The Vancouver Scrum

Did Barbara Frum make some sort of deathbed pact with the CBC to ensure that the MotherCorp never get too tough with her spawn? Between Susan Ormiston’s soft chat with David Frum about State of the Union addresses (AS IF Bush doesn’t pay attention to the media, and AS IF Bill Clinton’s speeches were a disordered mess with no purpose. Susan, ask a bloody followup and call him on it!) and Evan Solomon’s only slightly more challenging conversation about Frummy-boy’s new book with fellow armchair general Richard Perle, I’m getting my suspicions.

Some Frumisms: “You must see the world as it is, not how you want it to be.” TRANSLATION: If you disagree with how I see things, you’re looking through red spectacles. The truth is what I say it is.

“America must always champion the ideals of freedom.” Riiight: like interning people in military encampment as neither civilians nor prisoners of war? Sending Maher Arar over to Syria instead of Canada? Encouraging meter-readers and mail carriers to be spies on their routes? More like rant a lot about freedom, while overriding civil liberties whenever they get in the way of your latest bastard-Trotskyist escapade—or the search for monsters under the bed.

One thing I’ve gotta credit Frum with: He’s always on message, even as he does logical loop-de-loops about the rationale for kissing ass with some of the world’s strongmen while invading other countries, or how the fact that there was nothing wrong with invading Iraq under false pretense (“moral clarity” apparently doesn’t forbid lying to your own people and the entire international community.) In that respect, he’s like any good snake-oil salesman.

Still, it doesn’t excuse Solomon or Ormiston’s softness, especially when there’s nobody else on the show who would force Frum to flesh out his assertions. (The old broadcast interviewing principle: if there’s one guest, the interviewer does the challenging; if it’s more than one, the host can be more inquisitive than adversarial. Said principle does not apply to partisan or ideological love-ins.) Solomon did what he does with every book on Hot Type—tells the reader to go out and buy it. No thanks. If I want to read any Frum, I’ll get it from the local library and let the think-tanks and their wealthy benefactors line his pockets.