David Frum On Tucson Tragedy: Let’s Blame Pot Rather Than Easy Access To Guns

By Zaid Jilani Following Saturday’s tragic shooting of several people, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), by 22-year old assassin Jared Loughner, many have asked how someone who displayed so many obvious characteristics of mental instability was able to easily obtain access to a semi-automatic firearm. As Time Magazine’s Nathan Thornburgh points out, Arizona has particularly weak detection and reporting of mental health. (It is technically illegal to sell firearms to the mentally ill.) In a post on FrumForum, conservative pundit David Frum dismisses renewed calls for gun control and instead says that the incident should “remind us why we regulate marijuana,” noting that Loughner is suspected of being a marijuana user. He writes that there may be “renewed pressure to control the weapons that committed the crime,” but instead chooses to place blame on the “trend these days toward a more casual attitude and easier access to…drugs”:

After horrific shootings, we hear calls for stricter regulation of guns. The Tucson shooting should remind us why we regulate marijuana.Jared Lee Loughner, the man held as the Tucson shooter, has been described by those who know as a “pot smoking loner.” [...]

After the Tucson shooting, there may be renewed pressure to control the weapons that committed the crime. But what about the drugs that may have aggravated the killer’s mental disease? The trend these days seems toward a more casual attitude and easier access to those drugs. Among the things we should be discussing in the aftermath of this horror is the accumulating evidence of those drugs’ potential contribution to making some dangerous people even more dangerous than they might otherwise have been.

It should be noted that, of course, marijuana is illegal. However, the extended magazine that Loughner used in the shooting — which allowed him to get off as many shots as he did before he was subdued — was illegal until the assault weapons ban expired in 2004. Additionally, in an interview Mothers Jones conducted with Bryce Tierney, a friend of Loughner, Tierney claims that the alleged shooter quit drinking and doing drugs in 2009 — years before the shooting took place.

Update The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan notes that the Drudge Report is now exclaiming that Loughner is a "left-wing pothead."

'Axis of evil’ author loses job after ‘Waterloo’ comment

Blogger: Conservative movement 'devouring its own children' 'in Bolshevik fashion'

By Daniel Tencer

David Frum says he wasn't fired from his job at a right-wing think tank for declaring that the passage of health care reform was the GOP's "Waterloo," but many political observers seem to disagree.

What is known for certain is that, as of Thursday, Frum -- a long-time conservative columnist and a former speechwriter for George W. Bush credited with coining the term "axis of evil" -- is no longer at the American Enterprise Institute, where he had spent seven years.

"At lunch today, AEI President Arthur Brooks and I came to a termination of [our] relationship," Frum blogged on Thursday.

And what is also known is that in the last several days Frum has ruffled more than a few conservative feathers with a series of harsh criticisms of the Republican Party in the wake of the passage of the Democrats' landmark health care bill into law "Conservatives and Republicans today suffered their most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s," he wrote after the House passed the Senate health care bill Sunday. "It’s hard to exaggerate the magnitude of the disaster."

Frum concluded: "[I]t’s Waterloo all right: ours."

A few days later, he told ABC News' Terry Moran that "Republicans originally thought that Fox [News] worked for us and now we're discovering we work for Fox."

To be sure, Frum has shown an independent streak since the end of the Bush administration, frequently criticizing Republican strategies and talking points. In 2009, he penned a cover story for Newsweek entitled "Why Rush is Wrong," in which he argued that radio host Rush Limbaugh was leading US conservatives down the wrong path.

But were his most recent criticisms the straw that broke the camel's back? Howard Kurtz at the Washington Post seems to think so.

"Three days after calling health-care reform a debacle for the Republicans, David Frum was forced out of his job at the American Enterprise Institute on Wednesday," Kurtz wrote.

"Forced out" is also how the New York Times describes it.

Jacob Heilbrunn at the Huffington Post takes an even more negative view. Heilbrunn argues that Frum's departure from the AEI is a sign that the conservative movement, "in Bolshevik fashion ... is devouring its own children."

Is Frum really an apostate, a ranks-breaker? No, he isn't. I haven't seen any evidence that Frum, a vigorous polemicist, has fundamentally deviated from traditional conservative positions when it comes to Israel or tax rates....

Frum's saga resembles in reverse the odyssey of the neoconservatives who used to argue that they hadn't left the Democratic party. It had left them. Now, it seems fair to say, Frum isn't leaving conservatism; rather, the conservative movement is rapidly leaving Frum behind.

Frum would disagree vigorously. In an interview with the Plum Line's Greg Sargent, Frum asserted it was financial problems at the AEI that forced him out.

AEI President Arthur Brooks "asked me if I’d like to work for AEI on a non salary basis,” Frum told Sargent. “He said it had nothing to do with my work and that after all these are hard times.”

"'Big bad conservative think tank axes writer for criticizing GOP intransigence' is a seductive storyline for our times, but it may not be true," Sargent concluded.

Former Bush speechwriter tells GOP: Democrats’ passage of health care is actually ‘our’ Waterloo.

By Zaid Jilani Last summer, during a conference call with conservative activists, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) said that if the Republican Party was able to defeat Democratic efforts to pass a comprehensive health care bill, it would “break” President Obama and be “his Waterloo.” Last night, former Bush speechwriter David Frum posted a note on his website addressing his fellow conservatives on the consequences of the Democrats successfully passing a health care bill. He castigated them for refusing to deal with Democrats throughout the process — especially when the final health care bill incorporated many ideas from the Republican Party — and said that a “huge part of the blame for [yesterday's] disaster attaches to conservatives and Republicans ourselves.” He concludes that “it’s Waterloo all right: ours”:

A huge part of the blame for today’s disaster attaches to conservatives and Republicans ourselves. 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. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obama’s Waterloo – just as healthcare was Clinton’s in 1994. [...]

This time, when we went for all the marbles, we ended with none. [...]

So today’s defeat for free-market economics and Republican values is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry. Their listeners and viewers will now be even more enraged, even more frustrated, even more disappointed in everybody except the responsibility-free talkers on television and radio. For them, it’s mission accomplished. For the cause they purport to represent, it’s Waterloo all right: ours.

Frum also writes that Rush Limbaugh “wants Republicans to fail.”