When he puts it up, could you make sure that Michael uses this version of the Krauthammer piece instead of the first version I sent in? This one has about a dozen style tweaks and fixes and whatnot.
Thanks,
Barrett Brown Brooklyn, NY 512-560-2302
Kicking Krauthammer
When Barack Obama began positioning himself as a presidential aspirant towards the end of 2006, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer was encouraging. Obama, he wrote at the time,
has "an affecting personal history." More importantly, he has something
in common with 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 concerning
what the senator might bring to the table in terms of policy.
Less than two years later, Krauthammer was expressing disgust
with 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 even emerged as
the most significant of the administration's opponents among the right.
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 was presented with
an award this summer by Rupert Murdoch in recognition of his 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 somewhat akin to winning an
award from Noam Chomsky while being feted by the ghost of Louis
Brandeis.
Krauthammer ranks highly among today's
conservative commentariat insomuch as that he doesn't 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.
Tragically, though, someone appears to have convinced him that he is
some sort of expert on foreign policy and military
affairs. This was a pretty mean thing to do.
When NATO
sought to derail another potential 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, 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 the wacky columnist leaves out the rest of Clark's answer
in which it is explained that "the person who has to stop this is
President Milosevic" and that the purpose of the air campaign was to
force him to do just that. For good measure, Krauthammer also
criticizes Clinton for playing golf in the midst of conflict ("The
stresses of war, no doubt"); he seems to have changed his mind on the
propriety of such things around 2002 or so.
Even after the Kosovo campaign proved successful, 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, announcing 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 and the
EU.
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 initially 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
implemented largely by dipshit 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 really should have been done. He
concludes the 2003 column with the suggestion 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 began to denounce
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. Later, when the surge was proposed,
Krauthammer came out against the idea, explaining in a 2007 column
that it "will fail" due to the perfidy and incompetence of the Maliki
government; today, he deems the strategy to have been a success. Thus
it is that this most inexplicably respected of conservative
commentators may be the only pundit in the country to have been wrong
about every major U.S. foreign policy question of the last decade.
Krauthammer hasn't fared 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 attacks everyone else for doing the same - our
columnist explains that, should Obama run, "he will not
win. The reason is 9/11." In the meantime, he tells us, 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 silly 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 preternatural hypocrisy as
well. Two days after the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting, he appeared on Fox News in order to point out the inevitable Islam 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 his next column,
Krauthammer denounces "the inevitable rush to get ideological mileage
out of the carnage," citing gun control advocates for their bad taste in drawing social conclusions from 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." He had already gotten his own licks in, after all.