The American Spectator

To: Celeste Wesson, Senior Producer, NPR Marketplace

Re: Help Wanted

Dear Ms. Wesson:

My deepest sympathies regarding the recent news that your longtime token “conservative” commentator, David Frum, has decided to resign his position with your program.

Mr. Frum’s confession today that he has come to “recognize that my views are not very representative of the conservative mainstream” certainly must mark a sad day for you and all his friends at National Public Radio. Mr. Frum remarked in his farewell notice that he has suggested “potential replacements from closer to the present GOP consensus,” and I’m not sure whether my name was on that list. I have long considered Mr. Frum a friend, despite the frequent complaints from my conservative comrades who routinely denounce him as a “treacherous Canadian jackal,” etc.

Despite our friendship, however, perhaps my name would not have been foremost in Mr. Frum’s mind among those whose thinking represents the “GOP consensus,” given my frequent and at times vituperative denunciations of Republican Party leaders as untrustworthy and unprincipled (e.g., the GOP’s support of Dede Scozzafava). And it is true, as you may have heard, that I have vowed to “wreak vengeance on the worthless RINO-hugging GOP Establishment sons of bitches” who changed the date of the Florida primary and thereby ruined Christmas.

Furthermore, while I can confirm that I have called the National Republican Congressional Committee staff a “crew of bumbling dingbats,” I deny the accusation that I called for NRCC Chairman Pete Sessions to be “horsewhipped and stomped to death by the House Republican Caucus, his head carried through the streets atop a pike, and his mutilated headless corpse fed to dogs.” That was clearly a hypothetical, preceded as it was by the contingent clause, “If there were still any old-fashioned justice in the world …”

All of this is to say — and I’m sure Mr. Frum would vouch for it — that I am a responsible and eminently reasonable voice for America’s conservative grassroots today. As my good friend David notes in his farewell to NPR, his duties on Marketplace involved doing “point-counterpoint” with former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, an opportunity I would greatly enjoy. And I hope that Mr. Reich will understand that when I called him a “demented Bolshevik dwarf,” this was merely a colorful figure of speech.

Looking forward to working with you in the near future. Let’s do lunch.

Most sincerely,

Robert Stacy McCain