On his HBO show, Bill Maher usually arranges for one of his three guests to be a conservative. In one sense, he wants to be fair to the conservative point of view; in another he wants to provide a foil for the two liberal guests (as well as himself) who also sit on the panel.

One of the conservative guests who has been a regular on the program is David Frum, a one-time aide and speech writer in the George W. Bush White House. He did not always take the company line in the White House. While he supported John Roberts as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, he was a force in opposition to Harriet Miers as an associate justice. He was a strong advocate for many conservative ideas in the White House, but also a gadfly who would oppose the “Rovian” conventional wisdom when he felt that empathy was being overlooked. He eventually left the Bush White House to work for presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City.

The Canadian-born Frum is the author of seven books. Most advocate conservative ideas, suggesting that the liberal philosophy leads to financial waste and unaccountable social policy. However, through it all, he has maintained a certain skepticism of the wisdom of his fellow conservatives.

Over time, David Frum did what very few political advocates do. He basically changed his political philosophy. He came to accept the Democratic principles of primary concern for the poor and disenfranchised. He saw hypocrisy within both parties, but particularly with the Republicans. He became comfortable with uninhibited criticism of the Republican Party, particularly its leaders.

In the July 30, 2012 issue of The Nation, David Oppenheimer wrote a definitive article,  describing Frum’s metamorphosis. The same day that the article in The Nation came out, Frum, as a CNN contributor, wrote an article entitled “Mitt Romney’s painfully bad week.” Frum spared no punches on the Republican presidential candidate-to-be. He talked about Romney’s blatant criticism of the Affordable Health Care Act  at a meeting of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). Romney was predictably booed, but Frum raises the question of whether Romney was  naïve and had no idea what the reaction would be, or if he intentionally stirred the embers and sought sympathy from America’s whites, who seem to hate President Obama.

Frum points out that Romney also floated the idea of Condoleezza Rice as a vice-presidential nominee.. Perhaps this was intended to be a lame effort to win a few African-American votes, but Romney seemed to forget that (a) Rice is strongly pro-choice,  anathema to Republicans, and (b) she has repeatedly said that she has no interest in the vice-presidency.

And then who can talk about Mitt Romney without mentioning his inexplicable finances with Bain Capital, the financial services company that he once headed. As Gloria Bilchik has written in the Occasional Planet, this is like Retroactive Romney. He takes what he did in 2002 and pretends that it ended in 1999. The bending of the truth is a big enough concern in itself, but the real problem is that he tries to distance himself from a period of time when Bain was shipping thousands of jobs overseas. Frum, as a one-time loyal Republican, cannot take Romney’s slippery and sloppy rhetoric, and reams him, as many Democrats are currently doing.

Frum is a thinker; he enjoys analyzing data and putting disparate perspectives together into a coherent set of ideas. That took him on the path from aligning his views with those of Republicans to Democrats. We need more David Frums, even if they move on the other direction. We will not progress without critical thinking, and David Frum is a true model for such an approach.

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In one of the most accurate of sweeping political generalizations, Democrats have been calling Republicans “the party of no.”  It was only a matter of time until the Republicans turned the tables with questionable logic.  Whether the response of the GOP is unique to Republicans or politics of any party, the GOP chose to take something true and convert it into a falsehood.  That will work when all or part of the citizenry are either ill-informed or not paying attention.

First Newt Gingrich said that Republicans are the “party of yes.”  Technically, this statement might be true if applied to any of the following actions. Republicans are the party of yes when it comes to:

• Protecting wealthy people from paying their fair share of taxes.
• Running huge deficits as a result of ill-advised tax cuts.
• “Starving the beast;” i.e. ensuring that worthwhile programs cannot be funded because of large budget deficits.
• Using wedge issues to distract people from essential economic, environmental and energy issues.

Yes they can; the Republicans can turn no into yes and say it without batting an eyelid.  Now former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum has taken this form of “new speak,”  a step further by calling the Democrats the “party of no.”  Unlike Gingrich’s semantic games, Frum’s words go beyond “up is down and down is up.”  In essence he says that judgment on an issue doesn’t matter.

In a column on the CNN website, Frum says:

Party of no? When it comes to Supreme Court nominations, the GOP is a flock of baby lambs compared with their opposites on the Democratic side.

His assertion is that Democrats are much more effective at rejecting Supreme Court nominees offered by Republican presidents.  And on the face of it, he’s right.  The last Supreme Court justice nominated by a Democratic president to be rejected was in the 19^th century.  Two of President Grover Cleveland’s nominees failed to receive Senate confirmation in 1894.  This means that we have had a streak of eight straight Democratic presidents (Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson[1], Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama) whose nominees for the Supreme Court have been confirmed by the Senate.

Frum states:

The past two Democratic presidents have named three justices between them: Sonia Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. All glided painlessly to confirmation.

Compare that with the mayhem inflicted on Republican choices. Two of President Nixon’s nominees were rejected by the Senate. Ditto for one of Ronald Reagan’s choices (another withdrew shortly after he was nominated). One of President George H.W. Bush’s choices, Clarence Thomas, was confirmed after a fight that still ranks as perhaps the most vicious in confirmation history.

When Frum says that the Democrats are “the party of no” with regard to Supreme Court nominees from Republican presidents, he seems to be forgetting something; the qualifications of the nominee to serve on the Supreme Court.

Among the Supreme Court justices nominated by the eight Democratic presidents listed above are Louis Brandeis (Wilson), Hugo Black, Felix Frankfurter, William O. Douglas, and

Robert H. Jackson (Roosevelt), Tom Clark (Truman), Byron White and Arthur Goldberg (Kennedy), Thurgood Marshall (Johnson), Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer (Clinton) and Sonia Sotomayor (Obama).  Jimmy Carter did not have an opportunity to nominate a justice to the Supreme Court.

Let’s give credit where credit is due.  In the 1950s, Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed three outstanding justices to the court: Earl Warren, John Marshall Harlan, and William J. Brennan.  George H.W. Bush also gave us David Souter.

Is Frum upset that the Senate rejected Clement Haynsworth, who was  nominated by Richard Nixon?  As a federal judge, Haynsworth  had repeatedly ruled in favor of laws enforcing segregation, and he was reflexively anti-labor.  He also  ruled in cases where he had apparent financial interests.

Nixon then nominated Harold Carswell, who supported racial segregation during his unsuccessful election bid in 1948.  His nomination was doomed by a “with friends like this, who needs enemies?” remark.  Republican Senator Roman Hruska from Nebraska stated, “Even if he is mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they, and a little chance?”  Carswell’s nomination was defeated 51 to 45.

At the risk of generalizing, many Republicans seem to have blind spots when it comes to  assessing certain individuals’ lack of intellectual gravitas to hold high office.  In less than twenty years, their national tickets have included Dan Quayle, George H.W. Bush, and Sarah Palin.  It may be the Republicans who are smart,  because among the three of them, they have been victorious in three of the five elections in which they have run.  Intelligence and wisdom may not be important factors to Americans as they assess leaders.  If so, Frum’s criticism may convince some that the Democrats are the “party of no.”  And if that argument holds, the starting point for educating the American people is teaching that up really is up and down really is down.

[1] In 1968, Johnson nominated associate justice Abe Fortas to succeed Earl Warren as chief justice.  Because of some of Fortas’s extrajudicial activities, Johnson withdrew his nomination for chief justice, but Fortas remained on the bench as an associate justice.

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