I’ve been visiting FrumForum lately – partly because bob mentioned that he first visited this site after following my commenting name-link from there to here, partly because our occasional visitor and old friend strangelet (as “quell”) can be found there violating decorum, as well as punctuation, in her inimitable way.
Another reason I like to go Frumming is that I find Mr. Frum wrong in a right way – not an agreeable way, but in the manner of a kind of limiting political function defining the “inside” boundaries of “the Right” on our contemporary political spectrum. For instance, Frum will take any opportunity to remind us that he opposes Obama – thus his rather trivial and brief little post today: “The Next Time Obama Blames Bush….” Frum may be aware that many True Conservatives still think he despised Palin so much he endorsed Obama in ’08. And Frum has found his own, less obviously xenophobic way to attack the Park51 project, though, as his commenters point out, his use of the phrase “Ground Zero Mosque” already firmly places him, or his aspirations, politically (and culturally).
Unlike, say, Andrew Sullivan, Frum still wants to be included somewhere in the current Republican coalition, and that goal seems to require him, among other things, to find ways to bash Obama and bash Muslims, just less crudely than a wanna-be Tea Party hero would. In this vein, it’s interesting how much further to the left FF’s comment threads are compared to F himself, or at least to how F seems compelled to position himself. In its own way this tendency seems characteristic of our peculiar political-cultural moment, as those of us not wholly committed to either of the two big teams struggle to colonize the sacrifice zone between (and around) Far Right and Repudiated Left.
I haven’t been over at FF for quite a while. What I had found interesting after O’s election was FF as a representative theater of the war between the Far Right and the FarFar Right. Once the FFR prevailed in real life, if not FF, the whole thing seemed kinda repetitive.
Frum is before everything else, a neo con. So there’s no real place for him anywhere other than the Repubs.
I think the lefter than F character of the comments is because the FFR contingent disliked F for not kicking the RINOs and dems off the blog, so I’m guessing a lot of FFR just stoppped commenting or went somewhere more satisfying.