David Frum presents himself to the world as a level-headed moderate, a man repelled by crazy fringe figures and conspiracy theories. The center-right pundit and former Bush speechwriter also recently spent a day declaring that three major media outlets were faking images from the Gaza war, borrowing this analysis from a blogger who thinks he once took a snapshot of a ghost-cat as it was dematerializing…
Frum is also the guy who gave George W. Bush the phrase “axis of evil,” in which those famous rivals, Saddam’s Iraq and the mullahs’ Iran, were supposedly secretly aligned. (That’s what an “axis” is, you know. An alliance.) So the man is no stranger to dubious conspiracy tales. But he consistently describes them as though they’re something those other people do, not a phenomenon you can see among establishment figures like Frum as well as fringy folks like Alex Jones. Let this episode be a reminder that paranoia can flourish at the top as well as the bottom of the social pecking order.
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