Steyn on Frum

Mark Steyn writes at the Corner:

I’ve shared op-ed space with David in at least three countries. He’s a much smarter guy than I, and he’ll be around a lot longer. But there’s a strong sense of diminishing returns about these Frum flaps. David is becoming famous only for attacking fellow conservatives—Novak and Buchanan back in his end-to-evil days; then, Rush, Glenn, Sean and Sarah Palin; last weekend, it was Michelle Malkin for not mentioning his website by its name; and now AEI. At this rate, he’ll be picking fights with Barbara Bush by late spring.

Steyn trivializes the Frum situation. It’s not that Frum “picks fights” with fellow conservatives, as though this were a series of personal spats. It’s that Frum is against conservatism. He sees conservatives in the same way that liberals do—as crude, backward, faith-based haters who must either reform and get with the modern world, or be silenced and excluded from politics. How is it that Steyn, who writes constantly about liberal PC, fails to understand the liberal PC mentality in this case? Maybe he doesn’t understand it. Maybe he just keeps bouncing off the surface of it with his witticisms. As Steyn says of himself, he is not that smart.

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Alex K. writes:

I also didnt like Steyn’s phrasing here, in his list of Frum’s fight-picking: “Novak and Buchanan back in his end-to-evil days.” Saying “his end-to-evil days” is dismissive, when the only difference between Frum’s foreign policy in that book and the foreign policy Steyn supported himself in those days (and has not to date recanted) is the hyperbole of that phrasing. Otherwise, they both believed in hyperambitious war after war to drive illiberalism from the Muslim world.

LA replies:

And Steyn wrote dozens of hyperbolic, triumphalist columns about the Iraq occupation in ‘03 and ‘04, mocking the very idea that it might not work out. Then, when it didn’t work out as planned, he conveniently dropped the issue (without mentioning ever his previous columns on the subject), and went on to other things, namely the Islam problem, which he said we were to solve by outbreeding the Muslims.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 27, 2010 12:55 AM | Send