Dingus of the week: David Frum

Milkshakes today, fists tomorrow, and knives the day after

The weekly dingus is the newsletter you receive when you want to laughsob at the failed state of America and also learn some good shit and have a little drink.

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This week, Mexico elected its first female president, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo. Sheinbaum, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, is a physicist and climate scientist and the former mayor of Mexico City.

Mexico got its first female president not through girlboss vibes and pantsuits, but through a series of reforms that sought to establish gender parity within the government. In 2019, Mexico passed a constitutional amendment establishing quotas for women’s representation throughout all branches of government.

But that wasn’t all. According to The Washington Post, the National Electoral Institute put pressure on political parties to ensure they ran an equal number of female candidates. And candidates who made sexist comments could be stripped of their right to run.

It’s incredible what women can achieve when the male boot is taken off their necks and a little accountability is thrown in. It’s almost as if misogyny is built into the system and you have to change the system to get rid of misogyny. 

Mexico also enjoys an advantage in not being the home of David Frum. 

A woman elected president? DAVID FRUM IS FURIOUS!

Yes, he took to the pages of The Atlantic to call Sheinbaum’s election a security threat. The piece, entitled “The Failing State Next Door,” is accompanied by a photo of a smiling Sheinbaum waving to supporters while confetti falls around her.

The headline and picture alone are enough to give you an idea of where this is going to go. Frum’s thesis is that, while Sheinbaum is a member of the same political party as current Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador and is widely considered his protégé, “she lacks López Obrador’s charisma and popular appeal” and will essentially function as his puppet. 

“Charisma” is definitely not serving as any kind of euphemism coming from David Frum, that famous advocate of women, whose feminist credentials include criticizing Hillary Clinton’s smile and assuming that Susan Collins asked for Mitch McConnell’s permission before she cast a vote calling for additional witnesses during Trump’s first impeachment trial. 

When you are in a fight with Susan Collins and she is in the right, you ought to know that you’ve really messed up. But not David Frum! He will simply never learn! He actually made a bunch of writers for The Federalist mad in 2020 when he posted a tweet that ignored the fact that the conservative magazine had a lot of women on staff who were pro-Trump. And while America remains a very divided place, it seems the right and the left can agree that David Frum is sexist. You almost have to admire that level of commitment to misogyny.

And speaking of being wrong, Frum, who gained prominence by working as George W. Bush’s speechwriter and helping him sell a disastrous war, has some thoughts to share with Mexico’s president on national security.

In his new article, Frum argues that Sheinbaum, while “highly intelligent” (of course it’s generous of him to concede that someone with a Ph.D. in energy engineering has a brain, but why does “intelligent” sound particularly condescending when preceded by “highly”?) is “lacking in the people-pleasing ways of a professional politician.” It’s a bold conclusion to draw based on having interviewed Sheinbaum — in Frum’s own telling — exactly one time.

Sheinbaum won by an overwhelming majority of the vote — the highest in the history of Mexico’s democracy. It seems she is pleasing to the people of Mexico. What Frum means is she was not pleasing to him. On the one occasion that they met.

For the majority of the article, Frum criticizes López Obrador’s ties to organized violence, his consolidation of presidential power, and the amount of crime in Mexico. Which is a choice, because the article is ostensibly about the incoming president and not her male predecessor. Frum’s great criticism of Sheinbaum — besides that she is not pleasing — is that she is too “beholden” to López Obrador, who Frum believes will continue to run everything behind the scenes. He states as fact that López Obrador threw his support to Sheinbaum “because he wanted someone he could control.”  

Because she’s a woman? Therefore he can control her? Frum, my guy. That’s a sexism.

And look, I have no idea how Scheinbaum will perform as president. And there is plenty about Mexican politics to criticize. And I believe in women’s rights, wrongs, and abilities to be terrible presidents. But people who live in America don’t have a lot of room to point fingers at the “failing” politics of other nations, and in any case, this wasn’t really the moment. 

Also, super ironic that the man who helped George W. Bush market a disastrous war is against another president resorting to violence.

And the unsupported assertion that a female politician will serve as a puppet for her male predecessor? Well, with that kind of sexist analysis, you’d be banned from running for office in the failing state of Mexico.

It’s worth noting that the last time Frum tried to critique one of America’s neighbors, they absolutely covered his ass in poutine and sent him packing. It’s almost like a man whose biggest claim to fame is inventing the phrase “axis of evil”  shouldn’t be walking around pretending like he knows anything about anything except warmongering.

More like Axis of Snivel, amirite?

And now for something good

As you read this, I and 13 other people are trekking 339 miles across Iowa for Relay Iowa. We are raising money for Trans Mutual Aid and Iowa Abortion Access Fund.

You can support us by donating. Here is the link to Iowa Trans Mutual Aid. And here is the link to the Iowa Abortion Access Fund.

I am on the board of the Iowa Abortion Access Fund. I joined last year because I wanted to be part of making my community better and fighting for reproductive justice in my state. It wasn’t enough for me to just write about it. I wanted to live it. I wanted my fists in the street and my skin in the game. I live here. I have a personal stake in this place.

Last week, IAAF received the fundraising totals for our May fund-a-thon, and with the matching grant from the National Network of Abortion Funds, we raised over $130,000. So much of that money came from this community. And the executive director made a special point to say that every time I wrote about the fund in the newsletter, donations increased. This community was a huge part of helping us get to our fundraising goal. 

Every year I have a running mantra. A little phrase I repeat over and over when the runs get hard to remind myself that I am going to be okay. They are very simple phrases, not profound. But when you are in the middle of a hard thing, you don’t need deep philosophy; you need something simple that pulls you through. One year I repeated to myself, “Run your own race,” to remind myself that I am not in competition with the world around me. I am living my own life.

This year, I have been repeating, “You are not alone. You do not have to do this alone.”

You are all my good thing this week. Because we can feel isolated, but when we do this work together and in a community we are not alone.

Also, Nigel Farage got milkshaked this week. And that was pretty hilarious. “Milkshakes today, fists tomorrow, and knives the day after” is my new motto.

What I am drinking

I have a complicated history with rum. And that history is that I was very briefly in a sorority before I quit. You technically can’t really quit being in a sorority and for years they still sent me mailers and updates and emails. It’s easier to quit being a nun than it is to quit the sisterhood of Sigma Sigma Sigma.

It will not surprise you that my time as a sorority sister ended after I wrote a news story about Greek rush for the college newspaper. That story was not flattering at all, to say the least. And it upset the inter-Greek council, who called a special meeting to reprimand me. But before they could even begin, I stood up at the meeting and read a very dramatic letter about how the boat of this sisterhood was sinking and I was jumping off and swimming to shore. When I was done reading the letter, I stormed from the room into the hall. My friend Kristen followed me. And when I turned to her to ask her how it went, she said, “The boat metaphor was a little over the top.”

So, yes, I’ve always been like this.

Anyway, rum did some damage to me before I made my dramatic exit. But I’ve been trying to heal my relationship with rum (not sororities) and this week, I made a very delicious rum old fashioned.

I’d give you a recipe but it’s just an old fashioned with rum. I used a dark rum and cherry juice instead of simple syrup.

And I recommend that you make one too.