Sure the American Enterprise Institute is stillcrazy with climate denial and delay after all these years. And sure it recently compared EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to Clint Eastwood and carbon polluters to criminals. But it always retained the semblance of a serious think tank.
Heck, back in October, Steven F. Hayward, “the F.K. Weyerhaeuser fellow at the American Enterprise Institute” wrote:
The brain waves of the American right continue to be erratic, when they are not flat-lining.
He’s still got a job at AEI. I guess that sort of truth is okay to utter.
But while AEI scholars can question the lack of ideas in the entire conservative “movement,” apparently they can’t question GOP tactics, as TP’s Faiz Shakir explains in Bartlett: Frum’s Dismissal Shows ‘All That Matters Now Is Absolute Subservient Adherence’ To The GOP:
Former Bush speechwriter David Frum — who famously authored the phrase “axis of evil” — has been unceremoniously forced out from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a right wing, neoconservative think tank. Frum’s dismissal resulted from criticism he directed at the Republican Party for staking a failed strategic posture of “no compromise” on health care. As a result, “it’s Waterloo all right: ours,” Frum wrote to his fellow conservatives.
Right-wing donors of AEI began raising concerns about Frum. So, AEI president Arthur Brooks took Frum out to lunch this week to tell him that, while he valued “a diversity of opinion,” he wanted to downgrade Frum to a nonsalaried position. Frum declined the offer and posted a letter of resignation on his personal website.
Bruce Bartlett, a former economic adviser to President Bush, suffered a similar fate as Frum. After leaving the Bush White House, Bartlett authored a book titledImposter: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy. That book led to his dismissal in 2005 as a senior fellow at a conservative Texas-based think tank called the National Center for Policy Analysis
On his personal blog, Bartlett referred to Frum’s departure from AEI as “the closing of the conservative mind.” He elaborated further this morning on C-Span’s Washington Journal:
BARTLETT: [W]hat’s really going on here is that adherence to conservative principles has been – is out the window now. All that matters now is absolute subservient adherence to the Republican Party line of the day. And that’s what got David into trouble. He was critical, not even of Republican principles, but of Republican tactics on the health care debate. And now, even that is considered, you know, you can’t say that or you lose your job.
Watch it:
On his blog, Bartlett rips AEI: “The organization has lost an enormous amount of credibility by firing him and hiring Republican political hacks like Marc Thiessen. That’s a statement I will never need to retract.”
The Wall Street Journal criticized Frum earlier this week: “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.”
I think it has been obvious for a while that the conservative movement should be renamed the conservative stagnation:
- Gingrich sums up conservative ethos: “I am not a citizen of the world! I think the entire concept is intellectual nonsense and stunningly dangerous”
- Joe Klein on the GOP: “How can you sustain a democracy if one of the two major political parties has been overrun by nihilists?”
- Teabaggers try to “flush” Graham out of GOP, calling him “traitor” and “RINO” and “wussypants, girly-man, half-a-sissy”; Graham responds, “We’re not going to be the party of angry white guys”
- Honey, I shrunk the GOP, Part 4: Moderate GOP candidate yields to angry conservative.
- “Honey, I shrunk the GOP, Part 1: Conservatives vow to purge all members who support clean energy or science-based policy.”
- Part 2: Opposing clean energy hurts GOP — Mellman.
