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ThatDamnedPanda -> Achtung, Herr Frum! Dissent ist Verbotten! (3/25/2010 6:24:37 PM)
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Incredible. Can the Republican "leadership" in this country possibly find any way to become even stupider or even more insane? It's a question I have to keep re-asking myself on almost a weekly basis. Just 3 days after former Dubya speechwriter David Frum wrote his brilliant analysis of how the Republican Party castrated itself with its incompetent mishandling of the health care debacle, he's been terminated by the conservative "think" tank the American Enterprise Institute.
quote:
Three days after calling health-care reform a debacle for Republicans, David Frum was forced out of his job at the American Enterprise Institute on Wednesday. The ouster also came one day after a harsh Wall Street Journal editorial ripped the former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, saying he "now makes his living as the media's go-to basher of fellow Republicans" and accusing him of "peddling bad revisionist history."
Your Coat and Hat, Sir
Translation: Republicans don't say unflattering things about other Republicans. Not if they want to stay in the club.
For those of you wondering what he said to provoke his fellow Republicans into tossing him headfirst out of the treehouse, here's an excerpt and a link -
quote:
Conservatives and Republicans today suffered their most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s. It’s hard to exaggerate the magnitude of the disaster. Conservatives may cheer themselves that they’ll compensate for today’s expected vote with a big win in the November 2010 elections. But: (1) It’s a good bet that conservatives are over-optimistic about November – by then the economy will have improved and the immediate goodies in the healthcare bill will be reaching key voting blocs. (2) So what? Legislative majorities come and go. This healthcare bill is forever. A win in November is very poor compensation for this debacle now.
So far, I think a lot of conservatives will agree with me. Now comes the hard lesson: A huge part of the blame for today’s disaster attaches to conservatives and Republicans ourselves. At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike, say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut, we would make no deal with the administration. No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obama’s Waterloo – just as healthcare was Clinton’s in 1994.
Only, the hardliners overlooked a few key facts: Obama was elected with 53% of the vote, not Clinton’s 42%. The liberal block within the Democratic congressional caucus is bigger and stronger than it was in 1993-94. And of course the Democrats also remember their history, and also remember the consequences of their 1994 failure.
This time, when we went for all the marbles, we ended with none.
Could a deal have been reached? Who knows? But we do know that the gap between this plan and traditional Republican ideas is not very big. The Obama plan has a broad family resemblance to Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts plan. It builds on ideas developed at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s that formed the basis for Republican counter-proposals to Clintoncare in 1993-1994.
Barack Obama badly wanted Republican votes for his plan. Could we have leveraged his desire to align the plan more closely with conservative views? To finance it without redistributive taxes on productive enterprise – without weighing so heavily on small business – without expanding Medicaid? Too late now. They are all the law.
Heresy!
As I said, a brilliant piece of analysis and an even brillianter piece of writing. But you see, that kind of intellectual honesty and objectivity has no place in today's Republican Party. So Frum had to go. Because in the new Republican Kremlin, no member of the Politburo may speak against the Party in any way. Another opportunity to learn a valuable lesson wasted in spectacular fashion by the Party of Limbaugh.
Incredible. Just incredible.
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