Conservatives Liberals Love

David Frum

R. Emmett Tyrrell is not even a little sad that David Frum lost his job at AEI.

A major proposition that I advance in a book that will be published later this month, After the Hangover: The Conservatives’ Road to Recovery, is that there exists an odious subgroup of conservatives who since the beginning of the conservative movement have made their way to prominence in the mainstream media by a cheap act. They disparage with great melodrama other conservatives. Liberals love it — and for a while love the disparagers. In the late 1990s Arianna Huffington exploited this instrument of self-promotion brazenly. For several years David Frum has been doing it haltingly, even timorously. However, in the last two weeks he has been pulling a Huffington with unusual boldness.

First he smeared Sean Hannity. Then he reproached conservative opponents of the Democrats’ healthcare monstrosity. Now he is claiming martyrdom at the hands of Arthur Brooks, the head of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) that housed him as a resident fellow for seven years, reportedly at a salary of $100,000 a year. Brooks was willing to let him stay on at AEI but without a salary. Very theatrically Frum(p) quit, and the Liberals pronounced him a great man. My thesis is again vindicated, and you will understand my satisfaction in reporting that in Hangover I have embalmed Frum(p) as a perfect example of the conservative hustler, manipulating Liberal approval. I call his type the Reformed Conservatives (RCs).

Of a sudden Frum(p) is in a mad rush to become the Arianna Huffington of the present moment. He smears Hannity, snipes at opponents of Obama care, and calumniates AEI. What will be his next move in pulling an Arianna? Perhaps he will find a rich Texan to marry and fleece of tens of millions of dollars so he can move to California and open a salon for Hollywood pinheads. Maybe he will even affect an unintelligible foreign accent — Dahling.