St. Christopher's Mettle

David Frum on a great man of the middle:

If Christopher [Hitchens] quit the left...he never joined the right. Like his great hero George Orwell, he was a man whose most creative period of life was a period of constantly falling between two stools: his new hatred for George Galloway never dimmed his old animosity toward Henry Kissinger. He was for the Iraq war without ever much trusting or liking the leaders who led that war. The stock phrase of the 2000s on the right was "moral clarity." If moral clarity means hating cruelty and oppression, then Christopher Hitchens was above all things a man of moral clarity. But he was also a man of moral complexity, who would not submit to Lenin's demand that who says A must say B. Christopher was never more himself than when - after saying A - he adamantly refused to say B.

I wrote to Hitchens in June 2010, after I'd finished reading Hitch-22 and just before his cancer diagnosis. I never heard back. I'm not even sure I had the right address. Yesterday, before learning of his death, I'd been thinking of the e-mail as news came of the formal end of the U.S. war in Iraq:

Dear Mr. Hitchens:

Thank you for your wonderful memoir. I loved many things about it, but I'll confine my comments to some passages for which I was especially grateful.

As a seminarian, I preached a sermon about the Iraq war in the spring of 2003 (attached, not that you would possibly have time to read it) which, in our liberal Episcopal diocese, was viewed as bloodcurdlingly pro-war by virtue of not being antiwar. In the receiving line, a woman called me a liar for associating Saddam Hussein with Islamic totalitarianism. Since then, I've often wondered if I should've kept my intern's mouth shut, because of what our congregant said and also because of the way the war sometimes was going. Your summary of the evidence of Saddam's latter-day fundamentalism stanched one vein of second-guessing, and some patience about the ultimate outcome for the region and the people of Iraq should take care of the rest.

Thanks again.

Yours ever,

John Taylor

Consent Of The Governed Under Review

William A. Galston and former Bush speechwriter David Frum, writing about (as MK suggests) the latest iteration of Richard Nixon's silent majority:

On Dec. 13, more than 1,000 citizens from the 50 states will convene in New York to change the odds. They are founding a movement - No Labels. Among them will be Democrats, Republicans and independents who are proud of their political affiliations and have no intention of abandoning them. A single concern brings them together: the hyper-polarization of our politics that thwarts an adult conversation about our common future. A single goal unites them: to expand the space within which citizens and elected officials can conduct that conversation without fear of social or political retribution.

I wish I could go. Instead, I "liked" No Labels on Facebook (and had already asked for an "Of no party or clique" t-shirt for Christmas).

Hat tip to Maarja Krusten

Frummery

In a column last week, Bush ex-speechwriter David Frum implied that Hugh Hewitt opposed a third-party candidacy in the New Jersey gubernatorial race while supporting one in a House race in New York:

Conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt this week offered a stern condemnation of this fratricide on his popular program, calling the third-party candidate:

.... a wrecker, a selfish "look at me" poser .... It takes an outsized ego to look at poll after poll that puts you behind not one but two candidates by more than 10 points and still declare yourself in the hunt.

Whoops! Sorry, rewind. Fzzzzwwwwvvvvwwwzzzp. That was an editing error. Hugh Hewitt was not blasting Doug Hoffman, the third-party candidate in New York. In fact, Hoffman is the darling of talk radio and Fox News, which have helped to spread Hoffman Fever for the past few weeks.

No, Hewitt was attacking the third-party candidate in New Jersey's gubernatorial race, an independent named Chris Daggett who has drawn votes from the official Republican standard-bearer, Chris Christie.

When Frum wrote that Hoffman is "the darling of talk radio" after having just quoted Hewitt, he left the reader with the impression that Hewitt was for Hoffman. Why drag him into the column otherwise? When an outraged Hewitt told Frum on his program yesterday that he doesn't support Hoffman, nor spoiler candidacies in general, Frum admitted that he didn't know Hewitt's position on the New York 23rd and hadn't bothered to check.

In a blog post describing the confrontation, Frum said that in retrospect, he should've been more careful. Whoops! Sorry, rewind. Fzzzzwwwwvvvvwwwzzzp. Frum called Hewitt a bully and impugned his manhood.

Hat tip to Mike Cheever

And Girls, He's A Great Dancer

In an otherwise useful article about the future of the conservative movement, former Bush speechwriter David Frum veers briefly off course:

[Obama] 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?... 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...

Physically honed? Women dig him? Limbaugh is fat? Am I reading this? What would be the relevance in such an essay of Bella Abzug's dimensions or those of any number of buffed-out sociopaths? Several women I know do not trust Obama because he is going to raise their taxes, the cut of his jib notwithstanding. So let's rebuild the GOP without resorting to demeaning and irrelevant physical descriptions and veiled misogyny.

A Greener, Redder Stimulus

David Frum:

Instead of fighting Dems on the dollar amount of spending, knowing that we would lose that fight in any event, we could have stood with Obama and called for large high-tech infrastructure projects that would employ large numbers of minorities in construction and white collar suburbanites in development. These projects (high speed rail corridors as an example) would also capture the imagination of the green close-in suburbs that are turning viciously against the GOP and have the strategic benefit of jamming up the young Dem members (Webb/Warner/Hagan/McCaskill) who depended on these voters for their victories.

Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan