While I think Yglesias and Ezra give David Frum's cry of "whither blogger decency?" about as much code as it deserves, there are a few items in the article that I want to address. First off, I think Yglesias' comparison (which Frum references) of the foreign policy community to a cartel is very accurate. Conservatives grasped this a lot earlier than liberals did, and also understood that by pouring lots of money into think tanks with impressive sounding names and heavyweight letterhead they could break that cartel, which is how we ended with people like David Frum, Michael Ledeen, and Victor Davis Hanson appearing on TV as foreign policy experts, and a foreign policy "consensus" that lies somewhere between institutions like CSIS, Brookings, and CFR, which are politically centrist in orientation, and institutions like American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation out in deep-right la la land. So bloggers aren't in any sense "rebelling against the intellectuals", they're rebelling against a false foreign policy consensus that has, for a long time, favored a particular and limited range of intellectual orientation. When Frum complains about bloggers, then, he's really complaining about this arrangement (which clearly advantages immoderate views like his own and those of his cohorts at AEI) being disturbed.
