Useful Idiot or Shameless Sell-Out? |
Now dance for me! |
The Daily Beast has scored another influential voice. David Frum is joining Newsweek and The Daily Beast, writing for both. Frum, who is aconservativeD.C. blogger and former George W. Bush speechwriter, will be launching a new Beast blog on the heels of FrumForum, which boasted hundreds of contributors and reached more than 5 million readers. "When we launched, Sarah Palin was a leading candidate for president and Glenn Beck was broadcasting conspiracy theories on cable TV," Frum wrote in his farewell post. "Three years later—not so much. OK, maybe we can’t claim all the credit. But we won’t refuse some fair share." Beast and Newsweek editor Tina Brown tweeted, "Excited to welcome the brilliant writer and commentator* @davidfrum aboard the NewsBeast! Look fwd to a blog on Web & essays in the mag." Frum will bring contributor Noah Kristula-Green with him.
* Did Tina think Frum was so brilliant when he was in the Bush Administration? (I took the editorial liberty of striking a certain word and adding a " * " to above).
Jonah Goldberg speaking of David Frum back in March 2010:
Sardonic. |
But here is my problem with what [Frum's] doing. If I were convinced by his analysis — and I am not — I still wouldn’t argue my points the way he does. If you think Rush, Beck, Hannity, Palin, et al. are bad for conservatism, that’s fine. If you think that the Right is too committed to tax cuts or that its emphasis on social issues is hurting it with the young and the affluent, that’s totally reasonable (if not necessarily persuasive or dispositive). But time and again David seems to relish and glory in the GOP’s “failures.” And this makes no sense to me...
Instead, we get an almost giddy excitement at GOP failures or, worse, a sometimes absurd effort to spin GOP successes into failures (again, as with the McDonnell election). On the conservative front, it’s almost impossible to reconcile the Frum of ten years ago with the Frum of today. And while I don’t study the FrumForum too closely, I’ve seen little effort by David to explain his apparent philosophical transformation or why he thinks the base of the party should abandon theirs. Instead, one gets the sense that he read the polls and the long-term trends, and decided to defenestrate a lot of his old core convictions — and many of his personal and professional allegiances — to become the leader of a movement (that basically doesn’t exist).Message to Jonah: Hence my editting that word from the Daily Beast press release excerpt above.
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