Bartlett: Frum’s Dismissal Shows ‘All That Matters Now Is Absolute Subservient Adherence’

[cal04]

Bartlett: Frum’s Dismissal Shows ‘All That Matters Now Is Absolute Subservient Adherence’ To The GOP

Former Bush speechwriter David Frum — who famously authored the phrase “axis of evil” — has been unceremoniously forced out from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a right wing, neoconservative think tank. Frum’s dismissal resulted from criticism he directed at the Republican Party for staking a failed strategic posture of “no compromise” on health care. As a result, “it’s Waterloo all right: ours,” Frum wrote to his fellow conservatives.

Right-wing donors of AEI began raising concerns about Frum. So, AEI president Arthur Brooks took Frum out to lunch this week to tell him that, while he valued “a diversity of opinion,” he wanted to downgrade Frum to a nonsalaried position. Frum declined the offer and posted a letter of resignation on his personal website.

Bruce Bartlett, a former economic adviser to President Bush, suffered a similar fate as Frum. After leaving the Bush White House, Bartlett authored a book titled Imposter: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy. That book led to his dismissal in 2005 as a senior fellow at a conservative Texas-based think tank called the National Center for Policy Analysis

On his personal blog, Bartlett referred to Frum’s departure from AEI as “the closing of the conservative mind.” He elaborated further this morning on C-Span’s Washington Journal:

BARTLETT: What’s really going on here is that adherence to conservative principles has been – is out the window now. All that matters now is absolute subservient adherence to the Republican Party line of the day. And that’s what got David into trouble. He was critical, not even of Republican principles, but of Republican tactics on the health care debate. And now, even that is considered, you know, you can’t say that or you lose your job.

Watch it: http://thinkprogress.org/2010/03/26/aei-frum-bartlett/

On his blog today, Bartlett rips AEI: “The organization has lost an enormous amount of credibility by firing him and hiring Republican political hacks like Marc Thiessen. That’s a statement I will never need to retract.”

[BurtWorm]

1. Tristero at Hullabaloo (digby's blog) points out that this a shining example of rw PC

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/david-frum-aei-split-conservatives.html

The Politically Correct
or Mirror, Mirror: The Prequel

by tristero

One of the hoariest examples of rightwing projection is the notion of political correctness, that things shouldn't or can't be said by liberals or the Left because of an absurdly rigid value system. I first heard it when Young Churchill's father was campaigning for the presidency; he wielded the charge of "politically correct" to dismiss and belittle substantive objections to the extreme right agenda he espoused. It worked though even back then, it was obvious to anyone who was paying attention that it was bullshit, that the examples the GOP was using were of political non-entities of no consequence on the national stage, and that already the Reagan Republican party was quite intolerant of ideological impurities.

But in case it wasn't obvious before that the accusation of political correctness fits conservatives far better than liberals, David Frum's exit from the locked-door psych unit known as the American Enterprise Institute, it should now be quite clear:

Frum tells Mike Allen that "donor pressure" related to his "Waterloo" post was indeed responsible for his termination. Frum claims "the core of the story is the kind of economic pressure that intellectual conservatives are under" -- meaning AEI couldn't risk displeasing its base by keeping Frum on after he criticized the Republican Party. "he elite isn't leading anymore," said Frum. "It's trapped."

Earlier, Frum told Greg Sargent he and AEI parted ways over money, not ideology -- they offered him the chance to continue on at a salary of zero...

And also :

...the conservative movement has a tendency to excommunicate anyone who breaks ranks, says Bruce Bartlett, who was fired by the National Center for Policy Analysis, another right-wing think tank, for writing a book critical of Bush policies. "In the years since, I have lost a great many friends and been shunned by conservative society in Washington, D.C," Bartlett wrote in the wake of Frum's resignation.

Bartlett, who served as a domestic policy aide for Ronald Reagan and a deputy assistant Treasury secretary under the first President Bush, claimed Frum told him privately a few months ago that conservatives on AEI's payroll had been "ordered" not to speak to the media about health care reform "because they agreed with too much of what Obama was trying to do." Frum himself certainly violated that order.

Insert obligatory statement that liberals and the Left can also demonstrate an unhealthy rigidity on ideology... and hold it right there!

So what? None of the bozos who require purity tests in liberal and leftwing circles are anywhere remotely as powerful or as influential as the fanatical psychopaths who both fund and staff the conservative think tanks. Nor are they likely to become influential anytime in the forseeable future. I can't think of even a moderately liberal group, let alone a genuinely leftwing group, that funnels staff that have been ideologically vetted into the government at anything close to the level at which the AEI and the Federalist Society pack presidential administrations with the politically correct. Nor does any liberal-leaning group - say, CEIP or CAP - require anything close to the purity of ideology the right does. It's very simple:

The politically correct are conservatives. The politically correct are rightwingers. The politically correct are the teabaggers. The politically correct are Republicans.

Same as it ever was.

[Jennicut]

2. Rethugs have always tried to march in lockstep and keep out dissention. But constant critical

analyis is nothing new to the Dems and liberals, when we all actually agree on something it is a big deal. I don't mind watching Rethugs shoot themselves in the foot but they are really being stupid about trying to shut up others in their party.

[BurtWorm]

3. kick