The Iraq war has been raging for ten years now (Yes, ten f*&king years) and though it's finally winding down, it still remains one of the biggest debacles in American history. For any American, the idea that the U.S. went to war with Iraq because we wanted to control Iraqi oil fields was a common one, but was always refuted with vitriol by the pro-Iraq war factions of the country.

David Frum now explains it away in his new piece in the Daily Beast:

I was less impressed by Chalabi than were some others in the Bush administration. However, since one of those “others” was Vice President Cheney, it didn’t matter what I thought. In 2002, Chalabi joined the annual summer retreat of the American Enterprise Institute near Vail, Colorado. He and Cheney spent long hours together, contemplating the possibilities of a Western-oriented Iraq: an additional source of oil, an alternative to U.S. dependency on an unstable-looking Saudi Arabia.You might imagine that an administration preparing for a war of choice would be gripped by self-questioning and hot debate.

There was certainly plenty to discuss: unlike the 1991 Gulf War, there was no immediate crisis demanding a rapid response; unlike Vietnam, the U.S. entered the war fully aware that it was commencing a major commitment.Yet that discussion never really happened, not the way that most people would have imagined anyway. For a long time, war with Iraq was discussed inside the Bush administration as something that would be decided at some point in the future; then, somewhere along the way, war with Iraq was discussed as something that had already been decided long ago in the past.

In Frum's piece he does rewrite his own history if you read the whole piece but this was still an important revelation.

There was so much hatred spewed our way because it was plain to us that war with Iraq was a massive blunder which would lead into an immoral catastrophe.

Glenn Greenwald follows up with this:

Prior to the invasion of Iraq, nothing produced faster or more vicious attacks on war opponents than the claim that oil was playing a substantial role in the desire to invade. On February 23, 2003, then-Cogressman Dennis Kucinich appeared on Meet the Press and argued that oil was a primary reason for the US to want to invade Iraq, and in response, Richard Perle (Frum's co-author in their 2004 "An End to Evil") replied: "It is a lie, Congressman. It is an out and out lie." That exchange led the Washington Post's liberal columnist Richard Cohen to write this:

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The above video is an interview Newt had with the Brody Files. He's trying to spin away his disgusting behavior with the women he was married to. He sure hopes there is a forgiving God. And his main excuse for dumping wives who got seriously ill for younger ones is that he was just working to hard for America.

Newt Gingrich: There’s no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate. And what I can tell you is that when I did things that were wrong, I wasn’t trapped in situation ethics, I was doing things that were wrong, and yet, I was doing them. I found that I felt compelled to seek God’s forgiveness. Not God’s understanding, but God’s forgiveness. I do believe in a forgiving God. And I think most people, deep down in their hearts hope there’s a forgiving God.

David Frum does not see it the same way after Gingrich tried to whitewash his past by using religion. Remember, he also changed religions as well. David Frum writes:

These are all fair and interesting points, but they do not address the reason that Gingrich’s personal life has been – and will be – so politically lethal.

It’s not the infidelity. It’s the arrogance, hypocrisy, and – most horrifying to women voters – the cruelty.

Anyone can dump one sick wife. Gingrich dumped two.

And that second dumped wife is talking to the media. From the Esquire magazine profile of Newt Gingrich published in September 2010:

After going to the doctor for a mysterious tingling in her hand, [Marianne Gingrich] was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

Early in May 1999, she went out to Ohio for her mother’s birthday. A day and a half went by and Newt didn’t return her calls, which was strange. They always talked every day, often ten times a day, so she was frantic by the time he called to say he needed to talk to her.

“About what?” He wanted to talk in person, he said. “I said, ‘No, we need to talk now.’ “

He went quiet.

“There’s somebody else, isn’t there?” She kind of guessed it, of course. Women usually do. But did she know the woman was in her apartment, eating off her plates, sleeping in her bed?

She called a minister they both trusted. He came over to the house the next day and worked with them the whole weekend, but Gingrich just kept saying she was a Jaguar and all he wanted was a Chevrolet. “‘I can’t handle a Jaguar right now.’ He said that many times. ‘All I want is a Chevrolet.’ “ He asked her to just tolerate the affair, an offer she refused.

He’d just returned from Erie, Pennsylvania, where he’d given a speech full of high sentiments about compassion and family values. The next night, they sat talking out on their back patio in Georgia. She said, “How do you give that speech and do what you’re doing?”

“It doesn’t matter what I do,” he answered. “People need to hear what I have to say. There’s no one else who can say what I can say. It doesn’t matter what I live.”

Who needs oppo research with quotes like those on the record?

Ouch.

The Week: Former G-Dub speechwriter and recovering conservative, David Frum weighs in on the shame of conservative media. Wonder how Breitbart will handle this one? And let's not ignore the shame of the Obama administration. Finally, just shame

Vagabond Scholar: The Five Circles of Conservative Hell...more

The Reality-Based Community: Steaming piece of Senator

Cause For Concern: Sen. George Voinovich's doesn't have a 'topic' option on his web contact page for jobs or unemployment, but crazy, right-wing conspiracies are well-represented

Corrente: Straws in the wind at the convenience store: "Welcome to America"

The Hunting of the Snark Cookie of Gratitude: Let's hear it for the commenters!

Ronald Reagan famously gave the 11th Commandment of GOP politics: Thou shalt not speak ill of your fellow Republican.

Apparently, some 30 years after he left office and six years after he passed away, David Frum didn't think it members of the GOP needed to still worship at the altar of St. Ronnie.

He was wrong:

David Frum, who wrote a widely-circulated blog post Sunday suggesting passage of the health care bill amounted to "Waterloo" for the Republican Party, has apparently been forced out of his fellowship at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

Frum posted a resignation letter on his blog following a conversation with AEI President Arthur Brooks announcing that his position is "terminated."[..]

On Tuesday, the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page hammered Frum for his "argument that if only Republicans had negotiated with Democrats, they could have somehow made the bill less awful than it is."

"Mr. Frum now makes his living as the media's go-to basher of fellow Republicans, which is a stock Beltway role. But he's peddling bad revisionist history that would have been even worse politics," wrote the newspaper.

While I shed no tears for someone who has been smack dab in the middle of some of the most devastating policies ever wreaked on the whole world, it does strike me as more of the same recklessness and frenzied emotion that we see with the tea baggers, but coming from the institutional conservatives of DC. The fact that they cannot bear criticism or self-examination and would rather bash and remove the person who counsels reflection and restraint makes me a little frightened of who is in charge. Could it be that AEI is actually taking orders from the tea baggers?

David Frum admits what most of the media ignores -- that Fox News works for the GOP -- but then turns it on its head.

Frum: "Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us, and now we are discovering we work for Fox."

Frum has been outspoken against a lot of the tactics the GOP has been using since Obama took over office and even called the passing of HCR the GOP's Waterloo.

Jamison Foser:

The audience for Beck’s Friday night special were each given copies of two books. One of them was Cleon Skousen’s Five Thousand Year Leap. Skousen, who died in 2006, is one of the legendary cranks of the conservative world, a John Bircher, a grand fantasist of theories about secret conspiracies between capitalists and communists to impose a one-world government under the control of David Rockefeller.

There’s always been a market for this junk of course. Once that market was reached via mimeographed newsletters. Now it’s being tapped by Fox News.

...

It’s not a new message of course. In fact, big parts of it seem almost self-consciously copied from Peter Finch’s legendary declamation in the movie Network.

Of course, Finch was only pretending to be crazy. He was an actor performing a role. Then again – so probably is Glenn Beck.

But what about Fox News? What’s their excuse?

Frum seems to be under the impression that Glenn Beck's blend of stupid and crazy is some sort of departure from Fox's previously high standards. If only that were so.

John Birch is alive and well in the Tea Party movement. Beck is acting as a transmitter for all things crazy, but he was just the latest extension of what Fox News has always been. And for Roger Ailes, it's not about news, but ratings anyway -- and crazy brings ratings.

AILES: I'm not in politics, I'm in ratings. We're winning.

Here's my piece on everything Ailes said on THIS WEEK: It's very revealing. Ailes exposes Fox News' GOP philosophical connections

In which Andrew Bacevich schools David Frum on strategic defense policy issues. David Frum asks Dr. Bacevich how he would advise Obama (just around 11 minutes in):

What I would say is, Mr. President, you need to stop having meetings about Afghanistan. You need to start having meetings in which your national security team will help you identify what are the core principles that are informing US strategy that will deal with the problem of jihadism. And Mr. President, if you indeed give into this impulse to obsess about Afghanistan, ... then your administration will continue to have no strategy. You'll have a "Long War," so-called, he certainly going to run for re-election based on his record in Afghanistan, assuming that he does some variant of the options that are on the table, but he won't have a strategy. And I think that that's a tragedy, for the United States of America, at this stage of the game, to not have a strategy.

From his lips to Obama's ears. Highly recommended, if not only to watch Bacevich calmly and confidently destroy Frum, as Frum wriggles uncomfortably in his seat.

I have been really enjoying this stuff, I can't lie. Watching conservative wingnut talk-show hosts attack other Republicans has been a joy. It's not only Limbaugh fighting with the GOP and then watching them come a crawling back to beg forgiveness either. They usually focus on the evil liberals and dirty f*&king hippies who hate America (people like you and me), so after I listened to this segment back in March, I knew we had won more than an election.

The infrastructure of talk radio (and FOX News) that was built to try and make America a one-party (conservative) system is now cannibalizing itself and Rush Limbaugh is the Zombie King. Mark Levin was offended by Frum's criticisms of Limbaugh in this article:

On the one side, the president of the United States: soft-spoken and conciliatory, never angry, always invoking the recession and its victims. This president invokes the language of “responsibility,” and in his own life seems to epitomize that ideal: He 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? A man who is aggressive and bombastic, cutting and sarcastic, who dismisses the concerned citizens in network news focus groups as “losers.” 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 – exactly the image that Barack Obama most wants to affix to our philosophy and our party. And we’re cooperating! Those images of crowds of CPACers cheering Rush’s every rancorous word – we’ll be seeing them rebroadcast for a long time.

Levin took offense at what he considered personal attacks against the Zombie King; he wouldn't even link up Frum's columns, but did read some of it to his audience while Frum tried to debate the merits of his case. Frum's central point was that Limbaugh is taking the GOP in the wrong direction -- something that's become obvious to everyone except the Zombies like Levin.

Every slimy thing Karl Rove did before and after Bush is unraveling, no matter how much Villagers like Gloria Borger elevate Rove to godlike status:

And they haven't stopped fighting...

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Holy FSM, I love Rachel Maddow. And not in a little way; I mean pick-her-up-and-carry-her-on-my-shoulders kind of love. And I love her even more for the gracious way that she deals with neo-con former Bush speechwriter David Frum.

Frum, who unbelievably has the nerve to sit in judgment of anyone when his carefully crafted propaganda led us into an unnecessary war, employs the Republican tried and true method of creating false equivalencies to defend the indefensible tactics of the McCain campaign. And his target isn't the expected Barack Obama or even Bill Clinton, but Rachel Maddow herself.

That's right. Frum -- who by the way, has only a glancing relationship with facts -- has the bad manners in addition to flawed thought processes to tell Maddow that using snark and humor in her news show brings down the national dialogue just as much as McCain and Palin's race baiting and fear mongering.

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Campaign for Our Future's Rick Perlstein (and author of the soon-to-be* published Nixonland) went head to talking head with Bush speechwriter and neo-con David Frum for the latest edition of BloggingheadsTV. The entire discussion is about 45 minutes in length, but this excerpt is instructive to the whole. Frum authoritatively starts asserting his opinions as facts about how Lyndon Johnson could have saved the Democratic party in the late 1960s "if there had been a police response that sent the message, 'this is not going to be tolerated, no more riots..."

But Frum's mistake is assuming that Perlstein doesn't have the actual facts on hand. How many stammers and concessions do you hear Frum make?

* corrected. Nixonland will be available on May 13th.

It looks like the most talked-about media piece of the day is David Frum’s take on Karl Rove’s White House tenure. Frum, a former Bush speechwriter, argues, relatively persuasively, that Rove crafted a White House political strategy that was predicated on helping Republicans, instead of helping the country. That’s true, of course, but anyone who’s been paying attention the last six years already knew that.

More importantly, Frum offers this take on, well, us.

I notice that much of the Democratic party, and especially its activist netroots, has decided that the way to beat Rove Republicanism is by emulating it. They are practicing the politics of polarization; they are elevating “framing” above policy; they have decided that winning the next election by any means is all that matters — and never mind what happens on the day after that.

Does Frum pay any attention to politics at all? Stop by any of the leading progressive blogs and you’ll see ample discussion of substance, policy, and legislation. In general, the netroots are practically obsessed with what happens “the day after” the election. Indeed, most the online discussion recently hasn’t elevated framing above policy, it’s done the opposite — how can Dems make strides on adding safeguards to warrantless surveillance programs? On restoring habeas? On affecting war policy? On investing in infrastructure?

If Frum wants to suggest Rove believed that “winning the next election by any means is all that matters,” I’d agree with him. But the netroots? Sounds like projection to me.