Overview for David Frum in Print

Bush Firings Signal Help Is On The Way

It is supposed to have been Gladstone who said that a prime minister must first be a good butcher. Gladstone would have been impressed by the butchery in Washington this weekend: At 10:05 on a Friday morning, without so much as a hint leaked in advance, the Bush administration announced that its …

Written by David Frum on Saturday December 7, 2002

No Joking About Islam

More than 200 people are dead, some two dozen churches and thousands of homes have been destroyed, and much of the Christian population of the Nigerian city of Kaduna driven into exile - all because of a single joke by a Nigerian journalist. The joke was inspired by the controversy over the …

Written by David Frum on Saturday November 30, 2002

Secret's Out

On the evening of December 3 last year, the Bush administration learned of an alarming leak. At midnight, the largest Muslim charity in the United States, the Holy Land Foundation of Richardson, Texas, would be formally listed as a terrorist-linked organization. Federal agents would then raid the …

Written by David Frum on Monday November 25, 2002

The Disloyal Powell Should Be Sacked

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell should have been fired Sunday. It was on Sunday that The Washington Post posted its first excerpt from Bob Woodward's new book, Bush At War. Like Woodward's book on the Gulf War, The Generals , Bush at War is essentially an edited transcript of Powell …

Written by David Frum on Tuesday November 19, 2002

The Democrats Lost Ugly

A week after the big Republican win in the off-year election and the evidence is accumulating: The Democrats lost ugly. Consider just two cases. First, South Dakota. As Byron York reports on NationalReview.com, up until 6:38 a.m. on the morning after election day, it looked as if the …

Written by David Frum on Tuesday November 12, 2002

Loving Animals . . . Without Hating Humans

Lafayette Square is a small 19th-century park across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. If you happened to stroll across it in the 18 months after George W. Bush took the oath of office, you were likely to see an odd sight: a tall, red-haired man dressed in a neatly pressed suit, the coveted …

Written by David Frum on Saturday November 9, 2002

Sept. 11 Killed The Race Card

It only seems like nothing happened. For hour after hour on election night, the wires reported no change, no change, no change. But that "no change" was a big change from elections past. The president's party typically loses seats in off-years -- an average of 30 House seats and almost …

Written by David Frum on Tuesday November 5, 2002

Canada Has Earned America's Suspicion

Canada just won itself an expensive victory in the United States. On Thursday, the Americans agreed to exempt Canadian passport-holders from a new rule requiring all persons born in Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq and Sudan to be fingerprinted and photographed before entry into the United …

Written by David Frum on Saturday November 2, 2002

There Is No Making Deals With Dangerous Regimes

"Experience is a hard teacher, but fools will have no other." -- Benjamin Franklin. God likes his little jokes. Not one week after Jimmy Carter received his Nobel Peace Prize, we learn that his most important post-presidential assignment ended the way most of his policies …

Written by David Frum on Saturday October 19, 2002

Schroeder Writes Off The Iraqi People

LONDON - At a meeting with trade union leaders in the last week of the campaign, Germany's Social Democratic Justice Minister, Herta Daeubler-Gmelin, accused Bush of using the same "classic tactic" as Hitler used: exploiting war to divert attention from domestic troubles. Daeubler-Gmelin …

Written by David Frum on Tuesday September 24, 2002

Inauguration

Had the Founders of the American Republic left the capital in New York, it is hard to see how they could ever have had inaugural parades. Sealing off much of the downtown core, two subway stations and one of the city's busiest bridges for three days before a new president takes his oath would spark …

Written by David Frum on Friday January 19, 2001

What Clinton Did To The Left

BILL CLINTON did something that neither Richard Nixon nor Ronald Reagan ever managed: He convinced the American left that the United States is a conservative country. For eight years, Clinton steered his party in a rightward direction. Maybe he didn't begin intending to steer that way. …

Written by David Frum on Monday January 15, 2001

Chichen Itza

Everybody has to be somewhere on New Year's Eve, and I was in the Hotel Mayaland, in Mexico's Yucatan, glumly staring into a dish of soup that looked like wallpaper paste and tasted like that same paste mixed with 11 teaspoons of sugar. The soup had been preceded by a sad little shrimp cocktail and …

Written by David Frum on Saturday January 6, 2001

2000 Voter Fraud A Decidedly Nonpartisan Offense

If it were up to the District of Columbia government, I'd be a registered D.C. voter. That sounds reasonable, except for this: I'm a Canadian citizen. Nevertheless, when I moved into the district and signed up for a D.C. driver's license, I was invited under the Clinton administration's "motor …

Written by David Frum on Thursday December 7, 2000

Back To The 1880s

There is no new conservative era; the good news is things are bad for Democrats, too "Their gravely vacant and bewhiskered faces mixed, melted, swam together. Which had the whiskers, which had the burnsides: which was which?"-- Thomas Wolfe George W. Bush wants to reinvigorate …

Written by David Frum on Monday December 4, 2000

History As It Wasn't

What if Napoleon Had Won at Waterloo? What if Cleopatra Had Had an Ugly Nose? Virtual History. Alternatives and Counterfactuals edited by Niall Ferguson; Basic, 560 pp., $30 What If? The World's Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been edited by Robert Cowley; Putnam, …

Written by David Frum on Monday November 27, 2000

Electoral College A Scapegoat For Nation Divided

It's often said that the Electoral College survives only because it is so hard to get rid of, like woodpeckers or the post-40 bulge. With Al Gore the apparent winner of the popular vote and the apparent loser of the electoral vote, though, many Democrats are getting serious at last about eliminatin…

Written by David Frum on Thursday November 23, 2000

Ultimately, Right Will Be The Winner

In the end, George W. Bush will prevail. He will prevail not because of any outbreak of statesmanship on the part of Al Gore or the Democratic Party -- on the contrary, it is alarming how few Democrats have been willing to say for the record that the Florida result should be respected even if it …

Written by David Frum on Wednesday November 15, 2000

Myth Of The Happy Single

Watch daytime television long enough, and you are sure to hear the following statistic: Married women, it will be said, are twice (or four times) as likely to be depressed as their unmarried sisters. The implication of the statistic is clear: Marriage is bad for women's mental health. …

Written by David Frum on Sunday October 8, 2000

Chants For Peace Brought Us Closer To War

On Wednesday, three women loaded their belongings into a van and rolled away from their encampment near Newbury, England, a town about 50 miles due west of London. To the uninstructed eye, there was nothing very remarkable about them. But in their day, they had been very remarkable. These were …

Written by David Frum on Sunday September 10, 2000