Oh, for crying out loud, David Frum!

On the occasion of Bob Novak's death, must you still stubbornly defend your errors?

Robert Novak was respected and liked by many, and their memories of him are the memories that deserve hearing today.
But there is one thing about Robert Novak that I have had in mind for some time, and today seems the appropriate moment to say it.
Novak was one of the people I discussed in a still-controversial 2003 article for National Review, “Unpatriotic Conservatives.”
That piece analyzed a group of conservatives so radically alienated from their country that not even the events of 9/11 could rally them to her cause. . . .

OK, I'll stop there and if anyone wants to read the rest, they can. But David, do you not see what was wrong with your 2003 article, and what is even more wrong with your untimely defense of it?

First, you did not "discuss" or "analyze" Novak, Buchanan, et al., you attacked them, and in exactly the same manner that liberals have attacked conservatives as far back as Barry Goldwater or even Joe McCarthy.

You did what a friend of mine calls the "Ransom Note Method," cutting and pasting like a kidnapper gluing together words clipped from magazines. You then presented this assemblage as if it constituted a complete file of the essential facts that told us who these men really were.

Nudge, nudge: "They're all Jew-haters!"

Unfair and unfortunate, especially considering that on the issue which was even then being weighed in the balance -- the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq -- their doubts were ultimately vindicated.

'Cakewalks' Have Consequences
More than 3,000 U.S. troops died to implement that policy, thousands more were wounded, billions of taxpayer dollars were expended and, while the eradication of Saddam's Ba'athist regime was inarguably a good thing, patriotic Americans may reasonably ask, "Was it really worth the cost?"

The domestic political consequences have included the mobilization of a powerful left-wing grassroots movement, the loss of a congressional majority it had taken Republicans 40 years to gain, and the election of the most left-wing Democrat president in our nation's history. As to the foreign-policy results, we can only speculate what mischief may ensue in however many years it takes for American voters to get their bellyful of liberal misrule and regain their traditional good sense. (Assuming, of course, that the Bush-damaged GOP can yet be salvaged as a workable majority coalition, which is at this point a hypothetical proposition.)

For these multiple woes, then, leading advocates of the Iraq invasion must bear responsibility just as, had the invasion turned out to be the "cakewalk" that Ken Adelman notoriously predicted, its advocates would now be fighting over who should get credit for its success.

While future developments might conceivably lead historians to conclude that the Bush administration's policy was altogether wise and beneficial, as matters stand now, the Iraq invasion bids fair to rank as the most tragic folly of imperial overreach since the Athenian expedition to Sicily in 415 B.C.

How, then, can you possibly consider it "appropriate" on the occasion of Novak's death, to attempt to defend your foolish attack on him and others when even many of the most staunch Republican loyalists -- men and women who defended the Bush administration through thick and thin -- now freely admit that Novak, et al., were right all along?

Say what you will, David, but facts are stubborn things, and the facts are not on your side.

Ex-Democrats and GOP Cliques
Let us now leave to future historians to argue the merits of the Iraq invasion, just as Civil War buffs still endlessly argue whether Longstreet or Lee was correct about the tactical situation on July 2, 1863. (Most folks down home derogate Longstreet as a faithless scalawag, but I believe Lee was both sincere and correct when he said he was entirely responsible for that defeat.)

Military considerations aside, then, what of your attempt to smear Novak, along with Buchanan and others both living and dead, with the odious taint of anti-Semitism?

This involves an old intra-Republican feud to which I'd paid little attention before arriving in Washington. Having been a Democrat all my life until 1994 (a story I've told in bits and pieces over the past 18 months, including a thumbnail version at The American Spectator), I little suspected that what I had once dreaded as a mighty Republican monolith was in actuality a middle-school playground of antagonistic cliques.

David Horowitz and Peter Collier have described their own shock, upon leaving their New Left allegiances to support Reagan in the mid-1980s, at discovering the vicious factionalism inside the GOP. To its enemies, the Republican Party inevitably appears to be a carefully managed, well-funded, brutally efficient political machine, staffed entirely by ruthless automatons acting in synchronized lockstep.

This powerful illusion of Republican unity vanishes as soon as, dillusioned by the latest Democratic Party betrayal, the ex-Democrat ventures inside the GOP camp and tries to join up. Immediately, the arriviste finds himself pulled this way and that, urged to pledge his loyalty to one clique, one cause, one ideological posse within the intramural league of Republican rivalries.

Paleo, Neo, Me-o, My-o
Little did I suspect, while yet a Democrat, how bitterly Republicans were torn by Operation Desert Storm. While I thrilled at this brilliant military victory that vanquished the Vietnam Syndrome, from my purely political standpoint as a moderate Democrat, that war had the tragic consequence of destroying the presidential hopes of Sam Nunn.

Meanwhile, unknown to me, the GOP faction led by Buchanan had opposed Desert Storm from the beginning. By the nature of the arguments the Buchanan faction made against that war, they left themselves exposed to the charge of anti-Semitism. We might say, as Antony said of the accusation that Caesar was ambitious, "If it were so, it was a grievous fault, and grievously hath Buchanan answer'd it."

As in every previous and subsequent engagement between the paleocons and neocons, the paleos emerged the embittered losers, while the neos went on to new heights of prestige and influence.

However, allow me now to suggest, David, that in the Babylonian debacle that destroyed Karl Rove's "permanent Republican majority," the neocons have now suffered their Philippi.

You cannot recover from this self-inficted disaster, my friend. Whatever the future holds for the GOP, if the Republicans should recapture their Reaganesque mojo, displace the vaunting Pelosi Democrats and roll onward to new glories, I pray that they will never again commit the errors of Bushism, failing to discern wise counsel from folly merely because the fools were clever enough to accuse the wise of crude bigotry.

Plagiarize Yourself Much?
Your 2003 "Unpatriotic Conservatives" article that defamed Novak and other critics of the Iraq war -- some of them arguable less innocent than Novak -- was not your first exercise in that sort of attack. I am grateful to my friend Daniel McCarthy for having filled the gap in my knowledge on this score:

While at the [Wall Street] Journal, Frum accepted the freelance assignment that would make his name: a 1991 cover story for The American Spectator attacking Pat Buchanan.
The article, "Conservative Bully Boy," described Buchanan as "everything couth conservatives want to escape" and took aim not just at Buchanan himself -- then contemplating a run against George H.W. Bush for the 1992 Republican presidential nomination -- but also at his paleoconservative and libertarian supporters, including Paul Gottfried, Murray Rothbard, and Thomas Fleming, among others. Frum accused Buchanan of "sly Jew-baiting" -- so sly, evidently, that it slipped past Jewish intellectuals Rothbard and Gottfried, but not the ever vigilant Frum. . . .
The hit on Buchanan earned Frum a book deal with The New Republic's imprint at Basic Books; indeed, Frum reused much of his material on Buchanan and the paleos for Dead Right's chapter on "Nationalists."

So, a dozen years before your 2003 National Review cover, you had deployed the same theme in the same situation. When America was at war under a Republican president, you denounced conservative critics of the war in a way calculated to inflict maximum damage on their influence. What could be more damaging than the suspicion of anti-Semitism?

It is worth mentioning here that I have various disagreements with Buchanan and some of his supporters. For starters, I am a philo-Semite so staunchly pro-Israel as to make Netanyahu look like a squish. Also, as was true of Novak, I am a resolute free-marketeer who has no use for tariffs, labor unionism, and other such economic deviations to which the Buchananites are sadly prone. (I admit an uncouth nostalgia for the gold standard, but some Austrian School friends assure me that this is actually quite orthodox.)

Despite these various disagreements, however, I cannot bring myself to say that Buchanan and his followers are evil. Nor, in the grand scheme of things, would I consider their support for the Republican Party a net liability to the GOP. If you take a look at the Tea Party crowds and townhall "angry mobs" now striking terror in Democratic hearts, they look a lot more like Buchananites than Frumians.

All of which is to say, as I look at the conservative movement going forward, I think we have seen an end to the era when populists and traditionalists -- Bradford, Sobran, Brimelow, etc. -- would periodically be scapegoated and purged to maintain the standard of "respectability" necessary to sustain the support of a tiny clique of highbrow elitists.

We Don't Need No Stinkin' Elitists!
No more of that. From here on out -- and I think I speak now for a very broad consensus of conservative opinion -- we're rolling like the Hell's Angels on a Labor Day weekend run to Monterrey. If this flagrant contempt for elite opinion causes panic among the effete snobs at the Wall Street Journal, if it offends the tender sensibilities of gentle souls like Peggy Noonan, David Brooks and Rich Lowry -- well, screw them.

And in an ironic way, David, you have helped make possible the new bad-boy conservatism of the future. Let's list a few names of those you have denounced in recent months:

• Rush Limbaugh.
• Sarah Palin.
• Glenn Beck.
• Mark Levin.
• Matt Lewis.

Having done your best to alienate the widest possible swath of conservatives -- thinking that Obama's popularity would justify a purge of those clamorous talk-radio types -- you now deem the occasion of Novak's demise "appropriate" to revisit your old grudge against conservative critics of the Iraq war.

Alas, no one important to the GOP's future is listening to you now. If your conservative credibility were a bank, David, the FDIC would shut it down. So far as any ability to influence rank-and-file conservative Republicans is concerned, you're as bankrupt as Kathleen Parker.

What really makes your renewed ax-grinding against Novak's ghost so risible, David, is your accusation that Novak and friends were "so radically alienated from their country that not even the events of 9/11 could rally them to her cause."

David: You're Canadian.

Case closed. Court adjourned. You are remanded to the custody of Judge Ann Coulter for sentencing.

UPDATE: My previous discussion of the Frum/Novak/Levin feud has now been front-paged at Hot Air.

UPDATE II: More Novak obituary tributes piling up, including this one from American Spectator editor R. Emmett Tyrrell:

He is one of the most loyal contributors that The American Spectator has ever had. Some who have written for us never let it be known in their bios lest they give offense to polite company. Bob never hid his relationship with us and mentions it often in his stupendously informative memoir, The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years Reporting in Washington. . . . He served on our Board of Directors, never flinching when the government haled us before a grand jury or when and the Clintonistas infiltrated into the media tales of our treasonous behavior. During all this hullabaloo I innocently asked Bob what the mainstream journalists thought of us. The mortar fire was pretty heavy. "They think you're obnoxious," he responded. Gee, Bob have a heart!
He actually did have a heart and a strong conscience. On the one matter that temporarily ended our friendship he was proved wrong or at least sort of wrong. When that became apparent to him he suggested we dine and smoke the peace pipe. He admitted he had been wrong. I insisted that he had only been a bit wrong. Our friendship was renewed. In all my years as an editor I have only known one other acquaintance to come forward and admit to being wrong. And again, Bob was only sort of wrong, but he had the self-confidence to admit error. He also had the intellect and general competence to fall into error rarely.

Read the whole thing. Meanwhile, Mr. Tyrrell's indefatiguable right-hand man, Wlady Pleszczynski, posts this video tribute:

Special note to David Frum: I noticed your most recent e-mail in my inbox but, due to my chronic e-mail overflow (which my intern has promised to fix as soon as he returns from his holiday jaunt to Florida), it was auto-deleted before I had a chance to read it.

Please don't take a non-reply, or the reiteration of my criticisms, as unfriendly gestures. I still want to be your friend, but your relentless ax-grinding against the paleos and populists is passed its sell-by date. I have done what I can to try to persuade my paleo friends to relinquish their own ax-grinding, and intend to do more in that direction.

However, if there is to be a "New Majority" -- a conservatism that can win again, as you say -- it cannot be built on the basis of an elitist disdain for those unruly grassroots activists. Majority coalitions are not built by a process of subtraction, which is what your anti-populist agenda represents. The fact that Bill Kristol continues to say nice things about Sarah Palin should be a warning signal of how badly you're isolating yourself.

I'll be in town Thursday, if you'd like to upbraid me in person for this criticism.

'Journalism Through Whiskey'

Not every day I'm quoted by The Economist:

Mr Novak, who died today at age 78, helped invent modern political reporting. He grew up in Illinois and climbed to better and better jobs as "shoe leather" reporters in the sleepy state capitols of Nebraska and Indiana. As one admirer put it today, Mr Novak practicised "journalism through whiskey", befriending and socialising with sources, worrying less about sensational on-the-record quotes than finding out what these people, with their hands on the public treasury, really thought. It resembled British reporting more than the high-minded, Walter Lippman-worshipping "objective" reporting that dominated coverage in America.

Just had a long conversation with Joe Marier, in which I pointed out that Novak and Pat Buchanan were personal friends, and that Buchanan had (obviously) been one of Novak's sources in the Nixon and Reagan administrations. So when David Frum attacked Novak as "unpatriotic" for siding with Buchanan in opposition to the Bush administration's Iraq policy, it was not merely a policy dispute.

A Washington journalist needs sources, including sources he may disagree with politically, and if Sidney Blumenthal invited me to lunch tomorrow, I'd accept the invitation, assuming that Team Hillary had some really good anti-Obama dirt they wanted to inject into the media via the VRWC. (Trust me, Sid: No fingerprints, IYKWIMAITYD.)

Sometimes your sources become your friends. And when your sources and friends are at war with one another, calling each other the nastiest names they can think of, this is painful for a professional practicioner of neutral objectivity like me.

Speaking of "journalism through whiskey," there will be a 7 p.m. Happy Hour event Thursday at the Continental Lounge in Rosslyn, Va. -- just across the Potomac from D.C. -- and if you haven't been personally invited, feel free to show up anyway.

Bloggers, journalists, fat cats, bigwigs, congressional staffers, congressional mistresses, lobbyists, interns, hookers, policy wonks, oppo researchers, "senior administration officials," two-faced backstabbing GOP political operatives -- everyone should consider themselves invited.

Except my creditors. If I owe you money, you are specifically not invited. That would not be ethical.

Also: I don't drink whiskey. I had a traumatic experience at a Christmas party about 10 years ago, and had to part ways with my old buddy Mr. Jack Daniels.

Novak vs. Frum, Levin vs. Frum, and Casualties of Rhetorical Combat

Today's news about the death of Robert Novak brought to mind my first meeting with Novak in 2002, and subsequent events:

It was Novak's criticism of the Bush administration's Iraq policy, and especially his agreement with Buchanan on that subject, that earned him inclusion in David Frum's notorious 2003 catalog of "Unpatriotic Conservatives."
Since then, Frum has gone on to attack others, including Mark Levin. . . . As a result of the Bush policy -- and the rhetoric that attended the political defense of that policy -- every consideration of the U.S. position in the Middle East became a crude referendum on anti-Semitism, so that all dissenters were suspected of being closet Jew-haters in "unpatriotic" allegiance with terrorists.
This Manichean rhetorical escalation was both unfortunate and unjust, even if some of the dissenters (including Buchanan) had unwisely given their critics ammunition with which to arm accusations of mala fides. When discussions of policy become clouded by such damaging insinuations, when disagreement is cited as evidence of moral inferiority -- can anyone but a child molester be worse than an anti-Semite? -- then honest discussion becomes impossible. . . .
Today, of course, Novak can no longer be harmed by accusations that he, born at Jew, was guilty of aiding and abetting anti-Semites. Whatever his faults and errors, Bob Novak now awaits the judgment of a higher authority than David Frum. Let us pray that Frum will now pause to consider that he, too, shall one day be judged by the same authority.

You can read the whole thing at The American Spectator, and I am grateful to be linked in Ed Driscoll's own Novak tribute, as well as by DaTechguy, Mark Goluskin and Craig Henry.

Last night, I got a message from a veteran conservative communications professional, a friend who on Friday had tried to contact me about Frum's attack on Levin. Over the weekend, my attention had been consumed by other news, and so I had not responded to an earlier e-mail.

In the meantime, however, Dan Riehl had blogged about it, and someone called my attention to Frum's appearance on the Moyers show, and my response to that was actually mentioned on Monday night's show by Levin.

Nothing is more harmful to the legacy of Ronald Reagan than when a conservative, engaged in good-faith discussions of politics and policy, is publicly accused of dangerous malice, immorality or irresponsibility by another who purports similarly to revere the worthy cause to which Reagan dedicated his life.

Frum's attack on Levin was such an occasion, as was his "Unpatriotic Conservatives" article that attacked Novak and others. If a colleague in the conservative cause has erred in judgment, he should certainly expect criticism. Yet Frum has so clearly crossed a line -- and crossed it more than once -- that I wish he would entertain the hypothetical possibility that he has himself made errors of judgment.

Our nation is now in circumstances too desperate for good men to be silent while sincere conservatives like Mark Levin (who did honorable service under Ed Meese in the Reagan administration) are repeatedly and unfairly maligned by others who profess also to be conservatives.

(Cross-posted at the Hot Air Green Room.)

ROBERT NOVAK, R.I.P.

A great reporter has died.

UPDATE 12:11: Chicago Sun-Times:

Chicago Sun-Times columnist Robert Novak, one of the nation’s most influential journalists, who relished his “Prince of Darkness” public persona, died at home here early Tuesday morning after a battle with brain cancer. . . .

UPDATE 12:23: On Fox News, Major Garrett -- a former newspaper man himself -- just talked aobut Novak's excellence at "shoe leather" reporting: The time-consuming business of seeking out face-to-face interviews with sources.

His memoir, The Prince of Darkness, is full of stories about how he did this, meeting quietly at restaurants and bars with people, famous and obscure, who might be able to give him a scoop. People who've never worked as D.C. reporter would be amazed how often it is through casual social acquaintances -- someone you met at a party -- that a reporter gets a scoop.

"Better journalism through whiskey" is an ancient art that Novak once practiced nearly to his own destruction, until he took alarm at his health and swore the stuff off.

UPDATE 12:30: Tim Carney, who worked as an assistant to Novak for years, talks about the great man and his methods:

Bob Novak was, above all, a reporter.
Watching him work was a delightful education in reporting.
In 2004, I was chatting with Novak at a conservative dinner at the Willard Intercontinental in downtown D.C. when Ralph Reed approached. Novak greeted Reed, introduced me, and began trading pleasantries, but within one minute the conversation had somehow become an on-background interview -- I noticed this, but I’m not sure Reed did, because of the subtlety with which Novak deflected any questions back at Reed and steered the conversation away from himself.
It was a remarkable trait to find in a professional pundit so successful and so opinionated: Novak might have been the best listener I’ve ever known. . . .

What Novak was doing with Reed -- using a social encounter to pry out some useful bit of news -- is really the key to understanding why he was so good. The dramatic stuff of "All the President's Men" has given people a mistaken notion of what investigative reporting is really all about. It's actually more mundane than that -- but in some ways, more exciting. To reel in a source like a fish on the line is delicate business.

UPDATE 12:45 p.m.: Also at Human Events, Ken Tomlinson talks about Novak and the "Sonnenfeldt Doctrine," an example of how Novak's reporting impacted Cold War policy. Novak was originally a liberal Republican (that was before liberal Republicans learned to pretend they were conservative) but he always hated Commies.

But hating Commies is not an opinion. To say that communism is evil is to state a neutral, objective fact.

UPDATE 1:10 p.m.: When Novak's brain cancer was reported in July 2008, I wrote:

Early on in his career, Novak's saturnine appearance earned him the "Prince of Darkness" sobriquet. His longtime column partner, Rowland Evans, was a patrician WASP known and loved by Washington insiders, and so it was generally suspected (not altogether unfairly) that Novak was the troublemaker whose inside scoops caused so much embarrassment for the Establishment.

And in that post, I quoted Michelle Malkin's own tribute to Novak:

Novak has had a huge influence on my career. During a college conservative journalists’ confab, he urged us to seek metro newspaper jobs, pay our dues, and try to stay out of Washington for as long as possible. I took the advice to heart and left D.C. after a year as an intern at NBC to take my first newspaper job at the L.A. Daily News and then the Seattle Times.

Very good advice. The problem with a reporter coming to D.C. as a 22-year-old, I think, is that they come to take it for granted and don't appreciate what an honor it is to cover the Major Leagues, so to speak. When your earliest front-page scoops are about city councils and county zoning boards, you develop a better sensibility about the job.

Novak actually started out covering high-school sports as a teenage stringer for his hometown paper. After college and the Army, he eventually hired on with the Associated Press in their Omaha bureau, then transferred to their Indianapolis bureau before finally coming to D.C. at age 26. In Prince of Darkness, he writes:

I was the only AP newsman in Washington less than thirty years old, and there were precious few under 40.

That is to say, to be assigned to Washington was then, as it still should be, a plum job -- a privileged and an honor earned -- and I think that the kid who shows up in D.C. as a 22-year-old fresh out of college doesn't understand that.

More blog reaction at Mememorandum.

Liberal love for Bob Novak

Dramatic readings from the Leftosphere:



(Via Johnny Dollar.) Think Progress:

Vulgarity, bigotry, atrocious lies, and name calling are what they’re about, and ALL THEY’RE ABOUT! So, yes, let’s be gracious, but let’s also not forget that our battle is against soulless, mindless vermin, without a shred of compassion or human decency…

The Prince of Darkness is really a great book, considering it was written by soulless, mindless vermin.

Pray for 'The Prince of Darkness'

Robert Novak has been diagnosed with a brain tumor. He's survived cancer before, but after his accident last week, his doctors apparently decided to do a CT scan. Novak, one of America's finest investigative reporters, is 77.

Early on in his career, Novak's saturnine appearance earned him the "Prince of Darkness" sobriquet. His longtime column partner, Rowland Evans, was a patrician WASP known and loved by Washington insiders, and so it was generally suspected (not altogether unfairly) that Novak was the troublemaker whose inside scoops caused so much embarrassment for the Establishment.

Novak's 2007 memoir is full of fascinating never-before-revealed tidbits about how he got his biggest scoops during his 50-year career as a newsman, including the scoop about Joe Wilson's wife that became the "Plamegate" controversy. Although a staunch conservative who's never made any pretense of "neutrality," Novak is first and foremost a newsman who values a fact-filled scoop over any partisan or ideological loyalty. (His reporting has made him plenty of Republican enemies over the years.)

Prince of Darkness is not only an amazing inside look at the business of journalism, it's an important historical chronicle of our time. I recommend it without hesitation.

UPDATE: You stay classy, HuffPo!

UPDATE II: Ed Morrissey notes still more classiness from the tolerant and enlightened progressives at Democratic Underground.

UPDATE III: Michelle Malkin pays tribute:

Novak has had a huge influence on my career. During a college conservative journalists’ confab, he urged us to seek metro newspaper jobs, pay our dues, and try to stay out of Washington for as long as possible. I took the advice to heart and left D.C. after a year as an intern at NBC to take my first newspaper job at the L.A. Daily News and then the Seattle Times.

This is something overlooked by many young conservatives who seek to emulate Malkin (and Ann Coulter, too). Because of their youthful good looks, some of their admirers imagine that these two ladies came right out of college as conservative superstars. But as she mentions, Malkin spent seven years working for Left Coast newspapers before becoming nationally syndicated in 1999, and was a 31-year-old married mom when she published her first book, Invasion, in 2002.

Coulter spent even longer as a relative unknown -- first as a New York lawyer and then as a Senate staffer -- and didn't publish her first book until she was 34. It is far too common nowadays to meet ambitious young conservative writers who obviously want to be "the next Malkin" or "the next Coulter," but who don't want to pay their dues, and seem disappointed that fame hasn't found them by the time they turn 25.

Malkin also notes as "typical" the Associated Press's superficial "summary" of Novak's career. I would urge anyone who thinks Novak is just another right-wing pundit to read Prince of Darkness and learn the truth.