David Frum in the WSJ

The Frumster reviews The Right War? The Conservative Debate on Iraq. I sent OpinionJournal.com the following letter, but for some reason they didn't post it:

As a regular contributor to The American Conservative magazine, I'd like to point out that I strongly advocated America's war on the Taliban, but was highly skeptical of the ill-considered Iraq adventure that Mr. Frum whooped for so ferociously.

In contrast, Mr. Frum, during his brief tenure as a Presidential speechwriter, was responsible for concocting 2/3rds of the phrase "Axis of Evil" (Frum came up with "Axis of Hate"), a verbal invention so self-evidently stupid in its insincerity (claiming that long-term enemies Iraq and Iran and distant North Korea were allied!) that it proved the most globally alienating single phrase in American diplomatic history. At the beginning of 2002, after the conquest of the Taliban, America's prestige was never higher on the world stage, but Frum's idiotic phrase in the 2002 State of the Union address set off the long decline in America's position of leadership.

After doing as much damage to America as any speechwriter in decades, Frum still had the gall in the spring of 2003 to attack us conservatives who had displayed the traditional Burkean conservative virtue of prudence about his Iraq invasion as "unpatriotic."

Why does anyone still pay David Frum money for his opinions? How much harm can one man do to America, to the Republican Party, and to the conservative movement and still have people listen to him?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer