I guess David Frum has come to terms with the fact that he just isn't going to be "in the club" anymore and has embraced his role as "loyal opposition" to what he sees as dishonest and radically partisan elements subverting the Republican Party.
His latest salvo: Shirley Sherrod and the Shame of the Right Wing Media
For those who have been in a hole in the Gobi Desert for the past couple of days, Shirley Sherrod is an African-American woman who worked for the USDA; she was forced out of her job after a highly edited video of her purportedly expressing anti-white racist views surfaced in the Wingnut-0-Sphere™ in the last week or so.
After the general paroxysms of "reverse racism" from the usual suspects in the movement conservative echo chamber, the true story came out that Sherrod's remarks were about how she overcame her own racial animosity and actually befriended a white farmer she had initially declined "the full force" of assistance she could give; a farmer she is friends with, to this day, if reports are true.
So here's the weird part: The conservative voices in media then went after Obama for firing Sherrod and the NACCP for condemning her supposed racism. And apparently that was too much for Frum, who spins out, thusly:
There will be no apology or statement of regret for distributing a doctored tape to defame and destroy someone. There will be not even a flutter of interest among conservatives in discussing Breitbart’s role. By the morning of July 21, the Fox & Friends morning show could devote a segment to the Sherrod case without so much as a mention of Breitbart’s role. The central fact of the Sherrod story has been edited out of the conservative narrative, just as it was edited out of the tape itself.
When people talk of the "closing of the conservative mind" this is what they mean: not that conservatives are more narrow-minded than other people — everybody can be narrow minded — but that conservatives have a unique capacity to ignore unwelcome fact. [...]
Instead, conservatives are consumed with a new snippets-out-of-context uproar, the latest round of JournoList quotations. Here at last is proof of the cynical machinations of the hated liberal media! As to the cynical machinations of conservative media — well, as the saying goes, the fish never notices the water through which it swims.
Dance with them what brung ya Dave...
...no wait, I can't end on such a cynical note. Others can, and do it far better.
Look Dave, I feel your pain. No really, I do. But when are you and some of the rest of the hive mind going to take responsibility for this creature you helped create. I understand that in some small way writing articles like this may be your attempt at accountability.
And I know what it feels like to be shouting at the highly charged wind. All you get is your own voice and a little spit back in your face. So thanks for trying, I guess, and keep on plugging away, because until the problems you cite come to an end there can be no common cause.
This is not about "ideologues" v. "pragmatists." This is about self-justified dishonesty and solipsistic demogoguery hijacking an otherwise reasonable political party and philosophy, even if I disagree with it in most specifics.
Further, this is not one of those moments where I say, "and there's more than enough of this on both sides." Bollocks! Regardless of whatever examples that can be produced about alleged abuses on our side of the fence, they pale in comparison to the problems on the right.
This is a product of the crazies being allowed to take over the conservative movement and it's up to you and your gang to put it back in it's cage.
Good luck with that Dave...
mojo sends