Tag Archives: David Frum

David Frum Said Something Interesting…

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Insert your own Mayan calendar joke here.

Outages are not inevitable. The German power grid has outages at an average rate of 21 minutes per year.

The winds may howl. The trees may fall. But in Germany, the lights stay on.

There’s no Teutonic engineering magic to this impressive record. It’s achieved by a very simple decision: Germany buries almost all of its low-voltage and medium-voltage power lines, the lines that serve individual homes and apartments. Americans could do the same. They have chosen not to.

Of course, he goes on to say that burying the power lines would be a wonderful way to borrow and spend some more so-far-failed stimulus money. But still. Buried power lines. It’s not a bad idea.

There’s Always An Excuse For Your Slut

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Ace fisks Frum on the strained nature of the “Tu Quoque” Fallacy.

These are the same points I brought up earlier, when explaining that I did not care about Limbaugh’s outburst. But as Frum points out, Letterman did apologize for what he said about Willow Palin, as did Ed Schultz when he called Laura Ingraham a slut. And he concedes that Bill Maher did not apologize, but doubled down.

So far, so good. If Frum had stopped there, he would have the better of the argument, if the argument was about why Rush should apologize (which he has done, and which I seemed to bemoan in the comments of my earlier thread, having forgotten that Letterman and Schultz did apologize). The fact that Maher refused an apology does not give Limbaugh a pass, merely underline Maher’s degeneracy.

But Frum does not stop there. He tries to fashion out of straw and manure some manner of contention that Limbaugh’s act was different, a “new low”. He tries to assert that Schultz and Letterman and Maher are unimportant, whereas Limbaugh is the Right. All of which makes his preceding fairness a weak, old rhetorical trick aimed at smearing everyone on the Right with Limbaugh’s words, while simultaneously absolving the Left of everything Bill Maher says.

I haven’t listened to Rush Limbaugh in years, because I work for a living, and have better things to do ‘twixt one and three than be told things I already agree with. When I was a young fellow, Limbaugh’s mix of iconoclasm and populism set me free to say things already in my head. I don’t need that anymore. He’s not the entirety of the Right. He wasn’t even the entire Right in 1994, at what was perhaps the height of his influence. He’s even less so today.

It would be better if we could just police our own, and trust that the other side would police theirs. To the extent that I implied that Letterman et al. got off scot-free for their calumnies, I was in error with my earlier post. To the extent that Frum pretends that one side’s calumnies don’t matter, he remains in error, and complicit in the error of others.

 

David Frum: Always Reliable, When Republicans are Under Attack, To Rise to the Defense of those Attacks

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The Left’s pet rightie could not resist tut-tutting about how awful and offensive and poisonous that Andrew Breitbat fellow was. Such is the nature of Frum: always begging his enemies to regard him as a Good Jew. But the timing provokes Ace to some of the finest vitriol I’ve seen from him in quite some time:

David Frum exceeded Andrew Breitbart in one measure only, span of life.

But not in life.

David Frum will die as he lived, gray, timid, small, spiteful, cramped in thought and bent in spirit, slender of talent and obese in self-regard, unloved, unnoticed, unremembered and unread.

Nicely done.