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O Canada
 David
Frum is back in the news. Howard Kurtz of
the Washington Post reports that he’s leading
conservative opposition to Harriet Miers, President Bush’s latest
Supreme Court
nominee,  and
he’s said to be “the target of fierce resentment by administration officials.”
After all, Frum used to be a Bush
speechwriter. When the president spoke of the “axis of evil” in
a State of the Union speech, Frum managed to take credit for the phrase
— though he’d actually written “axis of hate”
before some White House gremlin modified it, or intensified it, depending on
which version you think is more hysterical.
Restraint isn’t the Frum
style. A couple of years ago he was co-author of a book titled An End
to Evil (or was it An End to Hate?) which warned that
unless the War on Terror was won, the United States faced nothing less than
a “holocaust.”
Before that, he’d accused
several conservative writers (including me) of “hating their
country” because they opposed the war. The charge raised hackles,
since Frum himself is an American only on paper. He may be a naturalized
U.S. citizen, but Canadian blood runs in his veins, and Kurtz says he
“periodically” returns to his native country and still writes a
column for a Canadian newspaper. You can take the boy out of Canada, but
you can’t take Canada out of the boy, eh?
None of which has stopped Frum
from vaulting to the pinnacle of American conservatism. He has helped draft
a petition against Miers for conservatives to sign, and some 3,000 of them
have put their names to it, perhaps unaware of a possible alien interest.
Frum himself says the issue is one
of “principle.” He says he feels “ill” about opposing
such a “lovely person,” but Miers just doesn’t measure
up to Supreme Court standards.
He recalls her praising Bush as
“the most brilliant man she had ever met.” And I agree that this
alone should disqualify her from a seat on the Court. Frankly, I’d be
dubious about anyone who said Bush is even above average. I’m a
patriot, but I have to go with the Canadians on this one.
![[Breaker quote for O Canada!: Who betrayed conservatism?]](2005breakers/051018.gif) The
conservative reaction against
Bush is long overdue. Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review, one
of the most thoughtful young conservative writers around, marvels that it
has taken Miers to bring things to a boil. He observes that conservatives are
now “feeling betrayed.”
For five years Bush has trampled
the constitutional limits that used to define conservatism. And from whom
has he been getting his legal advice? From none other than Harriet Miers!
Now Bush asks us to accept Miers
because he trusts her. That’s actually an excellent reason for
misgivings about her.
Mrs. Bush adds her own suspicion
that Miers’s opponents are prejudiced against her because
she’s a woman. This is simply idiotic. Those opponents were recently
hoping the president would nominate any of several distinguished female
judges rather than one of his own male cronies.
The president has really blown it
this time. He has picked Miers to reward her loyalty to him — and he
also expects conservatives to support her out of loyalty to him. Bush, his
wife, and Miers form what Frum might call an axis of ninnies.
Conservatives have shown Bush
entirely too much loyalty, and the result is a mess to which the Miers fiasco
is only the latest addition. Why didn’t they see this coming when they
went along with his war, his entitlement spending, and his constitutional
transgressions? Miers’s fulsome praise of her boss is no more
revolting than that of certain Canadian expatriates who have hailed him as a
great war president.
Now at last the conservatives are
starting to see what a huge embarrassment George W. Bush is to the
very name of conservatism. They’re being forced to face all the
things they’ve pretended not to notice, while congratulating
themselves on winning control of the Federal Government.
While preaching limited
government, the conservatives wanted power. Well, they got it — about
as much power as men ever get. And what do they have to show for it? A
miserable war, boundless debt, and the biggest government in American
history. Now they’re fighting about who betrayed the
“principles” they used to espouse. Blame the Canadians.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2005 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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