Three Steps to Losing Our Democracy

David Frum, the neoconservative former speech writer for George W. Bush and a leader of the Jewish Republican Coalition -- David Frum -- has written an important warning about the presidency of Donald Trump in The Atlantic, where it is guaranteed to be read by no one who's drunk the Trump Kool Aid:

What is spreading today is repressive kleptocracy, led by rulers motivated by greed rather than by the deranged idealism of Hitler or Stalin or Mao. Such rulers rely less on terror and more on rule-twisting, the manipulation of information, and the co-optation of elites.

Our Constitution is based on a basic assumption that any person who becomes president will be "restrained first and foremost by his own ethics and public spirit." "What happens," Frum asks, "if somebody comes to the high office lacking those qualities?" That is exactly what has happened, Frum says. Somebody without personal ethics or any leanings toward "public spirit" has taken control of our nation. He is

a president who plausibly owes his office at least in part to a clandestine intervention by a hostile foreign intelligence service. Who uses the bully pulpit to target individual critics. Who creates blind trusts that are not blind, invites his children to commingle private and public business, and somehow gets the unhappy members of his own political party either to endorse his choices or shrug them off. If this were happening in Honduras, we’d know what to call it. It’s happening here instead, and so we are baffled.

The Republican Congress, which spent eight years opposing everything Obama suggested, should be an important "check and balance" to Trump's lack of ethics, but Frum sees how they roll. They will spend the next four years, at least, trying their damnedest not to find out about any scandal in the Trump administration. They will be successful in their blindness.

Most interesting, perhaps, is Frum's declaration that the greatest burden for resistance to Trump rests actually on fellow Republicans: "The duty to resist should weigh most heavily upon those of us who—because of ideology or partisan affiliation or some other reason—are most predisposed to favor President Trump and his agenda."

He ends with this:

Those citizens who fantasize about defying tyranny from within fortified compounds have never understood how liberty is actually threatened in a modern bureaucratic state: not by diktat and violence, but by the slow, demoralizing process of corruption and deceit. And the way that liberty must be defended is not with amateur firearms, but with an unwearying insistence upon the honesty, integrity, and professionalism of American institutions and those who lead them. We are living through the most dangerous challenge to the free government of the United States that anyone alive has encountered. What happens next is up to you and me. Don’t be afraid. This moment of danger can also be your finest hour as a citizen and an American.

David Frum: Republicans' "Waterloo"

Worth reading: Conservative columnist and former speech-writer for George W. Bush, David Frum's slashing attack on Fox News and the yak-masters of talk radio for making it impossible for Republicans in Congress to compromise with this president and save themselves from their "Waterloo" moment ... which is happening right now, tonight, in the health insurance reform vote.

Frum thinks Republicans are waaay over-optimistic about taking back Congress come November.

Frum points out that the bill being passed tonight is really very "Republican" in basic outline (and, gee, thanks for reminding me about why I secretly hate it!):

...the gap between this plan and traditional Republican ideas is not very big. The Obama plan has a broad family resemblance to Mitt Romney's Massachusetts plan. It builds on ideas developed at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s that formed the basis for Republican counter-proposals to Clintoncare in 1993-1994.

Frum sez to his tea-partying confreres: Get over yourself! This bill will never be repealed.

And he sez this: "We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat."

Who's Flying This Plane?

Well now! David Frum, former speechwriter for George W. Bush, fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, and (last we heard) Respected Conservative Pundit, had this to say on Monday about "the duel" currently entertaining the public:

On the one side, the president of the United States: soft-spoken and conciliatory, never angry, always invoking the recession and its victims. This president invokes the language of "responsibility," and in his own life seems to epitomize that ideal: He is physically honed and disciplined, his worst vice an occasional cigarette. He is at the same time an apparently devoted husband and father. Unsurprisingly, women voters trust and admire him.

And for the leader of the Republicans? A man who is aggressive and bombastic, cutting and sarcastic, who dismisses the concerned citizens in network news focus groups as "losers." With his private plane and his cigars, his history of drug dependency and his personal bulk, not to mention his tangled marital history, Rush is a walking stereotype of self-indulgence -- exactly the image that Barack Obama most wants to affix to our philosophy and our party. And we're cooperating!

Frum writes ('pears to us) more in sadness than in anger, but the characterization of The Man in Black seems much more a zinger (and from Limbaugh's own section in the bleachers) than any of the stuff Michael Steele intimated and about which Limbaugh unleashed the full BTUs of his scorn.

David Frum (bless his heart) is showing fellow Republicans how to get their testicles out of hock.