If you want to read kind words about Charles Krauthammer, well, go ahead. By all accounts, in his private life Krauthammer was gracious and kind to everyone he met, regardless of their political convictions. But Charles isn’t famous for being a nice guy; he’s famous for being a political commentator, and as a political commentator he was a remorseless hitman for the State of Israel.
Krauthammer did surprise me a number of times (the complete list of my K-man outbursts is here). Most remarkable, I would say, was a column by Charlie headed “The GOP gets the Iran prisoner swap wrong”, responding to the Republican “response” (aka “hysteria”) to Iran’s return of five U.S. prisoners as part of the agreement halting Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Since my response, “Charles Krauthammer truly surprises me, for a full ten column inches,” was so short, I’ll repeat it in full:
“Yes, he does. For ten column inches (maybe twelve!) the K-Man coolly and calmly rebuts every single criticism Republicans have made over the recent U.S./Iran prisoner swap.
“It’s too good to last, of course. Charlie quickly goes off an extended rant about the lifting of long-standing sanctions on Iran consequent to the nuclear deal and how that will be the wind beneath the wings of that country’s “aggressively interventionist and immutably anti-American” foreign policy—language that studiously ignores the fact that it is the U.S., not Iran, that has been “aggressively interventionist”, much at Charlie’s urgings, and much to our sorrow. Why, according to Charlie, it’s another Munich!
“Another Munich! Okay! That’s the Charlie Krauthammer I know! That other Charlie Krauthammer, the one who, you know, spoke the truth, I scarcely recognized.”
Because that’s the way it was with Charlie: every nation that didn’t kiss Uncle Sam’s ass was Nazi Germany and every agreement with such a country was a “Munich”. Charlie was one of a group of Jewish neocons who came of age in the seventies, a wrenching experience that convinced them of two things: 1) the Democratic Party could not be trusted to defend the state of Israel; and 2) the United States could only be trusted to defend the state of Israel if its citizens could be persuaded to believe that the defense of Israel was an integral part of the defense of the U.S. against an “existential threat”.
Charlie and friends labored endlessly to convince America that she was in precisely the same situation as Israel—surrounded by ruthless enemies whose evil designs deserved to be, and only could be, defeated by any—any and all—means necessary. Our backs are against the wall! Do you want to live or do you want to die?
The Soviet Union, of course, supplied the necessary existential threat, and it’s no wonder that Charlie, like eventual comrade in arms William F. Buckley1, was terrified by Ronald Reagan’s bizarre decision to do what he said he wanted to do: win the Cold War. Because there’s nothing so politically useless as a war that’s over!
Fortunately for Charlie and his friends, George H. W. Bush, though a bit of a wimp domestically,2 took American ass-kicking overseas to a whole new level, by actually doing it, and in the Middle East, no less! Listen up, Muslims! There’s a new sheriff in town! And he shoots to kill!3
With the sweet sound of smart bombs still ringing in their ears, the neocons were massively unprepared for the election of Bill Clinton in 1992. That was not supposed to happen! Utterly shell-shocked, they swore an oath on the altar of God eternal hostility to the Democratic Party. No lie was too great, no deception too loathsome! Ecrasez l'infame!
And Charlie told them, endlessly. The Clinton years were “a holiday from history”, the Obama years, “America’s retreat”, despite the fact that if you compared U.S. foreign policy under Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton, and Condoleezza Rice, you’d get a 98% match. Domestically, Charlie’s “policy” was, basically, “give the goddamn hillbillies4 what they goddamn want.” Foreign affairs, and foreign affairs alone, were what counted.
Naturally, the advent of Trump sent poor Charlie spinning like a whirligig.5 While Charlie denounced Trump’s “plan” to deport 11 million illegals as “morally obscene”6, he praised Trump’s “revised edition”, whereby only those who had entered the country illegally would be deported. Left unsaid by Krauthammer was the number to be deported—around six million. Perhaps (perhaps!), for one who had played the Holocaust card so often, the image of six million non-white people rapists being herded onto cattle cars luxurious, air-conditioned buses was just a little too awkward to be examined.
Afterwords
Andrew Sullivan, writing in New York magazine, describes—a bit gently, I would say—his frequent disagreements with Charles and then adds:
“But he seemed incapable of personal abuse, animosity, or rhetorical demonization. He even expressed a kind of fondness for me, I like to think, which was hard not to reciprocate. He was always a thinker, always drawn to argument and counterargument, even if he almost never conceded a point, however trivial. He’d smile laconically if you thought you’d made a good point, in what seemed like a mixture of mischief and condescension, and you knew it wouldn’t be worth haggling any further.”
Okay, so he didn’t lie to his friends, but did lie to the public.7 How many lies is too many?
- In his early years, Buckley wanted to save Jews’ souls, but as the seventies wore on he was ready to have them help save conservatism’s ass. ↩︎
- Despite his self-applied Texan mystique, Aitch Dubya had a Connecticut Yankee’s pride in being on the right side of the Civil War and took an earnest if patently paternal interest in black America. As supply-side Republican Bruce Bartlett notes, honestly and uncomfortably, in his “interesting” history of Democratic racism, Wrong on Race, when a black staffer was “needed” to appear at a bill signing photo op at the Reagan White House, one had to be “borrowed” from Bush’s staff. ↩︎
- My ululations on the subject of Iraq are almost without number, but not quite. ↩︎
- Aka “goyim”. The two terms are interchangeable. ↩︎
- Krauthammer, like all other neocons, “forgot” that Donald Trump was/is nothing more than Rush Limbaugh with a bad weave, the same man they’ve been married to for the past 25 years. ↩︎
- The link to Charlie’s column is busted, so I’m linking to my comment. ↩︎
- In this post from 2009, The Evolution of Charles Krauthammer”, written when he had broken with Krauthammer over Charlie’s support of torture post 9/11, Sullivan gives a crisper take on his friend. He also notes that back when the Iran/Contra scandal broke during Reagan’s second term, he was shocked to learn that Charlie wasn’t shocked, that, for Krauthammer, the struggle proceeds by any means necessary. The Constitution? Hey, it’s not a suicide pact is it? And if it is, fuck it! ↩︎
