Frummie and his friends were beside themselves a few months ago over the nerve of Vanity Fair.  It quoted them!  And they were surprised that Vanity Fair was . . . unfair.  “Out of context!  Out of context!”  Context, I think someone said, is the last refuge of the scoundrel.  Some of the neo-neos felt betrayed—this stuff wasn’t supposed to come out until after the election, or after the New Year, or after the Fall of the Empire.  But there it was, and everybody got confused again.  Did the Frummies want a bigger war, or a better war, or a sort of war?

National Review was quick to respond.  “Vanity Unfair: An NRO Symposium” solemnly appeared.  It isn’t seemly to rehearse the boring responses of the serious neos.  But Frummie’s song, which I here offer as a poem, is noteworthy.  Never mind that it has no structure or rhyme; progressive poetry never does.

I always believed as a speechwriter that

If you could persuade the president

To commit himself to certain words,

He would feel himself committed to

The ideas that underlay those words.

And the big shock to me has been that

Although the president said the words, he

Just did not absorb the ideas.  And that is the

Root of, maybe, everything.

“Listen to the words, mr president-vice president-secretary of defense,” the neos slyly say.  Frummies have words, and if they can just get them in the right mouths and the right journals, the ideas they stand for will make the world safe for them.  All in all, Frummies prefer presidents like JFK, who was charming as well as educable.  He got committed to the words.  He absorbed them.  Maybe Democrats absorb better than Republicans.

But then, why wouldn’t Frummie stand up and cheer about how much Bush II has absorbed?  Preventive war is a very big item.  W, however, isn’t charming; maybe the Obamanation will absorb even better.  The appointment of Mr. Emanuel is a good start.  He volunteered for the Israeli army, but not ours.  At least he volunteered.  Neocons, as Taki has said, are different from women only in that women are sometimes found in combat.  (I apologize to all women for that last crack, especially to my granddaughter, who is an 82nd Airborne combat medic.)  The Democratic leaders, at least since John Kerry, haven’t volunteered for anything more dangerous than “community organizing.”

“I know what you’re thinking about,” said Tweedledum, “but it isn’t so, nohow.”  “Contrariwise,” continued Tweedledee, “if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t it ain’t.  That’s logic.”  Frummie foreign policy is logic: ideo-logic.  When we were small-town kids we decided to have a war.  All of us knew about guns and how dangerous they were, but the logical ones among us figured out that we could fight with homemade guns: less lethal but capable of escalation to the point of imperial stand-off.  We made what were essentially shotguns out of pipes and cherry bombs and BBs.  I started a fire in my dad’s garage with a misfired cannon.  We and our enemies (I think they were enemies; it seemed so at the time) didn’t kill each other because one of them escalated to the point that he blew their entire fort down demonstrating the ultimate weapon, and we all decided that “but as it isn’t it ain’t,” whether it ever might have been or not.

Tweedledum and Tweedledee

Agreed to have a battle;

For Tweedledum said Tweedledee

Had spoiled his nice new rattle.

 

Just then flew down a monstrous crow,

As black as a tar-barrel;

Which frightened both the heroes so,

They quite forgot their quarrel.

It’s best to be a little forgetful, at times.

The “root, maybe, of everything” is that Frummie’s Song has no tune.  It’s “through the looking glass” with no rhymes.  A Frummie-symp wailed on a blog response to “Vanity Unfair”: “WHY would any republican or conservative consent to be interviewed by any of these lying sacks of s***?”  Well, aside from the fact that no conservative was interviewed, another responder gets closer to a real insight when he says that “Joshua Muravchik suggested recently that the Neocons should admit their errors on the Iraq War and then move on expeditiously to bomb Iran and run Joe Lieberman for president in 2008.”  McCain was a stand-in, but he couldn’t make us do bombs because Lehman Brothers was on our minds.  But the monstrous black crow in the Frum-con closet may get out at any time and frighten them all back to their original ideo-logic, which isn’t, by anybody’s definition who is outside the looking glass, conservative.  And one can absorb ideas only if there are ideas to absorb.

Frummies should be locked in a soundproof well-lighted room for a year with The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll.  They would not learn to laugh, of course—senses of humor are reserved for those who understand that “terrorism” cannot be gone to war against and “democracy” cannot be exported—but they might sooner or later recognize themselves in the Walrus and the Carpenter, who made all the oysters their lunch.  Bigger Carpenters always come along.