No sooner do I get through
hammering David Frum for his errors than I turn around to
discover that we are to be afflicted with new
plagues from the Duke of Dull, that eminent Master of
Mediocrity, Michael Gerson.
Not content merely to waste newsprint with his
boring biweekly forays to the frontiers of
obviousness on the
op-ed pages of The Washington Post, the Titan of
Tedium has now combined with former Bush deputy Peter
Wehner to subject the unwitting subscribers of
Commentary to a potentially lethal soporific entitled,
"The
Path to Republican Revival."
This is a classic example of what inevitably happens when
bureaucrats attempt journalism. At nearly 5,000 words, this
massive malodorous manure pile might be mined like a
Comstock Lode of idiocy, yet its telling point is this bland
sentence:
Republicans will also have to put forth a comprehensive reform
agenda.
Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. How many times do we
need to tell the policy wonks that, in opposition,
conservatives ought not be too specific in offering alternatives
to the policies of Obama, Pelosi, Reid et al.? Given the
current powerlessness of the GOP, it is their duty as
the opposition to remind Americans daily that the
Democrats are leading the country straight to hell.
Republicans need not, and arguably should not, offer their
own roadmap to heaven, which can then be picked apart at
leisure by the Democrats' own policy wonks. In opposition,
the GOP should instead concentrate on fomenting
resistance to the incumbent party's agenda, campaigning on a
pledge to reverse course, and be content that the policy
specifics of that promised reversal will be hashed out
after the Democrats are dismounted.
The Gerson/Wehner call for a "comprehensive reform
agenda" is patent nonsense, the exact opposite of sound
opposition strategy, a make-work project for
underemployed former Bushlings.
Gerson, readers will recall, was chief of the Bush White House
speechwriting shop, in which he glory-hogged all the credit while
mismanaging the talents of better writers. Matthew
Scully has related that tale, and our straying friend David
Frum was among Scully's co-sufferers under the Gerson
regime. And in that, Frum certainly deserves our sympathy.
Whatever David Frum's errors, they are at least usually
interesting errors. By contrast, Gersonism is a
Brompton cocktail of bad writing in service of bad ideas, a
surefire formula for Republican suicide.
