Mr. Frum is one to talk about untruths:

http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/News/032103FrumLies.html

http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/News/Frum/FrumLies041003.html

Will’s reference to articles at Chronicles attacking Frum’s past writings is a typical example of the personalization of politics that has ruined political discourse in our time.

Let’s stipulate that Frum has written things in his career that were intellectually dishonest. I myself have felt that about him since the first article of his I read in the early ’90s and then his first book, Dead Right. Yet what does that have to do with the present case? The museum director himself admitted that he lied, out of anger at the U.S. So there’s no dispute over the facts here. Frum then made the apt comment that telling outrageous lies out of anger—especially anger at the U.S. or at Bush—is a very common behavior today. So the truth about the missing artifacts, and the truth of Frum’s comment about the curator’s lies, is not affected in the slightest by the fact that Frum in the course of his career may have himself written things that were less than intellectually honest. But Will is trying to suggest that because it was Frum who pointed this out, it must be false, or that in any case we ought to dismiss it.

We need to try to look at the truth of each case, not decide truth and falsehood on the basis of who is speaking it. If we follow the second path, we ultimately end up thinking in terms of the “black” truth and the “white” truth about O.J. Simpson, or in terms of “Jewish physics” and such like.

Posted by: Lawrence Auster on June 9, 2003 08:57 PM
“Frum in the course of his career may have himself written things that were less than intellectually honest”

that’s putting it mildly

speaking of bogus, how could nro let this whopper get by for publication?

Speaking of “Bogus”JUN. 8, 2003: H-HOUR
“While opponents of the Iraq war hurl charges of distorted intelligence at Presidnet Bush and PM Blair, it is emerging that in fact it is the opponents’ top accusation that turns out to be - well - a lie. It now seems clear that Baghdad museum lost a grand total of 33…”

top accusation? doesn’t nro have any self respect or integrity left.

“Will’s reference to articles at Chronicles attacking Frum’s past writings is a typical example of the personalization of politics that has ruined political discourse in our time.”

“We need to try to look at the truth of each case, not decide truth and falsehood on the basis of who is speaking it.”

I admit, I was merely taking a cheap shot, and I don’t in fact dispute the truth of what Frum said there - it seems quite clear that a huge exaggeration (of the number of looted artifacts) was made, for deliberate political reasons.

“But Will is trying to suggest that because it was Frum who pointed this out, it must be false, or that in any case we ought to dismiss it.”

I don’t think I even thought that far ahead; it was just an emotional reaction on my part, against someone who, in political terms, I do not care for, to say the least.

Henceforth I’ll endeavour to not post anything purely as an emotional and not-well-thought-out reaction to something.

Here is Frank Rich back in April writing about the missing antiquities:

“Is it merely the greatest cultural disaster of the last 500 years, as Paul Zimansky, a Boston University archaeologist, put it? Or should we listen to Eleanor Robson, of All Souls College, Oxford, who said, ‘You’d have to go back centuries, to the Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 1258, to find looting on this scale’?”

That’s a stand-up reply from Will. I appreciate it.