Friday afternoon, Aqua Regia commented:

I’m becoming concerned that Matt may be actually starting to like David Frum. It’s really important to remember that that guy espouses some truly horrific ideas, and he does not care about domestic policy at all, except inasmuch as it helps him achieve his terrifying foreign policy goals.

I’ve met Frum a few times in person and we’ve exchanged emails and I do, in fact, like him. But, yes, it is worth keeping in mind that notwithstanding his past year’s worth of being the “reasonable conservative” his ideas about national security policy are very hard right. The best thing I can say about his book (co-authored with Richard Perle) An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror is that it inspired what’s probably my favorite negative book review of all time.

That said, I think its unfair to say that Frum doesn’t care about domestic issues. What makes him a reasonable interlocutor with things worth saying on a variety of topics is precisely that he does care. Conservatives who care about the issues—whichever issues it is they care about, and whatever their substantive views on those issues—aren’t going to spend their time on nonsense inquiries into the nature of Obama’s plot to throw grandma in the Gulag or on fantasizing about the idea that Sarah Palin would make an effective president or state-by-state efforts to ban big government microchip implantation.

Here’s a great catch from my colleague Zaid Jilani. First, here was Ryan Grim and Sam Stein reporting that John Cornyn said the problem with Chris Dodd financial regulation bill is that it didn’t break up big banks:

Last week, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) met with 25 top Wall Street executives in New York City to hear their concerns regarding reform. Both say they oppose the Democratic plan as a perpetual bailout. “By creating a fund, that’s an invitation to Congress to spend that money just as we have in the highway trust fund and the surplus in Social Security,” Cornyn said.

HuffPost asked Cornyn what his alternative solution to the Democratic plan would be. “I think we need to look at the concentration of banking in just a handful of entities that threaten our economy if they go under,” Cornyn said. “They need to be smaller in order to avoid that problem and I would support efforts to move in that direction.”

This is a concern that a lot of progressives have expressed, and that’s why Senator Bernie Sanders introduced an amendment into the Senate Budget Committee that would have facilitated bank-shrinkage. Cornyn then voted against Sanders’ amendment which failed 10-12.

Which is just to remind you that in this climate everyone wants to position themselves as a bank-bashing populist, but people also wants to suck up as much Wall Street cash as possible. Consequently, many things are not as they appear.