by David Safier
I don't normally recommend Republican reading matter, especially when the Republican used to be George Bush's speech writer. But I'm making an exception with this David Frum piece in the Sunday NY Times which I finally got around to reading.
First, man, can this guy write! I wish I could do half of what he does with the language. And second, he gives a level headed, critical look at what's going on with the current crop of Republicans. Coming from somewhere other than the left, his criticisms have a ring of nonpartisan analysis.
Here is my favorite part of the piece.
Too often, conservatives dupe themselves. They wrap themselves in closed information systems based upon pretend information. In this closed information system, banks can collapse without injuring the rest of the economy, tax cuts always pay for themselves and Congressional earmarks cause the federal budget deficit. Even the market collapse has not shaken some conservatives out of their closed information system. It enfolded them more closely within it. This is how to understand the Glenn Beck phenomenon. Every day, Beck offers alternative knowledge — an alternative history of the United States and the world, an alternative system of economics, an alternative reality. As corporate profits soar, the closed information system insists that the free-enterprise system is under assault. As prices slump, we are warned of imminent hyperinflation. As black Americans are crushed under Depression-level unemployment, the administration’s policies are condemned by some conservatives as an outburst of Kenyan racial revenge against the white overlord.
Meanwhile, Republican officeholders who want to explain why they acted to prevent the collapse of the U.S. banking system can get no hearing from voters seized with certainty that a bank collapse would have done no harm to ordinary people. Support for TARP has become a career-ender for Republican incumbents, and we shall see what it does to Mitt Romney, the one national Republican figure who still defends TARP.
You can't say it much better than that. Man, can this guy write!
In the rest of the article, he slams the right for equating the strength of the economy with the protection of the financial sector.
[I]t’s not always true that what’s good for Goldman Sachs is good for the economy, or vice versa. Nor is what “the markets” want the same as what free-market economics require. Finance plays with other people’s money: financial disasters damage people and businesses who never participated in the fatal transaction. For that reason, financial firms are justly regulated in ways that other firms are not. And yet nearly 80 years after the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission, influential conservatives — including The Wall Street Journal editorial board — argued that trillions of dollars of derivatives trading should be exempt from regulation.
And Frum says — get ready for this — we need the welfare state. He probably has a different conception of what that means than I do, but he refuses to accept the kneejerk "Socialism!" response we hear from the Right these days.
Maybe, someday, it's possible that sanity will be restored to the Republican Party, to a point where I can disagree with its members without getting the feeling I've been listening to out-and-out crazies.
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Less politely, screw David Frum.
He had his chance back when he was actually working for the President, and he failed the American public miserably.
‘Bravely’ pointing out how irrational the Republicans are when you were instrumental in promulgating that very irrationality is the height of hypocrisy.
This is the guy who coined ‘Axis of Evil’, almost single-handedly derailing US/Iran relations (which at the time were finally beginning to thaw, ever so tentatively) and which pretty much got Amedinejad and the rest of the hard-liners elected, and helped North Korea build a nuclear weapon.
(Remember, until Bushes cowboy antics, North Korea’s nuclear fule enrichment reactor was cold , under international surveillance and sealed. North Korea HAD NO active nuclear weapons program and no bombs when Bush took office. )
He worked for an Administration that presided over the destruction of the US economy, the deadliest terrorist attack in US history, and HIS OWN WORDS helped start a completely pointless (and utterly illegal) war of aggression while IGNORING those who actually attacked us.
If he’s an example of a ‘sane’ Republican, we’re doomed. That he’s correct in this case is largely only proof of blind squirrels finding nuts and stopped watches being right.
When Republicans who ACTUALLY have some power start saying this sort of stuff, then I’ll be re-assured.