When Barack Obama began positioning himself as a presidential aspirant towards the end of 2006, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer was rather encouraging for a conservative. Obama, he wrote at the time,
has "an affecting personal history." More importantly, he is much akin
to another once-popular presidential aspirant, Colin Powell; both, as
it turns out, are black. "Race
is only one element in their popularity," Krauthammer noted, "but an
important one. A
historic one. Like many Americans, I long to see an African-American
ascend to the presidency. It would be an event of profound
significance, a great milestone in the unfolding story of
African-Americans achieving their rightful, long-delayed place in
American life." Though the column made a strong case for Obama's
candidacy in terms of his identity, it included not a word on what he
might bring to the table in terms of policy.
Less than two years later, Krauthammer was attacking those
who would make the case for Obama's candidacy in terms of his identity,
rather than his policies. "The pillars of American liberalism - the
Democratic Party, the
universities and the mass media - are obsessed with biological
markers, most particularly race and gender," he helpfully explained,
adding that the 2008 Democratic primary represented "the full
flowering of identity politics. It's not a pretty picture."
Regardless of what views he may think he holds regarding the legitimacy
of Obama's personal appeal, Krauthammer has plenty of other, presumably
firmer stances on the president and his doings, and has in fact emerged
as the most significant of the administration's right-wing critics. In a profile piece that made the rounds last May,
Politico's Ben Smith proclaimed the Canadian-born commentator to be "a
coherent, sophisticated and implacable critic of the new president" and
a "central conservative voice" in the "Age of Obama;" New York Times mainstay
David Brooks recently characterized him as "the most important
conservative columnist right now." When Krauthammer won an award last
month from Rupert Murdoch in recognition of having done a lot of
whatever it is that makes Rupert Murdoch happy, Dick Cheney himself was on hand to congratulate him.
In liberal terms of achievement, this is akin to winning an award from
Noam Chomsky and being feted by the ghost of Louis Brandeis.
Krauthammer does indeed rank highly among today's conservative
commentariat insomuch as that he does not use the term "Democrat Party"
and has so far refrained from screaming or crying on television. And
many of his arguments in opposition to liberalism are quite cogent,
which is certainly a fine thing for an argument to be. But
When NATO sought to stave off yet another Balkan genocide by way of
its 1999 air bombing campaign against Serbia, Krauthammer denounced the move as mere wide-eyed liberal amateurism on the part of Clinton,
arguing that air strikes would be insufficient to force Milosevic out
of Kosovo. Bizarrely enough, he tried to convince his readers that
General Wesley Clark agreed with him over Clinton on the matter,
quoting the then-NATO commander as telling Jim Lehrer, "we never
thought that through air power we could stop these killings on the
ground." But Krauthammer leaves out the rest of Clark's quote in which the general makes clear
that "the person who has to stop this is President Milosevic" and that
the purpose of the air campaign was to make him do just that - which,
of course, it did. For good measure, Krauthammer also criticizes
Clinton for playing golf in the midst of conflict ("The stresses of
war, no doubt"); he appears to have changed his mind on the propriety
of such things around 2002 or so.
Even after it became clear that the Kosovo campaign had succeeded
brilliantly, Krauthammer was still ideologically committed to chaos in
the Balkans, having also predicted in '99 that NATO involvement "would
sever Kosovo from Serbian control and lead inevitably to an
irredentist Kosovar state, unstable and unviable and forced to either
join or take over pieces of neighboring countries." When an ethnic
Albanian insurgency arose in Macedonia along its border with
UN-administered Kosovo in 2001, he felt himself vindicated, proclaiming that
"the Balkans are on the verge of another explosion," making several
references to Vietnam, and characterizing our continued presence in the
region as a "quagmire." The violence ended within the year, having
claimed less than 80 lives. Kosovo has since joined both the IMF and
the World Bank; Macedonia is preparing for membership in NATO.
Like many others who had cried apocalypse in Kosovo, Krauthammer
bumbled into our two more recent military adventures in a haze of
amnesia and inexplicable self-regard. He ridiculedNew York Times contributor Johnny Apple for writing an article to the effect that Afghanistan may develop into a "quagmire" and another one in which Apple proposed that coalition forces might have to contend with guerrilla fighters in Iraq. Krauthammer himself hailed the Iraq conflict
as "the Three Week War;" when those allegedly improbable guerrillas did
show up and U.S. reconstruction efforts were revealed to have been
thrown together by Liberty University grads, Krauthammer responded with
studied sarcasm. "Every pundit, every ex-official and, of course, every
Democrat knows exactly how it should have been done," he wrote,
before going on to explain how it should have been done. He concludes
the 2003 column by suggesting that if "in a year or two we are able to
leave behind a stable, friendly government, we will have succeeded. If
not, we will have failed. And all the geniuses will be vindicated." Two
years later, Krauthammer followed up by admitting to his failures and
acknowledging the predictive superiority of his opponents. Just
kidding. Instead, he denounced
retired military figures like John Batiste as the "I-know-better
generals" for second-guessing Rumsfeld, whom he continued to support
after even William Kristol had begun calling for the defence
secretary's resignation. When the surge was proposed, Krauthammer came
out against the idea, explaining in a 2007 column that the strategy "will fail" due to the perfidy and incompetence of the Maliki government.
Our columnist hasn't faired much better in the realm of domestic predictions. In his aforementioned column on Obama - the one in which he praises the senator's blackness,
not the one in which he blasts everyone else for praising the senator's
blackness - our columnist explains that, should he run, "he will not
win. The reason is 9/11." In the meantime, he says, the White House
will probably go to a Republican - "say, 9/11 veteran Rudy Giuliani."
Krauthammer also warns
that the "reflexive anti-war sentiments" of the left "will prove
disastrous for the Democrats in the long run - the long run beginning
as early as November '08."
Though well up to speed on his
nonsensical predictions quota, Krauthammer would still be in danger of
losing his parking spot at The Weekly Standard if he failed to turn out the occasional bit of hypocrisy. In the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre, he appeared Fox News to point out the inevitable Muslim connection:
Krauthammer: And he did leave the return address 'Ismail Ax.' 'Ismail Ax.' I
suspect it has some more to do with Islamic terror and the inspiration
than it does with the opening line of Moby Dick.
Brit Hume: Which was, "My name is Ismael."
Close enough, Brit. But in a column that appeared two days later,
Krauthammer denounced "the inevitable rush to get ideological mileage
out of the carnage" and called for taste in the aftermath of tragedy.
"Perhaps in the spirit of Obama's much-heralded post-ideological
politics we can agree to observe a decent interval of respectful
silence before turning ineffable evil and unfathomable grief into
political fodder."