An End to Evil

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.