Today’s must-read piece, by far, was written by David Frum, a former George W. Bush speechwriter who serves as an embodiment of old-school conservative Republicanism.
In recent years, Frum has made it his crusade to stop the Republican Party from ignoring reality and surrendering to its drift to the far right.
In a long essay for New York Magazine, Frum takes on a personal, confessional tone. “I belonged to this movement; I helped to make the mess,” he writes at one point, referring to the Bush years.
He describes how his relatively moderate views cost him his job, after 7 ½ years, at a conservative think tank and caused him to be banished from Fox News.
What’s more, Frum offers personal conversations with fellow Republicans that go something like this: “Have you gone crazy?” “No, why don’t you take a look in the mirror.”
Obviously, this same dialog could take place on the left, where liberal Democrats have forced out moderates and Blue Dogs, declaring them a heretical bunch. But no one on the Democratic side seems to be willing to make such a forceful statement. It is Frum, a former Wall Street Journal editorial page writer, who steps forward, after getting beat up by his former partisan soulmates, who makes a true impact.
Here’s a taste of the early moments of Frum’s treatise:
“It was not so long ago that Texas governor (George W.) Bush denounced attempts to cut the earned-income tax credit as “balancing the budget on the backs of the poor.” By 2011, Republican commentators were noisily complaining that the poorer half of society are ‘lucky duckies’ because the EITC offsets their federal tax obligations—or because the recession had left them with such meager incomes that they had no tax to pay in the first place. In 2000, candidate Bush routinely invoked ‘churches, synagogues, and mosques.’ By 2010, prominent Republicans were denouncing the construction of a mosque in lower Manhattan as an outrageous insult. In 2003, President Bush and a Republican majority in Congress enacted a new prescription-drug program in Medicare. By 2011, all but four Republicans in the House and five in the Senate were voting to withdraw the Medicare guarantee from everybody under age 55. Today, the Fed’s pushing down interest rates in hopes of igniting economic growth is close to treason, according to Governor Rick Perry, coyly seconded by ‘The Wall Street Journal.’ In 2000, the same policy qualified Alan Greenspan as the ‘greatest central banker in the history of the world,’ according to Perry’s mentor, Sen. Phil Gramm. Today, health reform that combines regulation of private insurance, individual mandates, and subsidies for those who need them is considered unconstitutional and an open invitation to ‘death panels.’ A dozen years ago, a very similar reform was the Senate Republican alternative to Hillarycare. Today, stimulative fiscal policy that includes tax cuts for almost every American is “socialism.” In 2001, stimulative fiscal policy that included tax cuts for rather fewer Americans was an economic-recovery program.”
Read ahead for Frum Part II
Old school Republicans are almost as much at fault as the Democratic Party. Government needs to be dramatically scaled back and entitlements need to be wacked. Socialism only benefits the elites and the non producers.