Though I don’t want to get into the habit of defending David Frum, I must say that John Zmirak’s point about Frum’s relative honesty compared to Limbaugh is an important one.  Frum, may have no redeeming value as a political commentator, but at least he is open about his contempt for traditional conservatism.  It hardly seems sensible to give someone credit for being honest about being awful, but in a spat like this there isn’t a lot of credit to spread around to begin with.

Rush on the other hand is a different beast.  Where Frum and company have been the architects of atrocious policies, it is Limbaugh who has worked so hard to make those policies palpable to a mass audience.  By disguising populism as mere opposition to the Democrats, and creating a caricature of conservatism that essentially boils down to “GOP is good, liberals are evil,” Rush and his army of clone warriors on the AM dial have ultimately done more to sink the conservative brand than anyone.  This would be bad enough if Rush were a true believer like Frum.  The fact that Rush has read Kirk and voted for Buchanan only serves to make his role in the descent of the American right even worse.

While it may be fashionable to point the finger of blame at the neocons, without an active propaganda arm promoting their perverse political agenda, it is doubtful that Frum and friends would have amounted to anything more than a blip on the radar screen.  Rush may not have been the first to assume such a role, but by being the loudest, he deserves enough condemnation to last a lifetime. 

The recent dust-up between David Frum and Rush Limbaugh leaves me cold. The very fact that we’re even paying attention to this tiff is evidence of the utter bankruptcy of Movement conservatism. It’s become a cliche to bemoan the slide conservatism has taken down the wrong side of the bell curve… to remind people that we once listened to debates between Rothbard and Buckley, Ropke and Hayek, Von Kuenhelt-Leddihn and Molnar. Now we lift our heads from Help Wanted pages to track the feud between a Machiavellian warmongering speechwriter from Canada, and an unprincipled Republican publicist shock-jock. Neither one is addressing the critical issues, since both have been on the wrong side of them; each was a shill for Bush’s policies and Bush’s war. Listening to them argue is like sitting in a Paris cafe in May 1944 watching a catfight among the Vichyites over the details of the Dreyfus case.

I’d like to see this argument settled. Preferably at dawn, in an IHOP parking lot near Pentagon City, with chainsaws. Better yet, let’s arrange a steel-cage Sumo match, fought to the death.

Of course Frum is more repulsive, more condescending and dishonest. But he never pretended to be anything else. No one watching Frum’s career at any point since college has any excuse for being surprised that he’s now trying to turn the Republicans into a bunch of mid-70s “wet” Tories. Limbaugh, on the other hand, for all his manifest character flaws, at least once acted as a populist. He supported Buchanan’s insurgency in 1992, and could easily have continued to succeed without selling out to the ideological neutralizers who ran the RNC. Indeed, it would have boosted his audience and given his show an ongoing “edge” if he’d been willing to go on criticizing party orthodoxy—and take on issues like immigration, outsourcing, and affirmative action. Instead, Rush let himself be bought by overnight stays in the White House, schmoozing expeditions with the likes of Karl Rove, and shallow partisan arguments.  Now he’s on the defensive, having presided over the ruin of a movement, and the utter victory of our enemies. Frum did the same thing, of course, but he at least had the smarts to jump ship, and find himself a cozy berth on Obama’s U-boat. All hail to the prince of the Vichy-Cons!

Choosing between siding with David “Frumbag” or Rush “Blowhard” is really no choice at all. If Frum and his ilk murdered mainstream conservatism by transforming the GOP into a single-issue party (war), Limbaugh and talk radio were their accomplices, who happily disseminated neocon propaganda for popular consumption.

The primary difference is that Frum is a dedicated ideologue who seeks to advance the neocon agenda regardless of which party is in power. Limbaugh is a party hack, whose “conservatism” is defined entirely by partisan circumstances. Under Bill Clinton, Limbaugh was all about “Slick Willie,” Monica Lewinsky and sticky dresses. Bush’s most enduring legacy will be Iraq, so of course Rush hopped aboard, pounded his war drum and never looked back – and still won’t. Now Rush is simply anti-Obama, and if Limbaugh’s focus is suddenly exorbitant spending, it’s only because a Democrat is doing the spending. When did Rush ever criticize Bush’s unprecedented spending? Oh wait… Bush had to spend because of Iraq, the issue that defined or disqualified any “conservative” for the last eight years, thanks in no small part to men like Frum (ask Ron Paul or Joe Lieberman).

If I had to pick a side, it would be Limbaugh. Whereas Frum’s political evil is conscious and intentional, Rush’s is simply circumstantial.

Limbaugh is like a dog that behaves badly when his master is away. Rush was a good dog for Bush and spent eight years snapping at anyone he perceived as trying to hurt his master. Though dogs often misbehave, it’s hard to stay mad at them. Blind loyalty is all they know.

On purely aesthetic grounds, I’d be on Rush’s side. Although a fat blowhard, he looks minimally less ugly than the Frumbag.

Moreover, unlike the person who just attacked him as a “racist,” Rush, to my knowledge, has never insulted me personally. Of all those targeted in Frum’s attack on the “unpatriotic Right,” it was I who had to endure the most gratuitous insults.. At the time, I had not castigated W for having dragged us into the Iraqi quagmire; and the Frumbag’s only gripe against me was that he considered me a babbling lecturer, who was emotionally unfit to be a college instructor. This charge was totally fabricated and was an obvious ettempt to get me dismissed from my place of employment. Still and all, Frumbag does not wield the kind of influence that Rush does at the present time; and his efforts to ingratiate himself with the Obamaites, which have been going on for months, look like acts of desperation. As a neocon and GOP frontman, Rush is the more formidable personality, and the fact that NR has rallied to him against their longtime hitman indicates who is our more powerful enemy on the bogus right.

My barber just informed me that the economy’s “going up again” … which I guess he learned from a 1010WINS report that Citigroup has reported profits and the Dow is bouncing higher. Yippee! But there are always bull rallies in secular bear markets, so I’m not sure how much we should read into this latest up-tick—and I don’t think we should take it as a sign that something has changed fundamentally in the economy.

As for Citigroup—how exactly are we supposed to feel when a company whose losses have been socialized starts to make a profit. Will the government, or “the people,” get to keep their share of the earnings? I think not. Moreover, I seriously doubt that Citigroup is actually any more solvent than it was in December. The whole “bad bank” bailout idea floated in London and Washington—in which the government would absorb all the bad stuff and let the banks keeps all the profitable assets—was ultimately derived from existing accounting practices. While the easy-money party was still going, banks would dump all their really toxic debt into unnumbered slush-fund accounts—or even swap the debt amongst themselves like a hot potato—and keep it all safely hidden when it was earnings-reporting time. My guess is that Citigroup is doing more of the ol’ accounting shell game—most likely with Timmy and Ben nodding in approval, so that soon Obama can tell the people, “See, it’s working!”

Another news item in which there’s more than meets the eye is the report that Bernie Madoff is expected to plead guilty to 11 counts of fraud, which might ultimately result in 150 years in the slammer. Is Bernie repentant? Well…  Madoff was always more complicated than your average scam artist. Normally Ponzi schemers promise their victims vast fortunes—the original Charles Ponzi actually offered his clients a 200 percent return in 60 days in real-estate deals (which famously turned out to be in Florida swampland.) Bernie, on the other, took the opposite tactic. His hedge fund’s returns were ridiculously consistent, yes, but then they were also quite modest—the 10 and 12 percent returns Madoff LLC promised year in, year out weren’t anywhere close to the Big Boys’, and they were only slightly higher than most mutual funds’. Moreover, while Madoff is becoming the Ultimate Villain of the financial crisis, it’s also clear that he was not acting alone—his sons and wife surely knew the score, and there must have been many, many more. In some kind of despicable gesture of loyalty, Madoff seems to be taking the fall for others—colleagues in his firm, for sure, but then perhaps some people who are “high up.” I doubt the Madoff clan is hoarding all the loot. 

Paul just sent me an email saying that he’s actually rooting for Frumy in his battle against “the obese druggie who claims to be the ‘conscience’ of the GOP.” Maybe it’s just me, but I’d still take the side of the oft misguided but still instinctually sound Lumpen Commentariate over the dreadful little neocons any day. 

About.com, which has some 40 kagillion viewers worldwide or something like that, has just published a Top 10 list of the best conservative websites offering the “most insightful and informative conservative perspectives anywhere.” Taki’s Magazine is numero tres, just behind The Weekly Standard. and NRO. 

The full list is as follows: 

1. The Weekly Standard

2. National Review Online

3. TakiMag.com

4. The American Spectator

5. The American Conservative

6. The New American

7. FrontPage Magazine

8. The Christian Science Monitor

9. Cybercast News Service

10. HUMAN EVENTS

I wonder if numbers 4-10 realize how large the full-time Takimag staff is… 

So far, I haven’t been tempted to say anything about the various denunciations and defenses of Rush Limbaugh.  But I couldn’t resist commenting on National Review’s Captain Renault-like level of shock at David Frum’s antics.  Those who are interested may find my brief comments, at the Chronicles website, here.

Bill Anderson reads the Slim Times so that you don’t have to, and this morning he does a job on David Brooks. (Hat tip: RSMc)

Brooks then gives us this one, which is full of ‘internal contradictions,’ to use a socialist phrase:

...Republicans could get out in front of this crisis for once. That would mean being out front with ideas to support the wealth-creating parts of the economy rather than merely propping up the fading parts. That would mean supporting President Obama’s plan for global stimulus coordination, because right now most of the world is free-riding off our expenditures. That would mean eliminating all this populist talk about letting Citigroup fail, because a cascade of insolvency would inevitably lead to full-scale nationalization. It would mean coming up with a bold banking plan, rather than just whining about whatever the Democrats have on offer.

Whoa! He complains about propping up the “fading parts” and then advocates propping up a fading company. And then there is the line about the rest of the world “free-riding off our expenditures.” People, that is rich, rich, rich.

As Peter Schiff has said, it is the USA that has been free-riding off the rest of the world, taking their products for our green paper, which they then use to buy more U.S.

Government debt, and then continue the practice over and over again. The “stimulus” is just another episode in this same sorry and unsustainable chain of events.

I must admit that while Brooks does not have the academic “credentials” of Paul Krugman, this column truly is worthy of Krugman’s praise and adoration. However, I would bet that Krugman himself would claim that this was a “free-market” column.

It’s rather amusing that Brooks thinks of Obama’s Washington as Atlas supporting the world—no telling how much Asia is benefiting from our ensuring of the bonuses of Citigroup banksters, or our propping up of our failing companies, or our expansion of unemployment compensation!

The reality is the moment the world cuts Uncle Sam off (i.e. stops buying its T-Bill junk bonds) is the moment it starts to become much wealthier and freer. 

Moreover, as Schiff points out, something like a “global stimulus” is a contradiction in terms. We can’t all borrow money and run massive deficits; some people actually have to save. The only way this idea makes sense is if the entire world went on a big low-interest rate money-printing spree. 

Obama may simply not know what’s he’s talking about—Obanomics has mainly been an act of flailing around. But Bernanke and the central bankers do know what the score is. So far, interest rate cuts have been coordinated globally, and my guess is that the Fed is going to try to coax its peer banks into working in unison to inflate currencies worldwide.

Again, the moment a foreign central banker decides to buck the Washington consensus is the moment his country will begin to become wealthier. 

I decided to look at the trend lines for political ideology using the General Social Survey. The sample size for those asked about their politics is rather large, 19,000. Here’s a chart which plots different ideologies as a function of age, from 18 (on the left) to 90 (on the right), with the data set being limited to whites only:

Of course different slices of the population will exhibit this trend to differing extents.  Here they are broken down by attitudes toward the Bible (again, young on the left, old on the right):

As you can see, conservatism is holding its own among those who accept that the Bible is the Word of God, but eroding among the other two classes.  And today comes confirmation of further decline of Old Time Religion in modern America….