Glenn Beck is doing good work and he is effective. Van Jones is out and ACORN has been defunded. But Beck can exaggerate and misrespresent as in his attack on Cass Sunstein. So is he a liability to the conservative cause as, I have maintained, Ann Coulter is? David Frum and David Horowitz discuss the question here. Excerpts from Horowitz directed at Frum:
. . . there are conservatives – you are one, David Brooks is another -- who think that if everyone on our team only behaved better, there would be no targets for the neo-Stalinist left to attack. Not a chance. If they were able to demonize George Bush as a liar, a murderer, an idiot, and a religious nut they can do that to anyone. So-called liberals have shown themselves to be shameless, unprincipled, bigoted, intolerant and determined to personally destroy any conservative whom they consider to be politically effective and therefore dangerous to their agendas. That’s where we really differ. If you understood this or believed it, you would not attack a Glenn Beck in the scorched-earth manner in which you did.
[. . .]
In fact, this is an exemplary case of exactly what I think is wrong with the conservative movement in contrast to what you think. Franken is now a U.S. Senator in part because conservatives of whom you are typical want to conduct politics by the Marquis of Queensberry rules when the other side is in it as war in which destruction of the enemy is the game. Franken calls us evil. You call him mistaken (and unfunny). And you want other conservatives to do the same. The more conservatives who follow your advice the more we will lose. Personally, I am thrilled with what is happening now in the conservative movement – our aggressive media like Fox and talk radio, the emergence of enraged conservative masses – the tea baggers – as leftist half-wits like to dismiss them. It is this energized, unapologetic, in-your-face (but also civilized and intelligent) conservative base on whom the future not only of the movement but the country depends.
Ronald Radosh, another red diaper baby who saw the light -- I highly recommend his Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left -- weighs in here.
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