You Bet Your Career

Michael Steele went up against Rush, Steele is now in mortal danger of being tossed out as RNC chair at this point. Nobody within conservative circles dares take on the Oxycontinfather...until today.

Who dares to bare fangs at Lord Limbaugh? In the role of Oliver Twist, it's little David Frum!

Every day, Rush Limbaugh reassures millions of core Republican voters that no change is needed: if people don't appreciate what we are saying, then say it louder. Isn't that what happened in 1994? Certainly this is a good approach for Rush himself. He claims 20 million listeners per week, and that suffices to make him a very wealthy man. And if another 100 million people cannot stand him, what does he care? What can they do to him other than … not listen? It's not as if they can vote against him.

But they can vote against Republican candidates for Congress. They can vote against Republican nominees for president. And if we allow ourselves to be overidentified with somebody who earns his fortune by giving offense, they will vote against us. Two months into 2009, President Obama and the Democratic Congress have already enacted into law the most ambitious liberal program since the mid-1960s. More, much more is to come. Through this burst of activism, the Republican Party has been flat on its back.

Decisions that will haunt American taxpayers for generations have been made with hardly a debate. The federal government will pay more of the cost for Medicaid, it will expand the SCHIP program for young children, it will borrow trillions of dollars to expand the national debt to levels unseen since WWII. To stem this onrush of disastrous improvisations, conservatives need every resource of mind and heart, every good argument, every creative alternative and every bit of compassionate sympathy for the distress that is pushing Americans in the wrong direction. Instead we are accepting the leadership of a man with an ego-driven agenda of his own, who looms largest when his causes fare worst.

In the days since I stumbled into this controversy, I've received a great deal of e-mail. (Most of it on days when Levin or Hannity or Hugh Hewitt or Limbaugh himself has had something especially disobliging to say about me.) Most of these e-mails say some version of the same thing: if you don't agree with Rush, quit calling yourself a conservative and get out of the Republican Party. There's the perfect culmination of the outlook Rush Limbaugh has taught his fans and followers: we want to transform the party of Lincoln, Eisenhower and Reagan into a party of unanimous dittoheads—and we don't care how much the party has to shrink to do it. That's not the language of politics. It's the language of a cult.

Put aside the fact that Frum doesn't have what the Republican Party needs -- actual solutions -- either, in fact in the article he basically says the GOP needs to take up the Democrats' health-care reform and global warming positions.

I got news for you, Dave. Democrats have already been there on that. The positions you're espousing are the ones the Demos have been all over for a long, long time now, and mostly ridiculed by yourself and the entire GOP. America trusts you no longer. Frum sees that now, of course. He's trying to portray himself as a Sensible Centrist, but hey...he's jumped ship on his National Review buddies and is now burning bridges with Rush.

Maybe he'll eventually figure out he has been wrong all this time. Hard for a man to take, I know. But he's dead to the GOP now as surely as Ahnold or Charlie Crist is, and frankly, I don't have any sympathy for the man. You spend twenty years doing yeoman's work for the cartel that got us into this mess and claim you're reformed now?

Be off with you, Frum.