I do not back down an inch from my long-held belief that, had his pet war in Iraq not turned into the biggest American foreign policy clusterfck in the history of clusters of fck, then David Frum—not to mention the think-tank bombardiers for whom he fronted—would not be out there now selling by the pint his tears over what has become of his Republican party, and the conservative "movement" that has been its only animating force over the past four decades. A guy's got to have a gig, right? The man wrote a book called An End To Evil, and he wrote it with Richard Fcking Perle, for pity's sake. This book argued for an invasion of Syria in 2004. It argued against a two-state solution of the Israeli-Palestinian bloodletting. The book argued for a national ID card and for severe restrictions on immigration from countries the two authors found troubling, which was practically everywhere in the Muslim world. In their most risible passage, Frum and Perle explain the problem called Iraq.

"But of all our mistakes, probably the most serious was our unwillingness to let the Iraqi National Congress, Iraq's leading anti-Saddam resistance movement, form a provisional government after the fall of Baghdad."

Feel the Chalabi-mentum!

As far as I am concerned, David Frum has not cleaned anywhere near enough bedpans at Walter Reed to be allowed back in polite political society. So you will have to forgive me if I fail to join the general chorus celebrating the brilliance of the lengthy weeper he's penned for The Atlantic about the "civil war" in the Republican party, and how that conflict has produced the phenomenon of Donald Trump. As regards Middle East policy, and domestic security measures, Trump hasn't said anything on the stump that Frum and Perle didn't say first in their book, except without the schlongs.

That said, the fundamental flaw in Frum's analysis of the effects of the prion disease on the Republican party is that history somehow begins in 2008, with the election of Barack Obama, or in 2010, when the people in their infinite wisdom elected the second-worst Congress of all time. By placing the beginning of the "civil war" in that period of time, Frum not only dodges his own responsibility for promoting the bad policies of a bad president, he also enables himself to see the rise of He, Trump as a recent phenomenon, rather that the logical end point of all the prior manifestations of the prion disease that first took hold when the party ate the monkeybrains to elect Ronald Reagan in 1980. The book Frum and Perle wrote when they were flying high was a symptom, too. And Trump may not even be its terminal phase. Frum writes:

This year, they are counting for more. Their rebellion against the power of organized money has upended American politics in ways that may reverberate for a long time.

Where does Frum see this "rebellion against the power of organized money"? The fact that He, Trump is self-financing his own campaign is an insufficient argument. Steve Forbes self-financed, too, and he wasn't exactly rebelling against organized money. Where is the Republican anywhere who is critical of the Citizens United decision? Where is the Republican of note who is arguing for more Wall Street regulation and not less? Where's the Republican version of Glass-Steagall that the widely ignored Jon Huntsman proposed in 2012? (In fact, where is Jon Huntsman, but never mind.) This may be my favorite part.

In the 1996 presidential election, voter turnout had tumbled to the lowest level since the 1920s, less than 52 percent. Turnout rose slightly in November 2000. Then, suddenly: overdrive. In the presidential elections of 2004 and 2008, voter turnout spiked to levels not seen since before the voting age was lowered to 18, and in 2012 it dipped only a little. Voters were excited by a hailstorm of divisive events: the dot-com bust, the Bush-versus-Gore recount, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Iraq War, the financial crisis, the bailouts and stimulus, and the Affordable Care Act.

"A hailstorm of divisive events"! Amazing. Who profited politically from most of the hailstorm? What party went out of its way to profit from the hailstorm? Who was president while most of this hailstorm was raging, anyway? Who sold off all the umbrellas, and took the roof off the house, and broke all the windows at the height of the hailstorm? It's a bit telling that a "divisive event" that actually was a natural disaster—Hurricane Katrina—doesn't seem to count as part of the hailstorm. The Republican party currently is in a brawl between establishment crackpots and outsider lunatics because that's the way the Republican party has been built for four decades. Your party is crazy, David. And there's no coming back. And, by the way, you're still about 200 bedpans short of being credible.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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