Death, Taxes, And Duplicity From Charles Krauthammer

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Friday December 07, 2012 · 11:27 AM PST

2012/12/07 · 11:27

Originally posted at Poison Your Mind.

Jonathan Bernstein read Charles Krauthammer for some reason, then he wrote about it:

Bernstein: Yes, this is petty. But so what? He deserves it. Charles Krauthammer:

Krauthammer: This is entirely about politics. It’s Phase 2 of the 2012 campaign. The election returned him to office. The fiscal cliff negotiations are designed to break the Republican opposition and grant him political supremacy, something he thinks he earned with his landslide 2.8-point victory margin on Election Day.

Bernstein: "Landslide 2.8 point victory"? Well, no. Krauthammer does link to the WaPo election map, but it hasn't been updated. David Wasserman's spreadsheet, however, tells us that Barack Obama's lead over Mitt Romney is currently 3.65 percentage points. ...
Krauthammer's sneering reference to Obama's "landslide" is both wrong and silly. ... It was certainly a much more substantial win than, say, either of George W. Bush's, and I don't recall Krauthammer insisting that Bush should practice restraint because of his narrow wins. ...

Regardless: the whole premise is silly. The president is the president, whether by 49 states or by a tiny and highly contested electoral college margin while losing the national vote. ...

So, Krauthammer has his facts wrong, and his argument doesn't make sense. That's fine and good. But, this being Krauthammer, there's an unsurprising further level of deceitfulness here.
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Thursday May 31, 2012 · 9:35 AM PDT

2012/05/31 · 09:35

I'm not sure anyone anywhere has ever written a stupider "news analysis" article:

Obama gambling that Syria won't be election liability

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Friday May 25, 2012 · 9:23 AM PDT

2012/05/25 · 09:23

Michael Fumento has had a run of the mill right-wing career. He's explained why FDR is responsible for the Depression being so bad: "Unemployment from 1923 to 1929 averaged a mere 3.3%. In FDR’s first year, 1933, it hit its high point of 24.9%." He's assailed the film industry for failing to present Arabs in a negative enough light: "By cooperating with organizations like CAIR, Hollywood kowtows to groups that aid and abet terrorists." His slightly-too-enthusiastic embrace of free-market principles cost him his position at the more mainstream Scripps Howard.

This fair-mindedness and commitment to rigorous empirical thinking has earned Fumento positions at the Hudson Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, and articles published in the Weekly Standard, National Review, Reason, and all the rest.

But even he's had enough:

I find myself linked not only with the Unabomber, but also Charles Manson and Fidel Castro. Or so says the Chicago-based think tank the Heartland Institute, for which I’ve done work. Heartland erected billboards depicting the above three declaring: “I still believe in Global Warming. Do you?” Climate scientists now, evidently, share something in common with dictators and mass murderers. Reportedly bin Laden was scheduled to make such an appearance, too. ...
The last thing hysteria promoters want is calm, reasoned argument backed by facts. And I’m horrified that these people have co-opted the name “conservative” to scream their messages of hate and anger. ...

All of today’s right-wing darlings got there by mastering what Burke feared most: screaming “J’accuse! J’accuse!” ...

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Thursday May 24, 2012 · 1:02 PM PDT

2012/05/24 · 13:02

Over at The American Conservative, Rod Dreher adds to a continuing discussion:

you don’t have to believe that Christianity is true to believe in human rights and dignity, but to say that God — by which I mean the basis of all reality — has ordained the universe such that x, y, and z are true is a much stronger basis than saying “these things are true because I believe them to be true.”

Well, maybe those arguments have more emotional resonance and rhetorical force. But that's rather a separate argument than whether or not they're true.

The problem is, God keeps changing His mind about everything.

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Wednesday May 23, 2012 · 11:07 AM PDT

2012/05/23 · 11:07

On my post about how watching Fox News makes you stupider, commenter Tevyeh asks, "Any thoughts on how a higher percentange of Republicans than Democrats answered correctly on each of the eight questions?" That's a reasonable enough question, but I don't think the survey results bear out a big difference between Republicans and Democrats:

What's more, while I'd rather everyone just knew everything, I'm more interested in what party elites say and do than I am in polls of everyone.

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Wednesday May 16, 2012 · 3:18 PM PDT

2012/05/16 · 15:18

Peter Beinart comments on a recent NYT article reflecting Mitt Romney's foreign policy advisers' complaints about the candidate:

It’s the kind of thing that usually happens near the end of a campaign, when all hope is lost: Mitt Romney’s foreign-policy team is trashing him to the press. On Afghanistan, one adviser told David Sanger of The New York Times, “None of us could quite figure out what he was advocating.” Another acknowledged that when it comes to Iran, “I’m not sure that anyone knows if the candidate has a strong view of his own.” A third admitted that “Romney doesn’t want to really engage these issues until he is in office.”
What’s going on?

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Tuesday September 06, 2011 · 1:37 PM PDT

2011/09/06 · 13:37

This morning, Ezra Klein addressed something we've talked about a bit-- that allegiance to the Republican Party carries no apparent policy beliefs.

Klein focuses on the Republican Party's 180-degree flip-flop on the effectiveness of stimulus spending in a down economy. (He doesn't mention, but could, of course, the GOP's corresponding flip-flops on cap and trade, on a health insurance mandate, on Section 8 housing vouchers, on the Earned Income Tax Credit, on industry bailouts, etc.)

Klein (wisely, in my view) rejects the sabotage hypothesis for a more learned explanation of the psychology of people who feel an emotional attachment to the word "Republican":

Poll

6 votes Show Results

What Is The Best Motto For Today's Republican/Tea Party?

6 votes Vote Now!

What Is The Best Motto For Today's Republican/Tea Party?

“Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast”

0 votes

”Keep Your Government Hands Off My Medicare”

0 votes

“Ignorance Is Strength”

5 votes

“No Weight To Objective Policy Content”

1 vote

Obama, Nixon, Eisenhower

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Thursday September 01, 2011 · 12:07 PM PDT

2011/09/01 · 12:07

A little while ago, Reagan and Bush Sr. adviser Bruce Bartlett compared Barack Obama to Richard Nixon. The entire article, which argues that Obama was not the transformative president that his party’s base wanted to see, is worth reading. But I wanted to focus on one thing that I think Bartlett gets wrong:

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Death, Taxes, And Duplicity From Charles Krauthammer

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Raging Id-iocy

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