In memory of Charles Krauthammer who died today at 68, we give you some of his best from his many newspaper columns over the years. As you read these (and as you remember his insight, his eloquence and his wit) you will understand why he is already so dearly missed:
Longevity for a columnist is a simple proposition: Once you start, you don’t stop. You do it until you die or can no longer put a sentence together. It has always been my intention to die at my desk, although my most cherished ambition is to outlive the estate tax . . .
To be doing every day what you enjoy doing is rare. Rarer still is to be doing what you were meant to do, particularly if you got there by sheer serendipity.
Nothing has so impressed me in my brief experience with fatherhood as the apparent autonomy of a child’s soul, the inner logic by which it seems to develop. It has a fixedness that is, perhaps happily, beyond a parent’s control. At least thinking so is a relief.
The threat to the Jewish future lies not in Europe but in the Muslim Middle East, today the heart of global anti-Semitism, a veritable factory of anti-Jewish literature, films, blood libels and calls for violence, indeed for another genocide. . . .
On the 70th anniversary of Auschwitz, mourning dead Jews is easy. And, forgive me, cheap. Want to truly honor the dead? Show solidarity with the living — Israel and its 6 million Jews. Make “never again” more than an empty phrase. It took Nazi Germany seven years to kill 6 million Jews. It would take a nuclear Iran one day.
Reagan was optimistic about America amid the cynicism and general retreat of the post-Vietnam era because he believed unfashionably that America was both great and good — and had been needlessly diminished by restrictive economic policies and timid foreign policies. Change the policies and America would be restored, both at home and abroad.
He was right.
In democracies, the pardon should be used as sparingly as possible. It is, after all, an admission of failure. It should be used not for dispensing clemency but for righting obvious miscarriages of justice that are otherwise unremediable (e.g., the 1913 Leo Frank case in Georgia). It might even be used, as was the Nixon pardon, to call an arbitrary halt to a national trauma. But only on these rarest of occasions should it supplant the workings of ordinary justice
Organized terror has shown what it can do: execute the single greatest massacre in American history, shut down the greatest power on the globe and send its leaders into underground shelters. All this, without even resorting to chemical, biological or nuclear weapons of mass destruction.
This is a formidable enemy. To dismiss it as a bunch of cowards perpetrating senseless acts of violence is complacent nonsense. People willing to kill thousands of innocents while they kill themselves are not cowards. They are deadly, vicious warriors and need to be treated as such.
Liberals believe that human nature is fundamentally good. The fact that this is contradicted by, oh, 4,000 years of human history simply tells them how urgent is the need for their next seven-point program for the social reform of everything. . . .
Clinton’s decade, that holiday from history, was certainly a time of peace and prosperity — but a soporific Golden Age that made no great demands on leadership. What, after all, was his greatest crisis? A farcical sexual dalliance.
The point is not what you think about the merits of the DREAM Act. Or of mandatory drug sentences. Or of subsidizing health care premiums for $175,000-a-year members of Congress. . . . The point is whether a president, charged with faithfully executing the laws that Congress enacts, may create, ignore, suspend and/or amend the law at will.
She [Hillary Clinton] promises no fundamental change, no relief from the new normal of slow growth, low productivity and economic stagnation. Instead, she offers government as remediator, as gap filler. . .
Hillaryism embodies the essence of modern liberalism. Having reached the limits of a welfare state grown increasingly sclerotic, bureaucratic and dysfunctional, the mission of modern liberalism is to patch the fraying safety net with yet more programs and entitlements.
A candidacy [Trump's] that started out as a joke, as a self-aggrandizing exercise in xenophobia, struck a chord in a certain constituency and took off. The joke was on those who believed that he was not a serious man and therefore would not be taken seriously. They — myself emphatically included — were wrong.
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