The Right's Voice Of Reason, Never Was Limbaugh

Rush Limbaugh used to call himself the voice of reason. He really never was reasonable and certainly is not now. Does he still call himself the voice of reason? But David Frum is becoming the voice of reason from the right. Frum has been questioning the inconsistencies of conservatives on health care and has laid down truth about our system of government, Barack Obama may be wrong but that does not make him evil. Frum points to the increasing ferocity of language that is appears to be leading down a path to terrible violence.

Frum writes:

"The Nazi comparisons from Rush Limbaugh; broadcaster Mark Levin asserting that President Obama is ‘former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin claiming that the president was planning "death panels" to extirpate the aged and disabled; the charges that the president is a fascist, a socialist, a Marxist, an illegitimate Kenyan fraud, that he "harbors a deep resentment of America," that he feels a "deep-seated hatred of white people," that his government is preparing concentration camps, that it is operating snitch lines, that it is planning to wipe away American liberties": All this hysterical and provocative talk invites, incites, and prepares a prefabricated justification for violence.”

He continues:

“Just yesterday, the radio host Sean Hannity openly contemplated violence—and primly tut-tutted that if it occurs, the president will have only himself to blame.”

He ends:

“It's not enough for conservatives to repudiate violence, as some are belatedly beginning to do. We have to tone down the militant and accusatory rhetoric. If Barack Obama really were a fascist, really were a Nazi, really did plan death panels to kill the old and infirm, really did contemplate overthrowing the American constitutional republic—if he were those things, somebody should shoot him.

But he is not. He is an ambitious, liberal president who is spending too much money and emitting too much debt. His health-care ideas are too ambitious and his climate plans are too interventionist. The president can be met and bested on the field of reason—but only by people who are themselves reasonable.”

"The guns are coming out. The risks are real," Frum writes and we know it is silly to carry a gun that is not loaded. Is it silly to carry a loaded gun if you are not going to use it? Is there violence coming?




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David Frum, Reasonable Critique Of Current "Conservative Patriotism"

Frum testifies at NewMajority.com to the American rule of law and the current misplaced "demise of liberty" attitude. A sample:

"If I lived in a country in imminent danger of a Bolshevik or Fascist seizure of power, I’d be a cowardly fool if I failed to use every means to prevent it, including violence if need be. If it were true that our political opponents wanted to impose tyranny on the United States – if (as Rush Limbaugh said the other day) a vote for the other party was a vote for “totalitarianism, dungeons, and torture,” then what patriot could possibly abide a political defeat?

Happily, none of those things are true. As wrong and harmful as the Obama administration’s plans are, the administration is playing by the rules of the game. To agitate people into thinking otherwise is to corrode the foundations of the American constitutional regime."

More discussion in this vein would be productive.

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