Re: Concerning the most recent Krauthammer critique
Subject: Re: Concerning the most recent Krauthammer critique
From: Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com>
Date: 10/3/10, 14:57
To: Christopher Sill <cms3zx@virginia.edu>
Mr. Still-
Thanks for getting in touch.
I understand and agree with your point that anyone who's written a great amount of output over an extended period of time is likely to be vulnerable, to one extent or another, to the sort of attack I made on Krauthammer. In the process of researching my book and other projects, though, I've found that certain columnists are far more vulnerable than others. Michael Kinsley, for instance, has served as a columnist for about as long as Krauthammer has, but I eventually had to give up on him for lack of finding any incidents whereby he had told his audience that something was definitely going to happen that did not up happening, whereas it was easy to find such things in the output of Krauthammer, Thomas Friedman, and others. In fact, Krauthammer is actually unusual in the extent to which he makes firm proclamations and attacks others for not sharing them and then turns out to be wrong. Meanwhile, he does not ever seem to have learned from his mistakes, whereas a more virtuous person might be inclined to at least admit his errors and perhaps even to attempt to stop making them in the future, particularly when his errors influence public opinion and thus public policy.
You're correct that a case against Krauthammer or anyone else would be stronger if one could find flaws in his logic. I have done so in other articles and blog posts; to a much greater extent, I have done so in the chapter on Krauthammer found in my upcoming book, which I have attached here in case you'd be interested in taking a look. I think that if you read the chapter in question, you'll agree that there is really no way for an honest person to consider Krauthammer to be consistent, ethical, or otherwise worthy of the audience and awards he's received over the years.
Thanks again for your note, and let me know if you have any other questions or comments.
On Sun, Oct 3, 2010 at 2:34 PM, Christopher Sill <cms3zx@virginia.edu> wrote:
Mr. Brown,
I was searching for Mr. Krauthammer's most recent column on google, and a link to your column came up as one of the news links. Being a consistent reader of Mr. Krauthammer the past three or four years, I was intrigued by your article. Call me out if I'm wrong here, but I think you can take any respected political pundit that has been writing for a considerable amount of time and find faults. One can be wrong, and yet their logic and reasoning could be completely sound. I could write the same book about Paul Krugman or Christopher Hitchens or Bill Kristol, all of whom have been on the wrong side of history even if they had sound reasoning.
If you want to do the routine Jon Stewart Busch-league style of critique and make the redundant point that humans are fallible, go ahead. But I think your critique would be significantly more powerful if you could drive at the issue of Krauthammer's logic, rather than just whether or not he turned out to be right or wrong. That would be a book worth my time.
Good luck with the book,
Chris Sill
-- Chris Sill University of Virginia 2011 Government, Economics Minor
