David Frum: Hatchet Man for Ben Bernanke
David Frum has written an article for CNN, "Ron Paul's money plan is far from golden." It is an attack on anything resembling a gold coin standard. It is therefore a defense of central banking in general and the Federal Reserve System in particular.
Who is David Frum? He is a Canadian immigrant who studied history at Yale and earned a law degree at the Harvard Law School. He has always earned a living as a journalist. He has long been employed by the neoconservative movement. He became a U.S. citizen in 2007.
In 2001, he got a job at the White House as a speech writer. It was Frum who coined at least part of the phrase, "axis of evil," which identified North Korea, Iraq, and Iran as the three most dangerous tyrannies of the decade. George W. Bush used the phrase in his State of the Union Address on January 29, 2002, his State of the Union Address after 9-11. That speech was part of his run-up for the Iraq War.
In his book, The Right Man: The Surprising Presidency of George W. Bush, Frum wrote that the head speech writer had given him the task of inserting a few words justifying a war on Iraq. He wrote "axis of hatred," but the head speech writer changed this to "axis of evil."
Frum's wife immediately sent out an email bragging about her husband's accomplishment, or at least two-thirds of the accomplishment: "axis of." This story got picked up by the Toronto Sun on February 1 -- not surprising, since her father was the editor.
The story spread. On February 27, Frum handed in his resignation. The rumor mill blamed Bush's anger at having had the most widely quoted phrase in his speech being attributed to a speech writer, as if anyone would have imagined otherwise, given Mr. Bush's skills of verbal communication. Frum later said that he had already given the White House a month's notice, meaning while he was still working on the speech. Whether he expected anyone to believe this story was a matter between him and his psychiatrist, which I assume he must have had, if he actually expected anyone to believe this story.
My point here is simple: Frum is a journalist who was briefly a speech writer for President Bush. For over two decades, he has bounced around inside the neoconservative movement. At present, he works for the American Enterprise Institute, which has a lot of money and has lots of Ph.D.- holding economists on the payroll. He has not written a book on economics, let alone monetary theory or policy. His books are on politics.
Then why did CNN, which is hardly a neoconservative media outlet, publish his hatchet piece on Ron Paul? Because he is one of its regular columnists.
Let's see: a conservative (it says here) who is a regular columnist for Ted Turner's creation. Isn't bipartisanship grand?Continued . . .
