Charles Krauthammer, famed Fox News \u201call-star,\u201d has died at the age of 68.<\/p>\n
Understandably enough, his colleagues have been effusive in their eulogizing of the man who has long been regarded as a sage of the conservative movement.\u00a0 Even while he lived, and long before he would be diagnosed with the disease that would end his life, no one in the Big Conservative media, even when they disagreed with him (over, say, Donald Trump), would argue with Krauthammer without first qualifying their remarks with assurances that they meant no disrespect to the good doctor.<\/p>\n
Krauthammer, doubtless, exemplified some true character excellences.\u00a0 He was intelligent, certainly, and, unlike many, Krauthammer had a calmness of mind that enabled him to be among the most articulate proponents of the ideas that he shared with his fellow partisans.\u00a0 Nor is there anyone who can fail to be moved by the determination, indeed, the courage, that a man must possess to become as professionally and personally accomplished as Krauthammer became despite the severe physical obstacles with which life burdened him.<\/p>\n
Yet these commendable attributes of his aside, as a well-known commentator, even a commentator who enjoyed the distinction of being a \u201cpublic intellectual,\u201d Krauthammer had a track record\u2014a record extending back decades\u2014that was less than stellar.<\/p>\n
In truth, it was abysmal.<\/p>\n
Had Krauthammer\u2019s not been among the more prominent faces of today\u2019s \u201cconservative movement,\u201d then we could safely ignore the hagiographical-type commentary that is now being cranked out on him.\u00a0 Since things are otherwise, however, the truth must be told.<\/p>\n
For starters, Krauthammer self-identified as a Great Society Democrat until as recently as the 1980s.\u00a0 He wrote for the left-leaning The New Republic <\/em>and, even after he became a Reaganite, Krauthammer became a weekly columnist, and resident \u201cconservative,\u201d for the left-wing Washington Post.\u00a0 <\/em>He retained this position until the illness that would claim his life forced him into retirement in August of 2017.<\/p>\n Yet Krauthammer was no conservative.\u00a0 Hendrik Hertzberg, with whom Krauthammer worked at The New Republic <\/em>in the 1980s, once wrote<\/a> in The New Yorker <\/em>that when he first met Krauthammer in 1978, the latter was \u201c70 percent Mondale liberal, 30 percent \u2018Scoop Jackson\u2019 Democrat\u201d\u2014meaning that he took \u201ca hard line on Israel and relations with the Soviet Union.\u201d Throughout the Reagan years, Krauthammer remained socially and culturally liberal-left while becoming \u201ca full-bore foreign-policy neoconservative.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2009, Hertzberg characterized Krauthammer as \u201c90-10 Republican.\u201d\u00a0 Hertzberg, himself a man of the left, intended to suggest that his one-time colleague underwent a political-ideological transformation of sorts over the decades.\u00a0 Perhaps it is precisely because of the constraints of his own ideological blinders that Hertzberg failed to see that his terms of choice for Krauthammer were but different grammatical variations for what essentially amounts to one and the same viewpoint: Krauthammer, remarkably, preserved the ideological identity that he had cemented for himself by the mid-1980s.<\/p>\n In other words, while Krauthammer would adopt the characteristically Republican rhetoric of \u201climited government,\u201d he exerted his significant influence advocating for one policy after the other\u2014domestic as well as foreign\u2014that exponentially expanded<\/em> and consolidated <\/em>the powers and scope of the national government.<\/p>\n In 2002, Krauthammer was appointed by George W. Bush to the President\u2019s Council on Bioethics.\u00a0 This is a particularly revealing episode in Krauthammer\u2019s career, for it isn\u2019t just that he lent his support to an American president\u2019s historically unprecedented decision to federally fund <\/em>embryonic stem-cell research; he exhibited either stunning naivety or dishonesty in his argument for this position:<\/p>\n \u201cIt is a good idea to expand federal funding of embryonic stem cell research,\u201d Krauthammer wrote in 2005<\/a>.\u00a0 Unlike some, Krauthammer does not think \u201ca zygote or blastocyst,\u201d i.e. the embryo, has \u201cthe rights of personhood.\u201d \u00a0This research is, however, \u201ca bad idea\u201d unless it is framed within legislation that prohibits the using of \u201cembryos created specifically to be used in research and destroyed.\u201d<\/p>\n Bush\u2019s insistence that stem-cells would be extracted only from those embryos that had been destroyed at the time that he delivered his speech on this matter in 2001 now seemed \u201carbitrary,\u201d Krauthammer said.\u00a0 So, it is good that the research will be expanded on embryos that would \u201cbe destroyed anyway<\/em>\u201d (emphasis original). \u00a0\u00a0But this research should not be potentially limitless.<\/p>\n \u201cThe real threat to our humanity\u201d is not <\/em>the destruction of \u201cexisting human embryos\u201d of which, \u201cGod knows, more than a million\u201d are destroyed annually via abortions and \u201cthousands\u201d of which are left \u201cto die in fertility clinics [.]\u201d\u00a0 The real threat \u201cis the creation of new human life willfully for the sole purpose of making it a means to someone else\u2019s end\u2014dissecting it for its parts the way we would dissect something with no more moral standing than a mollusk or paramecium.\u201d<\/p>\n Notice, Krauthammer simultaneously denies the personhood, the moral standing, the subject-ness of the unborn embryo while lamenting that the practice to which he\u2019s contributed and for which he\u2019s fought is encouraging the objectification of the unborn by treating it as \u201ca mollusk or paramecium.\u201d\u00a0 At one and the same moment, Krauthammer acts equally surprised that, once engaged in the practice of funding embryonic stem-cell research (or any other practice), the impulse of the federal government would be anything other than to further entrench itself.<\/p>\n In 2005, Krauthammer called for<\/a> substantially higher taxes on gasoline so as to encourage \u201cconservation,\u201d as he put it.\u00a0 \u201cThank God for $3.50 gasoline,\u201d he wrote. \u201cNo blessing has ever come more disguised,\u201d for at this point, \u201c$3.00 seems far less outrageous than, say, a year ago.\u201d This being so, Krauthammer urged the government to take advantage of this \u201cunique but fleeting opportunity to permanently depress demand by locking in higher gasoline prices.\u201d Krauthammer\u2019s solution was simple:<\/p>\n \u201cPut a floor at $3.\u00a0 Every penny that the price goes under $3 should be recaptured in a federal gas tax so that Americans pay $3 at the pump no matter how low the world price goes.\u201d<\/p>\n The man who favored \u201climited government\u201d also favored price-controls on gasoline.<\/p>\n In his best-selling 2013 memoir, Things That Matter, <\/em>Krauthammer articulated once more the foreign policy vision that he first advanced more than a quarter-of-a-century earlier, what he calls \u201cDemocratic realism\u201d or \u201cDemocratic globalism,\u201d a \u201cvalue-driven foreign policy\u201d that posits as \u201cthe engine of history\u201d what Krauthammer calls \u201cthe will to freedom\u201d\u2014which he identifies with \u201cthe spread of democracy\u201d around the planet. From this standpoint, America \u201cwill support democracy everywhere,\u201d<\/em> Krauthammer assured audiences, but it \u201cwill commit blood and treasure only in places where there is a strategic necessity,\u201d <\/em>i.e. \u201cplaces central to the larger war against the existential enemy, the enemy that poses a global mortal threat to freedom<\/em>\u201d (italics original).<\/p>\n In 1986, Krauthammer\u2019s essay, \u201cThe Poverty of Realism,\u201d was published in The New Republic.\u00a0 <\/em>The author was blunt, stating that \u201cthe end of American foreign policy is not just the security of the United States, but what John F. Kennedy called \u2018the success of liberty.\u2019\u201d \u00a0Krauthammer didn\u2019t hesitate to explain what he meant by the latter expression. It means, first of all, that the American government must go about the business of \u201cdefending the community of democratic nations,\u201d for they are \u201cthe repository of the liberal idea.\u201d\u00a0 Yet it must as well encourage \u201cnew liberal policies at the frontier, most especially in the Third World.\u201d<\/p>\n The razing of the Berlin Wall and the implosion of the Soviet Union further enflamed Krauthammer\u2019s hopes for planetary Democratic hegemony.\u00a0 In 1989, the title of his Washington Post <\/em>article read simply, yet triumphantly: \u201cDemocracy Has Won<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0 Krauthammer was jubilant, perhaps a bit uncharacteristically so:<\/p>\n \u201cIt has occurred to me\u2026that it may not be premature to say that political philosophy is over.\u00a0 Finished. Solved. The perennial question that has preoccupied every political philosopher since Plato\u2014what is the best form of governance?\u2014has been answered.\u201d<\/p>\n And the answer, of course, is Democracy.\u00a0 \u201cAfter a few millennia of trying every form of political system, we close this millennium with the sure knowledge that in liberal, pluralist, capitalist democracy we have found what we have been looking for.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet as far as Krauthammer was concerned, it isn\u2019t just we <\/em>who have discovered the answer to this perennial question.\u00a0 \u201cThis decade has seen the rest of the world register its agreement that to be modern\u2014to be advanced and humane\u2014is to embrace such Western political values as pluralism, democracy and free markets.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cPolitical theory,\u201d Krauthammer continued, or \u201cat least the part concerned with defining the good polity, is finished.\u00a0 The Western idea of governance has prevailed.\u201d<\/p>\n Krauthammer\u2019s position in 1989, particularly when considered retrospectively three decades later, can only strike all but the truest of his fellow believers as at once hubristic and na\u00efve. Yet there is no evidence that Krauthammer ever abandoned it.\u00a0 He supported most of the military interventions that the United States government launched over the last 30-plus years.\u00a0 And he was especially supportive of what has accurately been described as perhaps the biggest strategic blunder in the history of American foreign policy: the Iraq War.<\/p>\n In 2002<\/a>, Krauthammer wrote that \u201chawks,\u201d like himself, favor war in Iraq \u201con the grounds that Saddam Hussein is reckless, tyrannical and instinctively aggressive, and that if he comes into possession of nuclear weapons in addition to the weapons of mass destruction he already has, he is likely to use them or share them with terrorists.\u201d\u00a0 He continued: \u201cThe threat of mass death on a scale never before seen residing in the hands of an unstable madman is intolerable\u2014and must be preempted.\u201d<\/p>\n While acknowledging that the \u201creformation\u201d and \u201creconstruction of an alien culture\u201d constitutes a \u201cdaunting task,\u201d as well as being \u201crisky\u201d and \u201carrogant,\u201d Krauthammer insisted that there isn\u2019t \u201ca single, remotely plausible, alternative strategy for attacking the monster behind 9\/11.\u201d Yet this monster \u201cis not Osama bin Laden; it is the cauldron of political oppression, religious intolerance, and social ruin in the Arabic-Islamic world\u2014oppression transmuted and deflected by regimes with no legitimacy into virulent, murderous anti-Americanism.\u201d<\/p>\n Only the democratization of the Arab world can defeat Islamic terrorism.\u00a0 This was Krauthammer\u2019s position.<\/p>\n As for all of the damage that the war visited upon Iraq, Krauthammer remained optimistic: \u201cOnce its political and industrial infrastructures are reestablished, Iraq\u2019s potential for rebound, indeed for explosive growth,\u201d would be \u201cunlimited.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s self-evident to all who are remotely aware of the situation today that the reality that\u2019s since unfolded in Iraq is the antithesis of Krauthammer\u2019s forecasts.<\/p>\n Just a few years later, in 2006<\/a>, Krauthammer sounded surprised to discover that \u201cthe modern and democratizing influences\u201d that George W. Bush unleashed on the Arab world via the invasion of Iraq were being met with resistance from \u201cIslamic radicalism.\u201d Although during his speech to the Foreign Policy Research Institute Krauthammer conceded that \u201cthe entire enterprise of changing the culture of the Arab world\u201d of which he and his fellow neoconservatives were always the most impassioned supporters was \u201cradical,\u201d \u201carrogant,\u201d and \u201crisky,\u201d he continued to maintain that \u201cit was also the only idea of any coherence and consistency that anyone has advanced on how to change the underlying conditions that had led to 9\/11 and ultimately to prevent the kind of conditions that would lead to a second 9\/11.\u201d<\/p>\n Some commentators of an older right persuasion knew in 2002 that invading Iraq for purposes of \u201cregime change\u201d and \u201cDemocracy\u201d would end in the disaster that everyone in 2018 recognizes for what it is. Yet these commentators were either ignored, derided, and\/or suppressed by Krauthammer and his Big Conservative media fellow travelers.\u00a0 Krauthammer was indeed correct that the war would be \u201crisky.\u201d<\/p>\n What he never mentioned is that it would be thousands<\/a> of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis (and possibly as many as one million) who paid the costs of this enterprise with their lives.\u00a0 Of these, at least 175,000 were non-combatant civilians.<\/p>\n Krauthammer never mentioned the 800,000 or so children who were made orphans as the cost for a crusade for the democratization of the Islamic world that still has not ushered in the Promised Land that he envisioned.<\/p>\n Of those who would be forced to shoulder the burdens for his cause Krauthammer did not mention the ancient Iraq Christian communities and communities of other religious minorities who, without the protections afforded them by the secular Hussein, found themselves in the crosshairs of the Islamic jihadists who exploited the vacuum left by the dictator\u2019s forced removal from office.<\/p>\n It hasn\u2019t been until recently, courtesy of the direction of President Donald J. Trump\u2014who, it so happens, Krauthammer opposed<\/em>\u2014that the Islamic State has suffered defeat in Iraq (although the country itself is far from the utopia of which Krauthammer and his ilk dreamt).<\/p>\n As for Trump, before he actually threw his hat into the political ring, Krauthammer referred to him as \u201cthe GOP\u2019s Al Sharpton<\/a>,\u201d a \u201cprovocateur, and clown, unserious.\u201d This was in 2012, when Trump was only toying with the notion of running and when, remarkably, Krauthammer predicted that Haley Barbour <\/em>would be the most likely GOP candidate to win the primary and general contests that year!<\/p>\n After the first Fox-televised GOP primary debate in 2015, Krauthammer told Megyn Kelly that what audiences witnessed in the billionaire\u2019s stage performance was nothing less than \u201cthe collapse of Donald Trump<\/a>,\u201d whose competitors \u201cleft him out in the cold.\u201d<\/p>\n Obviously, Krauthammer couldn\u2019t have been more mistaken.<\/p>\n When Barack Obama first ran for the presidency, although the Illinois senator had authored two books, the first of which had the subtitle, A Story of <\/em>Race and Inheritance, <\/em>and although Obama\u2019s associations with radical leftists were by then well-known, Krauthammer, who was among a handful of Beltway Republicans to have dined with Obama, said, shockingly, that it took him five weeks after Obama\u2019s inauguration to realize who Obama was.\u00a0 Rush Limbaugh was incredulous, claiming on his radio show to have been \u201cshocked<\/a>\u201d to hear that Krauthammer couldn\u2019t figure out Obama\u2019s ideological and political identity. \u00a0Krauthammer defended himself<\/a>, insisting that Rush had misconstrued his words. \u201cI said that when Obama was elected, it was not clear whether he was a centrist Democrat who would occasionally throw a bone to the left, or if he was a man of the left who would occasionally throw a bone to the center.\u201d<\/p>\n Still, this defense is no defense, for there was enough available on Obama\u2019s background to clarify for all but the willfully blind exactly the man that Obama had always been (and remains).<\/p>\n On April 22, 2003, Krauthammer defended the decision to invade Iraq even though, at this juncture, no weapons of mass destruction had been found.\u00a0 \u201cHans Blix had five months to find weapons. He found nothing. We\u2019ve had five weeks.\u00a0 Come back to me in five months,\u201d Krauthammer said. \u201cIf we haven\u2019t found any\u201d by then, he concluded, \u201cwe will have a credibility problem.\u201d<\/p>\n With all due respect to the dead, what I\u2019ve been at pains to show here is that much of Krauthammer\u2019s career as a commentator has indeed given rise to a credibility problem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Charles Krauthammer, famed Fox News \u201call-star,\u201d has died at the age of 68. Understandably enough, his colleagues have been effusive in their eulogizing of the man who has long been regarded as a sage of the conservative movement.\u00a0 Even while he lived, and long before he would be diagnosed with the disease that would end…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1908","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n