Not Your Sweetie

He Got a Book Deal while the Rest of Us got an International Crisis"
Conason on David Frum, author of "Axis of Evil"

He concludes that " Frum at the presidential keyboard seems a bit
like Homer Simpson at the controls of the Springfield nuke plant. "

Here's how Hendrik Hertzberg at the New Yorker recounts the story of this blunder:

In the book, he writes that
when drafting duties
for last year's State of the Union
Message were being doled
out, his assignment was "to provide a
justification for a war,"
specifically a war with Iraq. After much
cogitation, he hit
upon the idea of likening what the United
States has been up
against since September 11, 2001, to the
villains of the Second
World War. The phrase he came up with was
"axis of hatred."
Higher-ups changed this to "axis of
evil," to make it sound
more "theological." Although Frum
initially intended his
"strong language" to apply only to Iraq,
Iran was quickly
added. (You can't have a single-pointed
axis.)
North Korea was an afterthought. It got
stuck in at the last
minute, but Frum doesn't quite explain
how or why. Perhaps
it was meant to echo the global span of
the original
(Baghdad-Tehran-Pyongyang equals
Berlin-Rome-Tokyo).
Perhaps it was an application of the
rhetorical Rule of Three
(our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred
honor; of the people,
by the people, for the people; blood,
sweat, and tears).
Perhaps it was the product of
intoxication brought on by an
excess of moral clarity. Most likely, it
was simply oratorical
affirmative action, bused in to lend
diversity to what would
otherwise have been an all-Muslim list.
One thing it was not
was the product of careful policy
deliberation. It had not been,
as they say, staffed out. As the Wall
Street Journal reported
last week, the State Department's East
Asia hands learned
about it only hours before the speech,
and they were not
happy. Secretary of State Powell, who
almost certainly agreed
with them but is ever the good soldier,
told them to suck it up:
"These are the President's views. It's
his speech, so salute and
follow."
As a rhetorical flourish, the axis of
evil soared like an eagle.
But in retrospect it more closely
resembles a turkey, and the
inclusion of North Korea, in particular,
has begun to look
uncannily like a chicken that in recent
days has come home to roost.