It is a truism among big-time journalists that you always sell the same piece three times. It is a fact of human nature that we enjoy pissing on our enemies. And it is thus a double pleasure for me to take another poke at one of my favorite hypocrites, Charles Krauthammer.
Charles Krauthammer is not without honor. I recently noted that Charlie went out of his way, when other right-wingers were working themselves into a fury over a prisoner swap the Obama Administration arranged with Iran, to point out that the deal made perfect sense. He didn’t have to do that.
No, he didn’t. But he also didn’t need to work himself into a snit, if not a fury, over the president’s recent trip to Cuba. According to Charlie, “Cuba wasn’t so much a legacy trip as a vanity trip, vindicating the dorm-room enthusiasms of one’s student days when the Sandinistas were cool, revolution was king and every other friend had a dog named Che.”
Sorry, Charlie, the president didn’t go to Cuba to lay a wreath on the tomb of Che but rather to dance upon it, saying that he had come to “bury the last remnant of the Cold War,” an impolite reference to Nikita Khrushchev’s once notorious boast that he would “bury” us. In the NFL that’s called “taunting,” and good for 15 yards.
As the president is well aware, he is the one making a revolution in Cuba, bringing Cuba into the modern world of, yes, global capitalism and out of the pointless exile to which it had been condemned by the mindless opposition of Charlie and his right-wing confrères, who would rather have an issue than see people enjoy peaceful, happy lives.
And Charlie will have his issue. He naturally segues from Obama in Cuba to terrorists in Brussels, which of course is all Obama’s fault. “He declared a unilateral end to the global war on terror and has downplayed the threat ever since.”
Well, if only. I guess Charlie never noticed the invasion of Libya, which proved as disastrous, if less costly, than our invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, plus the thousands of “bad guys” (and their families, friends, and neighbors) who have fallen victim to Obama’s drones, plus our military involvement, direct or indirect, in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Somalia, plus I am sure, a half a dozen others that we know nothing about. But I notice that Charlie, while working himself into (this time) a fury, for sure, over the president’s failure to get hysterical over the threat posed by ISIS, offers precisely zero suggestions as to what the president ought to do about it, because Charlie doesn’t have any, other than voiding the nuclear agreement with Iran, which, of course, has nothing to do with ISIS.
I continue to be baffled by the incessant neocon rage at the Democratic Party, whose foreign policy, under both Clinton and Obama, has been 90% neocon. But Charlie and his friends are blind to that. They have convinced themselves that the Democratic Party is Satan. Even now, they must know that only Hillary Clinton can save them from Donald “9/11 was Bush’s fault/Let’s leave NATO” Trump. But denial has become a way of life for them, which they could not quit even if they would.
Afterwords
Charlie is particularly enraged by the president’s habit of pointing out that “the terrorists” really aren’t killing a lot of people here in the U.S.1 That’s because Charlie don’t want no lousy, stinkin’ facts and no lousy, stinkin’ reason! Charlie wants Terror! Be afraid! Be very afraid! And do exactly what Charlie and his friends tell you to do!
- As this graph points out, Europe endured far more “terror” in the past than in the present. Perhaps this whole “existential crisis of the West” thing is overblown. ↩︎
