Word: frum
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Frum needed to explain why Saddam, even if he wasn't involved in 9/11, should be a target in the war on terror. What linked Saddam with Islamic terrorist groups, Frum thought, was their hatred of Western democracy. In that way, they were similar to the Axis powers of World War II. In his memo to Gerson, Frum called Iraq part of "an axis of hatred," but Iraq was the only member singled out at that point...
...late December 2001, chief presidential speechwriter Mike Gerson made a simple request whose repercussions would be felt around the world. "Here's an assignment," he told his colleague David Frum. "Can you sum up in a sentence or two our best case for going after Iraq?" President Bush had yet to decide to target Saddam Hussein, but he was moving in that direction and wanted a rationale for overthrowing Saddam in his State of the Union address. As Frum wrote later in his book, The Right Man, "I was to provide a justification...
There's a telling anecdote in David Frum's new memoir of his year as a White House speechwriter for George W. Bush. Early in the presidency, Frum--who later received credit for the deathless, and perhaps senseless, phrase "axis of evil"--submits a speech. The President eviscerates it. Frum asks why. "The material he had hacked out," Frum writes, "seemed to me the headline story of the event. Bush shook his head at me. The Headline is: BUSH LEADS...
...wait a minute. Let's go back to Frum's anecdote; a metaphor may lurk within. Frum doesn't say what the speech was about, and he doesn't specify what Bush cut from the text--this is only a tell-some memoir. But one can assume that Bush has cut the details of the policy. And that fits too: there has been a vaporous quality to Bush's boldness. He traffics in headlines. The policies themselves are often not entirely baked. A case in point: Frum's "axis of evil" and its accompanying doctrine of pre-emption, which Bush...
...their hands on nuclear, biological or chemical weapons--and he wanted to warn rogue states not to help them do it. So in January the Defense Department drew up an assessment of the danger and channeled it back to the White House, where two speechwriters, Michael Gerson and David Frum, came up with what they thought was the perfect rallying...