Charles Krauthammer

Charles Krauthammer
Charles Krauthammeris an American Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist, author, political commentator, and physician. His weekly column is syndicated to more than 400 newspapers worldwide. He is a contributing editor to the Weekly Standard and a nightly panelist on Fox News Channel's Special Report with Bret Baier. He was a weekly panelist on PBS news program Inside Washington from 1990 until it ceased production in December 2013...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth13 March 1950
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
It doesn't take a genius to see what happens when the entitlement state outgrows the economy upon which it rests. The time of Greece, Cyprus, Portugal, Spain, the rest of insolvent social-democratic Europe - and now Detroit - is the time for conservatives to raise the banner of Stein's Law and yell, 'Stop.' You can kick the can down the road, but at some point it disappears over a cliff.
An oil crisis looms, prices are spiking - and our president is extolling algae. After Solyndra, Keystone and promises of seaweed in their gas tanks, Americans sense a president so ideologically antipathetic to fossil fuels - which we possess in staggering abundance - that he is utterly unserious about the real world of oil in which the rest of us live.
The results of the Great Society experiments started coming in and began showing that, for all its good intentions, the War on Poverty was causing irreparable damage to the very communities it was designed to help.
The left is entering a new phase of ideological agitation no longer trying to win the debate but stopping debate altogether, banishing from public discourse any and all opposition. The proper word for that attitude is totalitarian. It declares certain controversies over and visits serious consequences from social ostracism to vocational defenestration upon those who refuse to be silenced.
The free lunch is the essence of modern liberalism.
For all the sublimity of art, physics, music, mathematics, and other manifestations of human genius, everything depends on the mundane, frustrating, often debased vocation known as politics (and its most exacting subspecialty - statecraft). Because if we don't get politics right, everything else risks extinction.
As the romance of manned space exploration has waned, the drive today is to find our living, thinking counterparts in the universe. For all the excitement, however, the search betrays a profound melancholy - a lonely species in a merciless universe anxiously awaits an answering voice amid utter silence.
Third parties in America gravitate not only to the extremes, but to irrelevance. (John Anderson's upcoming presidential campaign will undoubtedly confirm both tendencies.)
Take all your dukes and marquesses and earls and viscounts, pack them into one chamber, call it the House of Lords to satisfy their pride and then strip it of all political power. It's a solution so perfectly elegant and preposterous that only the British could have managed it.
Consider the oddity of those drug commercials on television. Fifteen seconds of the purported therapeutic effort, followed by about 45 seconds of a rapidly muttered list of horrific possible side effects. When the ad is over, I can't remember a thing about what the pill is supposed to do, except perhaps cause nausea, liver damage, projectile vomiting, a nasty rash, a four-hour erection, and sudden death. Sudden death is my favorite because there is something comical about it being a side effect. What exactly is the main effect in that case? Relief from abdominal bloating?
The great divide in American foreign policy thinking is between those who believe in paper and those who believe in power.
The war is not going well and it is time to say why...It has been fought with half-measures. It has been fought with an eye on the wishes of our 'coalition partners.' It has been fought to assuage the Arab 'street.' It has been fought to satisfy the diplomats rather than the generals...why have we not loosed the B-52s and the B-2s to carpet-bomb Taliban positions? And why are we giving the Taliban sanctuary in their cities? We could drop leaflets giving civilians 48 hours to evacuate, after which the cities become legitimate military targets.
Great leaders are willing to retire unloved and unpopular as the price for great exertion.
This is how the great post-partisan, post-racial, New Politics presidency ends-not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a desperate election-eve plea for ethnic retribution.