Former
Bush speech writer David Frum without a doubt forcefully rocked the GOP boat
earlier this week when he declared that the Democrats' passage of health reform
amounts to the Republican Party’s waterloo.
On
ABC's Nightline Monday
night, Frum continued to show his trepidation with the hard right political direction
that the GOP has taken.
"Republicans
originally thought that Fox worked for us and now we're discovering we work for
Fox," Frum told ABC's Terry
Moran. "And this balance here has been completely reversed. The thing that
sustains a strong Fox network is the thing that undermines a strong Republican
party." Moran
responded, "It sounds like you're saying
that the Glenn Becks, the Rush Limbaughs, hijacked the Republican Party and
drove it to a defeat?"
Frum
laid the blame for the anger of anti-health reform protesters not with the GOP,
but with talk radio and Fox News, which he said was the "real
leadership" in setting the terms of the political debate on health care.
As
Frum noted in his earlier ‘Waterloo’ piece, the Republican defeat on health
care reform is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry. Their
listeners and viewers will now be even more enraged, even more frustrated, even
more disappointed in everybody. They will be infuriated with all those except the
very ones who gin up the anger to begin with. These conservative entertainers
don’t allow opposing views to be heard because they know how easily it would be
to discredit them. Without the fallaciously manufactured dissent that comes
from their deceitful tirades and lies there would be no audience to keep tuning
in.
Frum’s
point had been previously affirmed by Fox News President Rogers Ailes himself when in an interview
with the Huffington Post in February he said Fox was in the ratings business,
not the politics business. The Fox position is ‘Country Last’; so what if
health reform helps tens of millions of Americans; we must spin lies to keep
the hate going so that our rabid audience buys our advertisers products, which
in turn, shower us with untold wealth.
"The
anger trapped the Republican leadership," Frum said, and "the
leadership discovered they have no room to maneuver as a result of the
anger."
Watch
the Frum interview here:
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