David Frum ~ So What Happened?

[Emit]

~snip~

Let me respond here to some specific issues in this matter.

1) Was the firing political? Obviously I cannot enter into people’s minds, and at my termination lunch AEI President Arthur Brooks insisted that politics had nothing to do with the decision. So let’s just follow the time line. Waterloo piece is posted Sunday March 22. Wall Street Journal editorial denouncing me appears March 23. Summons to lunch arrives mid-morning of March 23. At lunch I am told that AEI wishes to terminate my salary, office, benefits, and research assistance. I am however at liberty to continue to consider myself part of the AEI family. I declined that offer and wrote a letter of resignation.

2) Was the firing in response to donor pressure? At lunch, Arthur Brooks explained that AEI was facing a new kind of donor environment, in which donors were becoming much more specific about where they wanted their money to go. Arthur expressed extreme personal distress at having to terminate me. It’s possible that those words were pro forma, and that my own affection for Arthur led me to attach more weight to them than I should have. It’s very strange that Charles Murray would denounce me as a liar because I wished to think better of my former boss!

3) Did AEI muzzle healthcare scholars? I fear that in reproducing in print a private conversation from some months ago, Bruce Bartlett made a transmission error. I did not report as fact that scholars were laboring under any restrictions. What I did say was that AEI was punching way below its weight in the healthcare debate. I wondered, not alleged, wondered, whether AEI scholars were constrained by fear of saying something that might get them into trouble. To repeat: this was something I asked many months ago in private conversation, not something I allege today in public debate.

4) Was I terminated for under-productivity? If you’ll believe that, you’ll believe anything. In seven years at AEI, I wrote 3 books, over 1000 newspaper and magazine articles, millions of words of web journalism. I have made more TV appearances, delivered more lectures than I even know how to count. (I’ll be delivering half dozen such lectures in China in the month of April as a guest of the US Department of State.)

~snip~

http://www.frumforum.com/so-what-happened

[Warpy]

1. I think there is going to be some considerable blowback from this one

Frum is wrong about nearly everything, but he was one of the few actual intelligences at AEI left.

He is not going to go quietly into that good night of obscurity.

[Xipe Totec]

2. What happened? Well, it went something like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTt6-8l80dU

[nradisic]

3. I have to hand it to Frum...

He is most certainly one of the few rather intelligent conservatives. David Frum strickes me as an a classical old conservative, who by all signs are no longer welcome at the new GOP...good luck.

[MissMarple]

4. When the GOP abandoned all pretense of honor,integrity & cogent ideology,well, David Frum had to go.

He didn't turn himself into a pretzel trying to justify the insane turns the GOP was taking to maintain a toehold on power. I'm not saying I agree with his principles and ideology, but he retained a good measure of personal integrity, and didn't try to rationalize the sadly insane lengths the GOP is all too willing to pursue.

Perhaps he should reexamine the wisdom of Disraeli when he conceded that however conservative his personal beliefs may have been, leadership cannot ignore the direction the people have already taken. It cannot ignore the stark political reality. The GOP manufactured their own support, they came to believe their own spin. They now experience the consequences. I do feel sorry for John McCain and Mitt Romney. At the beginning each may have had some measure of integrity, but there really is no surviving such a poisonous political milieu.

[ThomWV]

5. I see this Frum firing as a very big deal, very big indeed. I think it signals Republican demise

It is what is sometimes called 'jumping the shark' meaning - as I understand it - the defining moment when no clear path to return sanity exists for the subject, which in this case I take to be the Republican party. Like Frum or not at least he was one of the actual intellects in the guiding arm of the Party apparatus. His firing shows that the crazies really are in charge. And consider what it was he said; that in the beginning the Republicans felt they owned right wing radio and Fox broadcasting as their own private communications tools, but now they are learning that it is not Fox and friends that work for them, it is in fact they - the Republican Party - who now works for the radio and TV mouthpieces and whoever it is that tells them what to say. Who would deny it?

[Emit]

6. Excellent observation, ThomWV

Yes, I agree. We saw a great number of GOP defectors, dating back to the Kerry campaign in '04, but this one is significant for the very reasons you point out.

[SidDithers]

7. K&R...

thanks for posting.

I wonder if he'll do a David Brock? Probably not, but I do see him continuing to become a more vocal critic of todays GOP.

Sid

[wishlist]

8. He has made too many moderate rational comments to pass rw litmus test nt