David Frum, the Bush 43 speechwriter who penned the very popular GOP critique, about how health care reform had become the GOP’s “Waterloo,” and not Obama’s, was just fired from conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute (AEI.)
Frum is quick to say that AEI tried to assure him his termination had, as The Plum Line’s Greg Sargent said, “nothing to do with his criticism of the GOP.” But Sargent also said “Frum is not taking a stand one way or the other on why he was fired.”
But actions always have consequences, not the the GOP has ever learned this lesson. I hope Frum continues to take on the GOP.
So, who leads AEI? Well, I’ll tell you, and then you tell me if Frum was fired just days after his piece received national attention.
2012 GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich, former VP Dick Cheney and his wife Lynne Cheney, neocons Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, and State Farm Insurance chairman and CEO Edward B. Rust Jr., and Robert Pritzker, President of Colson Associates, Inc., a holding company of hardware and medical companies.
Guess the neocons, insurance, and medical companies didn’t like David Frum’s honesty. In Waterloo, Frum wrote, “This time, when we went for all the marbles, we ended with none.â€
Fortunately, Frum hasn’t lost his marbles. But ironically, it seems “Waterloo” was Frum’s Waterloo, too, and still not Obama’s.
Bruce Bartlett, a Reagan and Bush 41 policy wonk, in “David Frum and the Closing of the Conservative Mind,” writes,
“Since, he is no longer affiliated with AEI, I feel free to say publicly something he told me in private a few months ago. He asked if I had noticed any comments by AEI “scholars” on the subject of health care reform. I said no and he said that was because they had been ordered not to speak to the media because they agreed with too much of what Obama was trying to do.
“It saddened me to hear this. I have always hoped that my experience was unique. But now I see that I was just the first to suffer from 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.”
To make his point, Bartlett quietly made the URL for his piece (look for yourself): “groupthink-right-would-make-stalin-proud.”
I rest my case.