The Wonk Room

David Frum: Guilty Of Feeding The Beast

Just to add to Ali’s post on David Frum’s attempted scolding of Rachel Maddow last night for not running her show precisely as he thinks it should be run, I think merely noting the laughably false equivalence that Frum posits between the rage of McCain-Palin supporters and the playful sarcasm of Rachel Maddow lets Frum off too easy.

The anger and fear of the conservative base that is now burning out of control did not light itself, it has been tended and stoked for years by people like David Frum. True, Frum is not as deranged as an Andy McCarthy or thuggish as a Sean Hannity, but that’s not really saying much. As one of the leading theorists of the war on terror, Frum has been a herald for some of the most vicious and destructive foreign policy ideas in the last decade. Frum’s own words have been quoted approvingly by Osama bin Laden himself — for the very simple reason that Frum’s ideas ideas about the clash between Islam and the West mirror bin Laden’s own. When McCain’s supporters express fear of the Muslim other, they are responding to an atmosphere that Frum — the author of the “Axis of Evil” — helped create.

If one is to take his comments last night seriously, Frum thinks that just because he bewailed the Islamofascist menace and delivered his exhortations to global war with an appropriate lack of sarcasm somehow excuses this. It doesn’t, and no amount of sanctimony larded on top of his false equivalences will make it so.