David Frum's "When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality?"

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David Frum's "When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality?"

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When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality?

By David Frum -- Published Nov 20, 2011 -- New York Magazine

"It’s a very strange experience to have your friends think you’ve gone crazy. Some will tell you so. Others will indulgently humor you. Still others will avoid you. More than a few will demand that the authorities do something to get you off the streets. During one unpleasant moment after I was fired from the think tank where I’d worked for the previous seven years, I tried to reassure my wife with an old cliché: “The great thing about an experience like this is that you learn who your friends really are.” She answered, “I was happier when I didn’t know.”

"It’s possible that my friends are right. I don’t think so—but then, crazy people never do. So let me put the case to you.

"I’ve been a Republican all my adult life. I have worked on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, at Forbes magazine, at the Manhattan and American Enterprise Institutes, as a speechwriter in the George W. Bush administration. I believe in free markets, low taxes, reasonable regulation, and limited government. I voted for John ­McCain in 2008, and I have strongly criticized the major policy decisions of the Obama administration. But as I contemplate my party and my movement in 2011, I see things I simply cannot support.

"America desperately needs a responsible and compassionate alternative to the Obama administration’s path of bigger government at higher cost. And yet: This past summer, the GOP nearly forced America to the verge of default just to score a point in a budget debate. In the throes of the worst economic crisis since the Depression, Republican politicians demand massive budget cuts and shrug off the concerns of the unemployed. In the face of evidence of dwindling upward mobility and long-stagnating middle-class wages, my party’s economic ideas sometimes seem to have shrunk to just one: more tax cuts for the very highest earners. When I entered Republican politics, during an earlier period of malaise, in the late seventies and early eighties, the movement got most of the big questions—crime, inflation, the Cold War—right. This time, the party is getting the big questions disastrously wrong."

Continue reading here:
http://nymag.com/news/politics/conserva ... m-2011-11/
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Re: David Frum's "When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality?"

Post by Dardedar »

This is David Frum:

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He is/was a Canadian and I grew up in Canada watching his mom, Barbara Frum on the evening news ("The Journal" I think it was).

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David is a consistent and well spoken conservative who, unlike his party, hasn't lost his mind. Just another conservative intellectual fleeing the increasingly incoherent and approaching insane, republican party.

Juicy quote from the above article:
"In the aughts, Republicans held more power for longer than at any time since the twenties, yet the result was the weakest and least broadly shared economic expansion since World War II, followed by an economic crash and prolonged slump. Along the way, the GOP suffered two severe election defeats in 2006 and 2008. Imagine yourself a rank-and-file Republican in 2009: If you have not lost your job or your home, your savings have been sliced and your children cannot find work. Your retirement prospects have dimmed. Most of all, your neighbors blame you for all that has gone wrong in the country. There’s one thing you know for sure: None of this is your fault! And when the new president fails to deliver rapid recovery, he can be designated the target for everyone’s accumulated disappointment and rage. In the midst of economic wreckage, what relief to thrust all blame upon Barack Obama as the wrecker-in-chief." LINK
"I'm not a skeptic because I want to believe, I'm a skeptic because I want to know." --Michael Shermer
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