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Former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum has resigned from the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, Frum announced on his Web site Thursday afternoon -- a move which suggests the conservative movement has cut ties with Frum over the straight talk he has been providing all week.

Following the passage of health care reform in the House, Frum made waves with a column for CNN.com declaring that health care had proven to been "Waterloo" for the GOP, not for Obama as Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) infamously suggested.

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"Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us and now we're discovering we work for Fox," Frum told ABC's Terry Moran. "And this balance here has been completely reversed. The thing that sustains a strong Fox network is the thing that undermines a strong Republican party."

Frum laid the blame for the anger of anti-health reform protesters not with the GOP, but with talk radio and Fox News, which he said was the "real leadership" in setting the terms of the political debate on health care.

"The anger trapped the [Republican] leadership," Frum said, and "the leadership discovered they have no room to maneuver as a result of the anger."

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http://rawstory.com/2010/03/frum-republicans-work-fox-news/

Republican lawmakers quickly dismissed Frum, a prominent reformist conservative, as a mere "former staffer."

Then Frum said on "Nightline" that the Republican Party's lockstep with the Fox News attack machine has hurt the party, and that "we're discovering we work for Fox." That may have been the last straw for AEI.

"I have been a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute since 2003. At lunch today, AEI President Arthur Brooks and I came to a termination of that relationship," Frum wrote on his Web site.

While Frum has been willing to speak out on Republican failings, he's hardly become a liberal since leaving the Bush White House. In a column published Wednesday night, he recommended that Obama either ignore the issue of immigration reform or encourage "self-deportation."

But the conservative movement has a tendency to excommunicate anyone who breaks ranks, says Bruce Bartlett, who was fired by the National Center for Policy Analysis, another right-wing think tank, for writing a book critical of Bush policies. "In the years since, I have lost a great many friends and been shunned by conservative society in Washington, D.C," Bartlett wrote in the wake of Frum's resignation.

Bartlett, who served as a domestic policy aide for Ronald Reagan and a deputy assistant Treasury secretary under the first President Bush, claimed Frum told him privately a few months ago that conservatives on AEI's payroll had been "ordered" not to speak to the media about health care reform "because they agreed with too much of what Obama was trying to do." Frum himself certainly violated that order.

[UPDATE: Supporting Bartlett's claim, Paul Krugman points out that a 2003 health reform proposal from the Heritage Foundation, a think tank considered more right-wing than AEI, looks a lot like the bill Obama just signed.]

[UPDATE 2: Frum tells Mike Allen that "donor pressure" related to his "Waterloo" post was indeed responsible for his termination. Frum claims "the core of the story is the kind of economic pressure that intellectual conservatives are under" -- meaning AEI couldn't risk displeasing its base by keeping Frum on after he criticized the Republican Party. "[T]he elite isn't leading anymore," said Frum. "It's trapped."

Earlier, Frum told Greg Sargent he and AEI parted ways over money, not ideology -- they offered him the chance to continue on at a salary of zero -- and that his criticisms of the Republican Party were "welcomed and celebrated" at the conservative think tank.

Allen reports that AEI is standing by their earlier story that it was Frum's decision to leave.]

[UPDATE 3: Frum's excommunication continues. At The Corner, Charles Murray calls Frum's statement to Mike Allen "despicable" and announces that their friendship of "many years" is over.]

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Republican leadership is increasingly marginalized by their psuedo-populist right-wing, and feeling less secure in their ability to frame the debate and set an agenda.

This is the natural result of playing to the extreme ends of religion: Religious people are followers and believers first of all, who will swallow ANY story, no matter how ridiculous. (Armageddon comes to mind!) Believers/ followers form mobs quite readily, as they're easily worked into a frenzy.

So now they have a tiger by the tail: a racist, religious, and/or hyper-nationalistic bunch who will resort to threats of violence (which often presages action), who behave (to all intents and purposes) like Hilter's brownshirts.

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As of February 2:

63% - Obama is a socialist
39% - Obama should be impeached
24% - Obama wants “the terrorists to win”
31% - Obama is “a racist who hates white people.”
36% - Obama wa nots born in this country
21% - ACORN stole the election for Obama.
23% - want their state to secede from the union
55% - gays should not be allowed to serve openly in the military
68% - gay couples should not receive “any state or federal benefits
73% - openly gay men and women should not be allowed to teach in public schools
51% - sex education should not be taught in schools
77% - creationismshould be taught in schools
31% - contraception should be outlawed
34% - birth control is “abortion.”
16% - would vote for Palin though 42% said they are undecided
53% - Palin more qualified than Obama

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45% of Republicans (25 percent overall) Obama “not born in the United States and so is not eligible to be president”
38%- Obama is “doing many of the things that Hitler did”
67% - (and 40 percent of Americans overall) Obama is a socialist
57% - he's a Muslim
24% - “he may be the Antichrist"
61% - he wants to take guns away
51% - he wants to turn the sovereignty of the US government to a world government
55% - he ha done many things that are unconstitutional
47% - he resents America’s heritage
40% - he does what Wall Street tells him to do
45% - he wasn’t born in the US and isn’t eligible to be president
45% - he is a domestic enemy that the US Constitution speaks of
42% - he is a racist
41% - he is anti-American
41% - he wants to us economic collapse or terrorist attack to take dictatorial powers

The poll, which surveyed 2,230 people right at the height of the health-care reform debate, also clearly shows that education is a barrier to extremism. Respondents without a college education are vastly more likely to believe such claims, while Americans with college degrees or better are less easily duped. It's a reminder of what the 19th-century educator Horace Mann once too-loftily said: "Ignorance breeds monsters to fill up the vacancies of the soul that are unoccupied by the verities of knowledge."

This poll is the latest and most detailed evidence of the extent to which Wingnuts are hijacking our politics. It should be a wakeup call to all Americans and a collective reminder, as we move past health-care reform, that we need to stand up to extremism.

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