David Frum fired after criticizing Republicans.

It really is a sign of how unhinged the American right are becoming that, when one of them speaks the first piece of sense I have heard out of them for many months, they instantly fire him.

David Frum, the Canadian-born conservative pundit who has been harshly critical of the Republican battle plan against President Barack Obama's health-care overhaul, is unapologetic after being fired Thursday from a right-wing think tank.

“I'm going to remain a conservative whether they want me or not,” Frum told The Canadian Press on Thursday night following his ouster from the American Enterprise Institute, adding he was saddened by the turn of events.

“In a democracy, there are competing teams, and each team has to bring its best game to the table ... health-care reform is here to stay, it isn't going to be repealed, and it was within our grasp to help formulate it and we failed to do so. Instead, we decided to do whatever we could to make Democrats look wicked and evil.”

On Sunday, Mr. Frum wrote on his website, FrumForum, that health-care reform had been a debacle for the Republican party, saying they'd “suffered their most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s.”

“A huge part of the blame for today's disaster attaches to conservatives and Republicans ourselves,” he wrote. “At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike, say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut, we would make no deal with the administration. No negotiations, no compromise, nothing.”

While Republicans predicted months ago that health-care reform would be Mr. Obama's “Waterloo,” Mr. Frum wrote: “It's Waterloo all right: ours.”

If you don't like the message, fire the messenger.

The Wall Street Journal attacked Frum like this:

“Mr. Frum now makes his living as the media's go-to basher of fellow Republicans,” the Journal wrote. “But he's peddling bad revisionist history that would have been even worse politics.”

They are accusing him of "pedalling bad revisionist history". But Frum was warning the Republicans about this as long ago as May last year. There's nothing revisionist about this.

I’ve been on a soapbox for months now about the harm that our overheated talk is doing to us. Yes it mobilizes supporters – but by mobilizing them with hysterical accusations and pseudo-information, overheated talk has made it impossible for representatives to represent and elected leaders to lead.

Frum's basic charge was that the Republicans allowed themselves to be led by "the most radical voices in the party and the movement" and that these people, "led us to abject and irreversible defeat."

I mean, what is "revisionist" about that? To me, that is simply a statement of fact.

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Tags: David Frum, Republicans, universal healthcare