As if to underscore, late last week the American Enterprise Institute, conservatives' flagship think-tank, fired resident scholar Frum.
Any questions?
Reacting to Frum's public execution, TMV's Joe Gandelman said,
"...today's Republican party increasingly seems dominated in terms of tactics, strategy and rhetoric by the 24/7-rage-required talk-radio political culture which puts a premium on personal attacks, over-the-top polemics, cherry picking or misrepresenting facts, demonizing and defining those with whom they disagree, and above all trying to discredit those who have different ideas and solutions rather than focusing relentlessly on the ideas and solutions they considered flawed."This from John McQuaid of True/Slant:
"...the terrible economic conditions and the historic political cycle, both of which point to significant GOP gains in the 2010 elections...have masked and even exacerbated the ongoing intellectual disarray on the Right. Frum is one of the few conservatives who sees rather clearly that the Right's current agenda is outmoded and self-destructive, and he wasn't shy about saying so."Bruce Bartlett now makes his home at Capital Gains & Games. Speaking from personal experience, he sees Frum's dismissal as yet more evidence of
"...a closing of the conservative mind. Rigid conformity is being enforced, no dissent is allowed, and the conservative brain will slowly shrivel into dementia if it hasn't already."And The Daily Beast's Christopher Buckley, who echoes his father in both style and substance, said,
"It is not for the likes of me -- non-intellectual, and post-partisan -- to tell AEI how to handle its resident scholars. But the teapot having been heated, let me now drop in my leaves and say that it strikes me that AEI has not burnished its reputation as a center of right-intellectual thought."Buckley put a bow on his opinion by reaching back into an address to the United Negro College Fund, delivered by a right-wing Mr. Potatoe Head from another era:
"As Dan Quayle once put it so well, 'What a terrible thing to have lost one's mind. Or not to have a mind at all. How true that is.'"The Democratic Party has its own problems, different problems, as do enclaves across the ideological spectrum. In almost every case, as McQuaid points out,
"...I'd wager that most of the people in these institutions don't think anything -- internally, anyway -- is amiss."The conservative establishment, which these days bears a striking resemblance to the movement's mindless extremes, reacts to truth by shooting messengers, and indeed that may be the best way to hang on to wingnut donors. The fact remains, however, that the emperor is buck naked.
By averting its eyes, the conservative movement -- as it exists today, at least -- assures its ultimate demise.
