Pace Emmett Tyrell, now is the conservative crackup. Melissa Clouthier is right: You really have to take a few minutes to watch this, the whole thing, to get a sense of where we aren't going, and how we aren't getting there.

I don't know what to make of it. First of all it's hardly clear what the role of Brink Lindsey is here. It's Bloggingheads.tv, but we don't really need two blogging heads (does Brink really even blog except as an afterthought?), one -- here, David Frum -- to talk, and one to bounce up and down. That's not blogging, that's bobbing.

But this is of a piece with the wing of the GOP that believes that to be a Republican is essentially to be a libertarian with NATO, or something like that. Brink has made a career now of insisting that the Right write off right, or any concept of conservative values, to be relevant in the future. Now David Frum is at least acknowledging that he has no business at the National Review, still redolent of the incense and candles of the late William F. Buckley's Catholic-based conservatism. If Frum is a post-neoconservative, then what kind of conservative is he, if he is so contemptuous of "heartland" conservative sensibilities? If Frum is the lone voice of a resurgent intellectualism on the Right, in theory much to be welcomed, how can he compare the inexcusable Harriet Miers nomination to the political arbitrage of the Palin candidacy?

We don't need, and I don't want any part of, a party of Brink Lindseys and P.J. O'Rourkes, and such a party has no future in this country as an alternative to the present regime. Frum, whose persona and ethnic / religious identity, a Google search reveals, unleashes a great deal of smoke but very little light, even confuses the Jews. As far as this Jew, so does this debate, both as exemplified in the video above and in other trenches, confound. But perhaps free of the Bush White House and out of National Review, David Frum can go somewhere coherently intellectual, yet genuinely conservative; and perhaps there will be something good there. He need not throw out the values baby with the know-nothing bathwater; if he does, what does he have?

Let's see just how smart David Frum really is.

Originally posted on Likelihood of Success, Ron Coleman's Clark Kent-type blog.