The bandersnatchulous Frum

David Frum gets Kakutani’d in the NY Times.

What is surprising about “The Right Man” is how tired, disingenuous and knee-jerk so many of its arguments are. The book serves up a handful of personal observations about the president: for instance, Mr. Bush’s “id seems to have been at least as powerful and destructive as the Clinton id” but had been “captured, shackled and manacled, and locked away” by the time he entered politics.

The volume as a whole, however, is less an insider’s view of the Bush White House than a shrill polemic about the administration’s response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 and its campaign against Saddam Hussein. It is a polemic that exults in the president’s shucking of “half a century’s worth of conventional wisdom about the Middle East and the world,” a polemic that celebrates the younger Bush as the right man for his job.

…and then the finishing stroke:

Mr. Frum’s penchant for facile analogies and bellicose language underscores the dogmatic, hectoring tone of this book, a book that plays solely to readers who already share all of his certainties and that makes no effort to persuade others through historical knowledge, foreign policy acumen or simple logic

Man. That’s gonna leave a mark….