The false equivalency of threatening violence and being sarcastic

Rachel Maddow interviewed David Frum on her show; Frum complained about the low level of political discourse during the current election season blaming both Republicans and Democrats. Rachel Maddow pinned him down and forced him to make clear what he was talking about.

Over at Hullabaloo Tristero has posted both the video of the interview and his discussion and dissection of what was said. It is quite fascinating, something that should be reviewed repeatedly and learned from.

David Frum is a master rhetorician. The video shows David Frum at his best, making incendiary accusations and then in pulling every rhetorical trick in the book avoiding being pinned down and taking responsibility for what he says. It also shows Rachel Maddow carefully avoiding the many rhetorical and emotional traps Frum sets and turning them back against him. Tristero then carefully explains what happened. I can't add to what Tristero wrote.

This video and Tristero's explanation of what was happening in it is one of the most educational things I have seen in a long time. Go read it and watch the video.

David Frum? Correct for once? Let's hope.

David Frum writes that the period of conservative ascendancy is coming to an end. Here is a key statement

In polls, Americans express preference for Democrats over Republicans on almost every issue surveyed, including such traditional Republican advantages as taxes, ethics and competence.

In 2002, equal numbers of Americans identified as Republicans and Democrats. In the six years since, Republican identification has collapsed back to the level recorded before Ronald Reagan. The decline has been steepest among young voters. If they eat right, exercise and wear seatbelts, today's 20-somethings will be voting against George W. Bush deep into the 2060s. Most ominously, US polls show an ideological sea change: a desire for a more activist government, a loss of interest in the tax question and a shift to the left on most social issues (although not, interestingly, abortion).

I wonder what his first clue was? FEMA at New Orleans? The Iraq invasion and botched occupation? The slow collapse of the American economy into recession and stagflation? Or maybe something else?

More on Rove - the Republicans don't like him either

David Frum has published an Editorial in The New York Times entitled "Building a Coalition, Forgetting to Rule." David Frum is, of course, and ex-Bush speech writer and a fellow at the Neocon American Enterprise Institute.

AS a political strategist, Karl Rove offered a brilliant answer to the wrong question.

The question he answered so successfully was a political one: How could Republicans win elections after Bill Clinton steered the Democrats to the center?

The question he unfortunately ignored was a policy question: What does the nation need — and how can conservatives achieve it? [Snip]

Instead of seeking solutions to national problems, “compassionate conservatism” started with slogans and went searching for problems to justify them. To what problem, exactly, was the faith-based initiative a solution?

This was a politics of party-building and coalition-assembly. It was a politics that aimed at winning elections. It was a politics that treated the problems of governance as secondary. But of course governance is what incumbents get judged on — and since 2004, the negative verdict on President Bush’s governance has created a lethal political environment for Republican candidates.

David explains that Karl Rove practiced "political polarization" rather than "Wedge Politics."

Wedge politics unites a large constituency on one side, while splitting the coalition on the other side. In the 1970s, crime was a wedge issue: pushing white urban Democrats away from their black and liberal New Deal allies. In this strict sense, the only wedge issue Mr. Rove deployed was immigration, and he deployed it against his own side, dividing business donors from the conservative voting base.

Polarization, however, is Karl Rove’s specialty. He united his own base on one side — and united his opponents on the other. Al Gore and John Kerry each won 48 percent, the best back-to-back performance by a losing party since the 19th century. Play-to-the-base politics can be a smart strategy — so long as your base is larger than your opponents’.

But it has been apparent for many years that the Democratic base is growing faster than the Republican base. The numbers of the unmarried and the non-churchgoing are growing faster than the numbers of married and church-going Americans. The nonwhite and immigrant population is growing at a faster rate than that of white native-borns. The Democrats are the party of the top and bottom of American society; the Republicans do best in the great American middle, which is losing ground.

Mr. Rove often reminded me of a miner extracting the last nuggets from an exhausted seam. His attempts to prospect a new motherlode have led the Republican party into the immigration debacle.

In my brief service as a speechwriter inside the Bush administration, I often wondered why it was that skeptical experts on issues like immigration could never get even a hearing for their point of view. We took the self-evident brilliance of our plans so much for granted that we would not even meet, for example, with conservative academics who had the facts and figures to demonstrate the illusion of Rovian hopes for a breakthrough among Hispanic voters. We were so mesmerized by the specious analogies between 1996 and 1896 that we forgot that analogies are literary devices, not evidence.

In 2006, Republicans and conservatives paid the price for this we-know-best attitude. I fear that we will pay an even higher price in 2008.

While I admit that I am personally suspicious of anything that David Frum writes or says, this seems like a pretty straight forward analysis of how Rove has operated and what the results have been.

So why does the Bush White House refuse to gather information from outside experts? The answer is "attitude." They have a bad case of the "Not invented here" attitude. A story told by Dick Armey to NJosh Green (and published by Kevin Drum) demonstrates it.

"For all the years he was president," Armey told me, "Bill Clinton and I had a little thing we'd do where every time I went to the White House, I would take the little name tag they give you and pass it to the president, who, without saying a word, would sign and date it. Bill Clinton and I didn't like each other. He said I was his least-favorite member of Congress. But he knew that when I left his office, the first schoolkid I came across would be given that card, and some kid who had come to Washington with his mama would go home with the president's autograph. I think Clinton thought it was a nice thing to do for some kid, and he was happy to do it."

Armey said that when he went to his first meeting in the White House with President Bush, he explained the tradition with Clinton and asked the president if he would care to continue it. "Bush refused to sign the card. Rove, who was sitting across the table, said, 'It would probably wind up on eBay,'" Armey continued. "Do I give a damn? No. But can you imagine refusing a simple request like that with an insult? It's stupid. From the point of view of your own self-interest, it's stupid. I was from Texas, and I was the majority leader. If my expectations of civility and collegiality were disappointed, what do you think it was like for the rest of the congressmen they dealt with? The Bush White House was tone-deaf to the normal courtesies of the office."

Not only were Bush and Rove not interested in obtaining information from outside the White House as Frum pointed out above, they did not even practice the the normal civilities that ease working together with people they disagree with, and if they treated the conservative Republican Speaker of the House that way, they disagreed with everyone.

For the conservatives who decry the "Bush haters," they need to remember that a person gets back the same behavior he demonstrates towards others. There is nothing in the Constitution that even hints that the President should be treated with a level of respect and civility he fails to demonstrate to others.

Let's not forget that Rove put Bush into the office he now holds, and Rove has also set the standards for how to treat those with whom he disagrees. Bush is responsible for this, the most disastrous Presidency in America's history, but Rove is right up there in line for blame with Bush himself.

Digby explains the Republican panic

Panic isn't too strong a word, either. Digby deconstructs a new whine from David Frum over at NRO about the huge advantage Democrats have with young voters. Frum points out that young white voters still prefer Republicans by about 2%, but that Hispanic and African-American young voters overwhelmingly prefer Democrats. So what is the republican problem? According to Frum, not Bush's social policies. The problem is the failure of the Bush administration is

... the legacy of immigration non-enforcement.

Digby points out that the poll was not of new immigrants. It was of voters, most of whom are American born and educated. But this piece of right-wing Republican ignorance certainly explains why immigration reform and a fence across the border between Mexico and the U.S. are such great right-wing priorities.

Essentially Frum complains that young Hispanics and African-America voters detest the Republicans. Does he ask why? Of course not, because the only answer to that is the fact that the Republican Party is the party of institutionalized Racism in America today. Digby provides the evidence, as well as economic studies that show the reason why America does not have the social support system fitting to a modern industrial nation is that very Racism Frum so studiously ignores.

Essentially Frum is lamenting that the vote is not restricted to White Americans only. Digby points out that this very Racism is something that Bush and Rove have tried to wean the Republicans off of, but failed. So it is very likely that the alternative was the Attorney General's DoJ efforts to suppress likely Democratic votes in key states.

Go read Digby for the full details. As usual, her post is worth reading.