Tunku Varadarajan, not a Cable Gamer but a thoughtful fellow, an alumni of The Wall Street Journal, now a columnist for The Daily Beast, takes apart the odious David Frum today. I mean, Varadarajan takes Frum apart, piece by piece, point by point.
Frum raised TCG's ire with his attack on Sean Hannity, documented here last week. Since then, reading more about him, I see that Frum has been busy attacking conservatives of all kinds. As The Wall Street Journal edit page observed recently, "Mr. Frum now makes his living as the media's go-to basher of fellow Republicans, which is a stock Beltway role." Ain't that the truth. No conservative should get away with bashing conservatives, non-stop, and still be allowed to call himself a conservative.
But it's Varadarajan who really nails Frum, in a long and detailed piece, calling him a "Polite Company Conservative." That is, a conservative who says what he must to fit in with liberals. As Tunku puts it:
David is a man I’ve known professionally for almost a decade, and with whom my social interaction has always been very genial. He is a good and energetic man, and has, in the years since he left service at the White House, dedicated himself to being what I call a “polite-company conservative” (or PCC), much like David Brooks and Sam Tanenhaus at the New York Times (where the precocious Ross Douthat is shaping up to be a baby version of the species). A PCC is a conservative who yearns for the goodwill of the liberal elite in the media and in the Beltway—who wishes, always, to have their ear, to be at their dinner parties, to be comforted by a sense that liberal interlocutors believe that they are not like other conservatives, with their intolerance and boorishness, their shrillness and their talk radio. The PCC, in fact, distinguishes himself from other conservatives not so much ideologically—though there is an element of that—as aesthetically.
There you have it, and more. Read the whole piece.
And stay tuned for David Frum to go the way of another ex-conservative named David--David Brock.
