Reagan administration) are repeatedly and unfairly maligned by others who profess also to be conservatives.
"You describe yourself as a calm conservative. But you have certainly aroused those to your right in the Republican Party. You know, talk show hosts like Mark Levin have come after you saying you're kneecapping your own. What about that?"
To which Frum replied:
"Look, a lot of the conservative movement in this country is conducting itself in a way that is tremendously destructive. Both of the basic constitutional compact of the requirements of good faith and of their own good sense. I mean, when you were going on the air and calling the President of the United States a Nazi as Rush Limbaugh has repeatedly done. When Mark Levin -- you mentioned him - he said the President of the United States is literally at war with the American people. And then people begin, unsurprisingly, showing up at rallies with guns. It's just outrageous. It is dangerous. It's dangerous for the whole constitutional system."
Really, David. Was that necessary? Talk radio is "dangerous for the whole constitutional system"? Like you're the second coming of James Madison?
And while we're at it: How come Bill Moyers and Jim Lehrer never ask Rush Limbaugh or Mark Levin to come on their shows? Am I the only person who gets tired of seeing these third-person references to famous people who, I suppose, would be available for interviews when they are slanderously accused of fomenting assassination attempts?
The question is whether Ace was askin' for it, struttin' around in lipstick and tight jeans like a whore.
Oh, yeah. We know the story: Frum was just chillin' in his center-right Republican dorm room with a bit of herb, some cold malt liquor, watching ESPN with his moderate posse.
Knock, knock, knock -- "It's me, Ace." The sultry little minx wants to hang out with the homies, drinking a few of Frum's 40s. Starts doing the tease routine, talking sexy about "electability" and "pragmatism." Yadda yadda. Ba-da-bing. Et cetera.
Next morning, Ace runs off crying to the campus medical center claiming he said "no" (ah, but his eyes said "yes"), and before you can say "presumed innocent," there's a Take Back the Night candelight vigil with chants and posters and . . .
What? Too lurid, Ace? Am I "blaming the victim"? Is the trauma induced by your ordeal still a raw wound? Perhaps you'd prefer soothing poetry:
Ace and David, Sittin' in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G
I could roll that way. (Outlaw!) But once I whip out my big thick analogy like this, I gotta go all the way.
I don't blame Frum for taking what he wants, seeing as how Ace was obviously so willing to give it up. The problem is this I'm-not-that-kind-of-girl victim act on Ace's part.
Like I said, I've got no problem with cocktail parties. That's just coalition politics, an obligatory ritual like the high school prom. Laura Ingraham and Mark Krikorian were there as chaperones, just in case things got out of hand. (Some conservatives have one too many glasses of that reserve pinot and start stumbling around, badmouthing NRA and Club For Growth like a whore.)
Oh, we all saw it coming. Signing that Coulter petition was like showing up for your date in a tube top and a mini-skirt, an unmistakable advertisement that you were ready for some action. Ace, you were like that stupid tramp in Colorado who thought she could just "fool around a little" with an NBA superstar and that Kobe Bryant would stop exactly where she said stop. A lesson learned the hard way, so to speak.
Now, Friedersdorf is accusing conservatives of trying to "purge" you, Ace. If that's what Hawkins or anyone else is up to, count me out.
I've had my bad moments, too, so I have empathy, like Sotomayor.
Ace, what I'm saying is that you made an error of judgment for which you are responsible, like that chubby freshman girl who arrives early at the Teke open-house party, starts right in on the tequila and doesn't stop until the pledges are lined up down the hall waiting to take their turns.
But why bring Meghan McCain into this?
My point is that if Ace is a dirty slut, he's our dirty slut. We don't blame Frum and Friedersdorf for wanting to do a three-way and then hand him off to David Brooks, David Letterman, David Gergen, David Brock, David Hasselhof, David Copperfield . . . but again, why bring Meghan McCain into this?
Ace knows what he is, and we respect what he is, insofar as he is at least honest enough to admit that he has these unfortunate tendencies to be "center-right," a weakness for "pragmatic" arguments about "electability."
What it ignores is the original folly of making Philadelphia-on-the-Tigris the focal point of Republican electoral strategy. You can get away with that kind of blunder for a while, especially when the Democrats are content to nominate a guaranteed loser like John Kerry and rely on the strategic advice of Bob Shrum.
Karl Rove got his winning reputation too easily. The fundamental flaws in the policy/politics formula of Bushism were exposed just as soon as the Democrat grassroots used the Internet to organize a coup against their clueless leaders, installing Howard Dean at the DNC and putting Rahm Emanuel in charge of their congressional campaign.
However, the flaws of Bushism were there all along: The GOP cannot build an enduring majoritarian coalition on the basis of overseas adventures, nebulous domestic "triangulation" and a rhetoric of symbolic appeals to patriotism. If Bushism appeared to work for a while, that was mainly because Democratic leaders were out of touch with, and therefore incapable of effectively organizing, the grassroots resentment that the Kos/MoveOn axis saw as the natural fulcrum upon which to leverage a strategy of direct opposition (as opposed to an absurd DLC "Me-Too-ism") to the Bush agenda.
Never mind. t I don't want to discuss that now. What I want to do is to ask a question: Surely the "Mindy" who writes this is not Mindy Finn?
Clarify, Conor.
UPDATE II: Ace just e-mailed to say that "Mindy" is not Mindy Finn, so excuse my throwing that name out there. She just happened to be the only Republican named Mindy who came to mind. I'll await further information. This poison-pen stuff -- trashing an entire political movement in an e-mail exchange and then allowing the exchange to be published with only "Mindy" as identifying one half of the exchange -- is bad business.
Bill Whittle interviews Frum, who is certainly articulate and intelligent. Frum is also pitching a web site. Whittle's chat covers the impact of the Sanford scandal with respect to the 2012 election. There is also much interesting discussion about leadership, or lack thereof, amongst conservatives. The New Majority website appears slickly designed and well staffed. Note the picture of the original Progressive, Theodore Roosevelt at the top of the page. As Ancient Commenter Solomon might have said of Progressives,
There is a way that seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof [are] the ways of death. Pro 16:25
While certainly standing for a few good things, e.g. women's sufferage, modern Progressivism seems subverted by the Modern Liberal mindset. In the discussion between the individual and society, Progressives seem to take for granted that the 50 states are moot, and only the Federal government matters. One wants to hear Frum talk about the 10th Amendment as meaningful, about the 16 Amendment as evil, but he seems to have conceded that we have a centrist government driven by single personalities, rather than 50 States United running on Constitutional principles. He is articulate, and has a fine understanding of the tactics of the current political situation. I have the same problem with him that I have with Conor Friedersdorf, however: Frum seems to be fighting on ground of enemy choosing, which most winning generals eschew.
David Frum was never much of a thinker. Try as he might, he just can't seem to attract interest, let alone a following, even when stabbing his old boss, President George W. Bush, in the back with a rambling screed. Profiting from a confidential relationship with a president is about as low as it gets. But Frum, the ex-speech-writer turned self-hating blogger, isn't done descending. Now he spends his lonely days and nights at his keyboard trying to settle personal scores and demonizing those who dare to dismiss his ramblings as the work of an emotional wreck. Go read every blood-drenched word. See why I like Levin? He is perfectly happy to spend his days going after Democrats and ignore the occasional insult. But if you ever really piss him off . . .
(Via Protein Wisdom.) Go read the whole thing, but check back here in an hour or so, because I'll have an update I think you'll want to read.
UPDATE: Believe it or not, I consider David Frum a friend. He did me a favor once when I needed it, and I try not to forget a favor.
Nothing hurts me worse than to see two friends at daggers drawn, as with Frum and Levin, but Levin is clearly the injured party here. As I sometimes say when somebody gets cross-ways with me, "Buddy, you done pissed off the wrong redneck."
Frum wrote a truly excellent book about the 1970s, How We Got Here, and his wife, Danielle Crittenden, wrote a truly excellent book about feminism, What Our Mothers Never Told Us. I do not hesitate to recommend either book, even if you don't like David Frum.
So, what happened to Frum? He made the mistake of joining the Bush speechwriting team without thinking of what he was getting himself into. As Matthew Scully has explained, Bush made the mistake of assigning his speechwriting shop to Michael Gerson, a worthless, self-serving, two-faced, second-rate scoundrel.
There is something about working for a mediocrity like Gerson that injures a man's pride, which is why it is always dangerous to entrust managerial or supervisory duties to mediocrities. Gerson was a disloyal glory hog who was always leaking to the press. The rest of the speechwriting staff knew who was doing the leaking, they resented the hell out of it, and it destroyed morale.
That kind of stuff happens all the time in D.C.. When I showed up for my first day of work at The Washington Times in November 1997, I got talking to a guy named Michael Rust, a brilliant writer who died a few years ago of diabetes. Michael said, "Welcome to Washington, a town where people advance" -- and here he made a motion with his hands, as if climbing a ladder -- "on the knives stuck in the backs of their former friends."
Ah, would that I had heeded Michael's warning more closely! It was not until about 2006 that I began to understand what he meant. The specifics are irrelevant here, but the lesson that you must understand is that most feuds like this in Washington are not really about ideology, they're about ambition.
There is another excellent book you should read by -- surprise! -- David Brooks. Bobos in Paradise (2000) includes a chapter describing the means by which political intellectuals ascend the ranks of the punditocracy. It's a shrewd and devastatingly accurate analysis of how things work inside the Beltway, and the insightful reader realizes that Brooks followed his own cunning advice. ("Brooks, you brilliant bastard! I read your book!")
When I write about The Republicans Who Really Matter, I'm trying to explain how ambition accounts for the bizarre peregrinations of so many "conservative" operatives in Washington. It isn't that they don't have principles or that they don't have any core beliefs. Rather, it is that they stay in the game long enough to see how the game is played by the "winners" -- e.g. , David Gergen -- and decide to start playing that same game.
This is why I so admire Robert Novak. An excellent reporter who was originally a liberal Republican, Novak followed the facts wherever they led him -- which is why he became a conservative. But if a Republican was doing the wrong thing, he always had to worry about Novak, because Novak was fearless and independent, and he would blow the whistle in a heartbeat if he found out someone was running a scam.
In his ill-advised article "Unpatriotic Conservatives," Frum unjustly attacked Novak, and Rich Lowry should have been fired immediately for having had the bad taste to publish such a thing on the cover of National Review. (What did Ann Coulter call Lowry, a "girly man"?)
I've got friends on both sides of the paleoconservative/neoconservative divide. My paleo friends are laughing their asses off to see Levin and Frum going at one another. And half my family is Democrats, so you can imagine how they're enjoying this internecine Republican bloodletting.
It's just like when Charles Johnson goes after Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? Who assigned Charles as the Torquemada to lead the Blogospheric Inquisition? In any large collaborative enterprise, these kinds of feuds and schisms are to be expected, but sooner or later somebody has got to say, "Hey, knock it off with this Urge to Purge power trip." I've got no personal beef with Charles, but at the point he accused Geller of being a pawn of Euro-fascism, he jumped the shark.
Same thing with Frum or Dreher or anyone else who wants to arrogate to themselves the right to say who is or is not a legitimate conservative spokesman. Like Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin and Laura Ingraham, Mark Levin has earned what he's got by honest toil.
Levin's independence is a function of his hard-earned success, and he speaks to an audience that is always free to turn the station. Even if I don't always agree with him -- even if I sometimes think, "Hey, Mark, could you maybe turn it down to 11?" -- Levin is honest, and does not fawn or flatter or backstab.
If Levin's got a problem with you, he's going to come right at you. That's just the way the bad boys roll. Either roll with them, or get out of the way, Moe Green.
My advice to David Frum would be to admit his error and try to make amends, because like I said, "Buddy, you done pissed off the wrong redneck."
UPDATE II: Now linked at Memeorandum, and speaking of pissing off the wrong redneckCanadian, Kathy Shaidle jumps in and predicts the trench warfare will continue all week. BTW, Kathy perfectly illustrates what I'm trying to say about trying to bridge the paleo/neo divide. Kathy is pro-Israel, which would normally make her neo, but she's so bold in her political incorrectness, it's as if Sam Francis had been reincarnated as a sawed-off Canadian girl. (NTTAWWT.)
And, by God, she fights. That's what really counts with me. I admire conservatives who hate and despise liberalism with a primal ferocity, so that the minute the Left comes after one of our guys . . .
When you're Jet, You're a Jet all the way, From your first cigarette To your last dying day.
Heaven help any fool who thinks he's going to cross Kathy Shaidle and walk away unscathed.
Sadly, it is fashionable among certain righty intellectuals to make a point of distancing themselves from Ann Coulter. . . . The offensive reason, of course, is to establish their bona fides as "reasonable" conservatives so that they do not destroy their social lives. . . . The more legitimate reason is that Ann, along with Rush, has been so successful promoting a sort of "low brow" conservatism (see John Derbyshire on this taxonomic classification and Rush Limbaugh's impact on it) that the middle-brow version has been terribly diminished by comparison.
Like I said in the headline, "Watch it with that 'lowbrow' stuff, cracker." Coulter and Limbaugh are obviously quite intelligent, and I credit them with knowing exactly what they're doing. (See also: Dreher, Levin, and the Craft of Talk Radio.)
Some people like to imagine that they're more sophisticated than Rush, more sensitive than Coulter, more civil than Levin. And anyone who thinks like that is an arrogant son of bitch, in my book.
When someone is very successful at what they do, they must be given credit for knowing what they're doing. Don't try to tell Jimmy Page how to play guitar and don't tell Tiger Woods how to swing a three iron.
This is not to say that Page never misses a note, or that Tiger never shanks a drive, nor is it to say that Rush or Ann or Mark is immune to criticism. Rather, they have earned, by their demonstrable success, a certain level of respect for their judgment, and ought not be lectured self-righteously by some wannabe "expert" who never played the game. And I will repeat what I said before:
"One of the basic principles of military strategy is to reinforce success. If you see a man who fights and wins, give him reinforcements, and bid others to emulate his success."
Conservatives who want to derogate successful leadership really need to ask themselves whether David Brooks, Kathleen Parker, Rod Dreher et al., have what it takes to inspire and lead conservatives to success. Evidence for such a proposition is lacking.
If Republicans had listened to Rush, John McCain never would have been the GOP nominee and Barack Obama would not have been the Democratic nominee. So if the Republican Party is in disarray, whose fault is that? It ain't the fault of us "lowbrow" conservatives, is it?
Tigerhawk, you're still a Jet in good standing, as far as I'm concerned. I've always liked John Derbyshire, but that was an article he never should have published. And if Rush or Ann see you quoting that kind of stuff, don't say I didn't try to warn you.
Red Eye's Andy Levy on David Frum: I'd seen the Kathy Shaidle post, but hadn't actually played the video until I saw it linked by Paco. Perhaps this would be a good occasion to explain why I have been reluctant to go all Rule 4 on David Frum, despite his anti-Rush cover story in Newsweek and his infamous "Unpatriotic Conservatives" National Review cover, which included Robert Novak, Pat Buchanan and other worthies in a vicious "anti-Semite" smear worthy of Ezra Klein. When Frum first published How We Got Here, the best history of the 1970s ever written, I attended an American Enterprise Institute book event where Frum spoke, did a feature story about him and his book in The Washington Times. I'd already read his 1995 book, Dead Right, and so was familiar with him. I was also familiar with his wife, Danielle Crittenden, whose 1998 book, WhatOur Mothers Didn't Tell Us, is a fascinating and eminently readable indictment of the feminist/careerist worldview. Which is to say, my acquaintance with Frum goes back to the days before he became a Bush administration speechwriter. I know him to be capable of good work, and his subsequent excursions into RINO-land have been a disappointment. However, I would contrast Frum's errors to the case of David Brooks, who has in recent years only confirmed what shrewd observers have known ever since his 1997 "National Greatness" cover story in The Weekly Standard: That Brooks is an un-conservative, or better yet, an anti-conservative, whose every instinct and impulse is in opposition to the philosophical tradition of Edmund Burke, Richard Weaver, Friedrich Hayek, Russell Kirk, et al. Furthermore, from Matthew Scully's 2007 Atlantic Monthly article about the inner workings of the Bush speechwriting shop, I have deep sympathy for Frum -- a successful journalist and author long before he signed up with the Bushies -- having had to toil anonymously in an operation run by that towering monument of uselessness, Michael Gerson. (See, "Separated at birth?") Like Luke Skywalker insisting that there is still some spark of good in Darth Vader, I choose to believe that Frum's grievous errors do not mean that he is as evil as Brooks or as useless as Gerson. Indeed, his New Majority Web site has offered publishing opportunities for some young conservatives of my acquaintance, including Tom Qualtere and Joe Marier. Thus it cannot be said that Frum does not continue to do good, despite his manifestations of RINOcity. What I wish Frum would consider is that, by so assiduously aligning himself with the elite Establishment -- "The Republicans Who Really Matter," as one of our guestbloggers dubbed them -- he undermines his potential for influence among the grassroots conservative activists who remain the heart and soul of the Republican Party. When you're a jet, you're a jet all the way. Allying yourself with the grassroots won't get you funding from foundations and deep-pocket RINO donors, it won't get your a cover story in Newsweek, but being a well-paid backstabbing Brooksian crapweasel is really not the kind of thing you want in the first paragraph of your obituary. A wise man lives as if life is short and tomorrow is not promised. Thus, I would do a dishonor to my children if I accursed the family name by becoming a vile creature like David Gergen who, if he were run over by a bus today, would deserve no notice from conservatives except, "Good riddance." Let us pray that David Frum grows wise, considers his errors, and amends his ways.
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My advice to you, Tiger? Plead insanity. Because you'd have to be crazy to cheat on her.
