Charles Krauthammer Dies At 68

One of the most influential, and one of the most interesting, conservative commentators has died.

Fox News reported:

Charles Krauthammer, a longtime Fox News contributor, Pulitzer Prize winner, Harvard-trained psychiatrist and best-selling author who came to be known as the dean of conservative commentators, has died. He was 68. 

His death had been expected after he wrote a heartbreaking letter to colleagues, friends and viewers on June 8 that said in part “I have been uncharacteristically silent these past ten months. I had thought that silence would soon be coming to an end, but I’m afraid I must tell you now that fate has decided on a different course for me… 

““Recent tests have revealed that the cancer has returned. There was no sign of it as recently as a month ago, which means it is aggressive and spreading rapidly. My doctors tell me their best estimate is that I have only a few weeks left to live. This is the final verdict. My fight is over.”

To read more, go here. 

Krauthammer To GOP: "Walk Away"

Romney's Overseas Trip A Triumph

If one is relying just on the biased reporting by the liberal mainstream media, one would conclude that GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney's overseas trip was a failure.  One recent survey found that the MSM's reporting on the Romney campaign has been 86% negative.

Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer has an article analysing Romney's trip.  He declares it "a triumph."  Here's some passages from the article:

The Warsaw leg was a triumph. Romney’s speech warmly embraced Poland’s post-communist experiment as a stirring example of a nation committed to limited government at home and a close alliance with America abroad, even unto such godforsaken war zones as Afghanistan and Iraq, at great cost to itself and with little thanks. 

And at his previous stop, Jerusalem, Romney’s speech was a masterpiece of nuance and restraint. Without directly criticizing Obama, Romney drew pointed distinctions deftly expressed in the code words and curlicued diction of Middle East diplomacy. 

Look at how Romney was received. In Israel, its popular prime minister lavished on him a welcome so warm as to be a near-endorsement. In Poland, Romney received an actualendorsement from Lech Walesa, former dissident, former president, Cold War giant, Polish hero.  

Scorecard? Romney’s trip was a major substantive success: one gaffe (Britain), two triumphs (Israel and Poland) and a fine demonstration of foreign-policy fluency and command — wrapped, however, in a media narrative of surpassing triviality. 

To read Krauthammer's full article, go here.

Speaking of endorsements, actor/director Clint Eastwood has endorsed Romney for president.

Obama Defies Congress and Constitution On Immigration Amnesty

Obama vs. The Daily Caller.

It was interesting (and fun) to see President Obama's Rose Garden statement on amnesty for some illegal aliens get marred by The Daily Caller's Neil Munro.

Obama was interrupted during his statement by Munro, who shouted a question on the impact of his new policy on American workers.  Obama refused to answer even after he finished his statement.

Obama lost his cool and was visibly angry.  Some of the mainstream media called Munro's questioning "heckling."

Charles Krauthammer's Reaction.

On the amnesty matter itself, columnist Charles Krauthammer had this reaction:

"Beyond the pandering, beyond the politics, beyond the process — is simple constitutional decency.  This is out-and-out lawlessness. You had a clip of the president himself say months ago ‘I cannot do this on my own because there are laws on the books.’ Well, I have news for president — the laws remain on the books. They haven’t changed."

Only a dictator would act as Obama does.

El Rushbo.


Rush Limbaugh had this reaction (read more here):

I have a name for this new Obama immigration policy. In case you haven't heard, folks, very quickly. The regime today told the border agents: "If you catch young illegals, let 'em go and grant 'em work permits."  No more deportation of illegal immigrants.  They are to be given work permits and they can stay in the country.  So what this is is "Catch, Release, Vote."

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2012/06/15/munro-obama-ignores-questions-about-controversial-de-facto-amnesty-decision/#ixzz1xvTxaQdJ and http://dailycaller.com/2012/06/15/krauthammer-new-obama-immigration-policy-out-and-out-lawlessness-video/

Why Obamacare Is Sinking

Charles Krauthammer has a great article entitled, "Why Obamacare Is Sinking."

In it, Krauthammer outlines the many reasons that the Obamacare healthcare "reform" legislation is losing ground amongst Democrats.

He starts it with:

What happened to Obamacare? Rhetoric met reality. As both candidate and president, the master rhetorician could conjure a world in which he bestows upon you health care nirvana: more coverage, less cost.

But you can't fake it in legislation. Once you commit your fantasies to words and numbers, the Congressional Budget Office comes along and declares that the emperor has no clothes.

To read the full article, go here.

Krauthammer: Bonfire of the Trivialities

Charles Krauthammer, as usual, puts the current mess involving AIG, Obama and Congress into proper perspective:

That's $165 million in bonus money handed out to AIG debt manipulators who may be the only ones who know how to defuse the bomb they themselves built. Now, in the scheme of things, $165 million is a rounding error. It amounts to less than 1/18,500 of the $3.1 trillion federal budget. It's less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the bailout money given to AIG alone. If Bill Gates were to pay these AIG bonuses every year for the next 100 years, he'd still be left with more than half his personal fortune.

For this we are going to poison the well for any further financial rescues, face the prospect of letting AIG go under (which would make the Lehman Brothers collapse look trivial) and risk a run on the entire world financial system?

And there is such a thing as law. The way to break a contract legally is Chapter 11. Short of that, a contract is a contract. The AIG bonuses were agreed to before the government takeover and are perfectly legal. Is the rule now that when public anger is kindled, Congress will summarily cancel contracts?

Even worse are the clever schemes being cooked up in Congress to retrieve the money by means of some retroactive confiscatory tax. The common law is pretty clear about the impermissibility of ex post facto legislation and bills of attainder. They also happen to be specifically prohibited by the Constitution. We're going to overturn that for $165 million?

To read the full article, go here.

Deception Is The Core of Obama Plans

Charles Krauthammer nails President Obama again in his article, "Deception At Core of Obama Plans."

In it, Krauthammer notes:

The "day of reckoning" has now arrived. And because "it is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we'll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament," Obama has come to redeem us with his far-seeing program of universal, heavily nationalized health care; a cap-and-trade tax on energy; and a major federalization of education with universal access to college as the goal.

Amazing. As an explanation of our current economic difficulties, this is total fantasy. As a cure for rapidly growing joblessness, a massive destruction of wealth, a deepening worldwide recession, this is perhaps the greatest non sequitur ever foisted upon the American people.

At the very center of our economic near-depression is a credit bubble, a housing collapse and a systemic failure of the entire banking system. One can come up with a host of causes: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pushed by Washington (and greed) into improvident loans, corrupted bond-ratings agencies, insufficient regulation of new and exotic debt instruments, the easy money policy of Alan Greenspan's Fed, irresponsible bankers pushing (and then unloading in packaged loan instruments) highly dubious mortgages, greedy house-flippers, deceitful homebuyers.

The list is long. But the list of causes of the collapse of the financial system does not include the absence of universal health care, let alone of computerized medical records. Nor the absence of an industry-killing cap-and-trade carbon levy. Nor the lack of college graduates. Indeed, one could perversely make the case that, if anything, the proliferation of overeducated, Gucci-wearing, smart-ass MBAs inventing ever more sophisticated and opaque mathematical models and debt instruments helped get us into this credit catastrophe in the first place.

And yet with our financial house on fire, Obama makes clear both in his speech and his budget that the essence of his presidency will be the transformation of health care, education and energy. Four months after winning the election, six weeks after his swearing in, Obama has yet to unveil a plan to deal with the banking crisis.

Maybe it's because he has no plan. He is either clueless or the biggest liar in Presidential history!

Krauthammer knows what's going on:

What's going on? "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," said Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. "This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before."

Things. Now we know what they are. The markets' recent precipitous decline is a reaction not just to the absence of any plausible bank rescue plan, but also to the suspicion that Obama sees the continuing financial crisis as usefully creating the psychological conditions -- the sense of crisis bordering on fear-itself panic -- for enacting his "Big Bang" agenda to federalize and/or socialize health care, education and energy, the commanding heights of post-industrial society.

Clever politics, but intellectually dishonest to the core. Health, education and energy -- worthy and weighty as they may be -- are not the cause of our financial collapse. And they are not the cure. The fraudulent claim that they are both cause and cure is the rhetorical device by which an ambitious president intends to enact the most radical agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime.

Right-o. Obama is an idealogue steeped in socialism and Marxism. Many of us had him pegged months ago, but the drones who voted for him have yet to wake up. When they do, it just may be too late for this country.

At least Rahm Emanuel is honest in his comments. They are taking advantage of this bad economy and are using it to further their socialist aims. That's why they are using scare tactics to panic people into demanding fast action, not realizing that they are being deceived and the "fast action" is leading this country into socialism.

As Rush Limbaugh has been asking the Obama drones, Did you really vote for this?

To read Krauthammer's full article, go here.

Charles Krauthammer: The Fierce Urgency of Pork

Charles Krauthammer nails it again in his latest column in the Washington Post. His latest article is called, "The Fierce Urgency of Pork."

In it, Krauthammer writes:

It's the essential fraud of rushing through a bill in which the normal rules (committee hearings, finding revenue to pay for the programs) are suspended on the grounds that a national emergency requires an immediate job-creating stimulus -- and then throwing into it hundreds of billions that have nothing to do with stimulus, that Congress's own budget office says won't be spent until 2011 and beyond, and that are little more than the back-scratching, special-interest, lobby-driven parochialism that Obama came to Washington to abolish. He said.

After Obama's miraculous 2008 presidential campaign, it was clear that at some point the magical mystery tour would have to end. The nation would rub its eyes and begin to emerge from its reverie. The hallucinatory Obama would give way to the mere mortal. The great ethical transformations promised would be seen as a fairy tale that all presidents tell -- and that this president told better than anyone.

I thought the awakening would take six months. It took two and a half weeks.

Some of us already had Obama figured out months ago. It's the people who drank the Kool-Aid and voted for him who need to wake up.

To read Krauthammer's full column, go here.

Obama: Further Left Than LBJ

Charles Krauthammer has a new article, "Further Left Than LBJ." In it, Krauthammer tells us what to expect out of an Obama Administration with allies in the Congress.

What will you get?

Card check — meaning the abolition of the secret ballot in the certification of unions in the workplace. Large men will come to your house at night and ask you to sign a card supporting a union. You will sign.

The so-called Fairness Doctrine — a project of Nancy Pelosi and leading Democratic senators — which is a Hugo Chavez-style travesty designed to abolish conservative talk radio.

Judges who go beyond even the constitutional creativity we expect from Democratic appointees. Judges chosen according to Obama’s publicly declared criterion: “empathy” for the “poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old” — in a legal system historically predicated on the idea of justice entirely blind to one’s station in life.

An unprecedented expansion of government power. Yes, I know. It has already happened. A conservative government has already partially nationalized the mortgage industry, the insurance industry, and nine of the largest U.S. banks. This is all generally swallowed because everyone understands that the current crisis demands extraordinary measures. The difference is that conservatives are instinctively inclined to make such measures temporary. Whereas an Obama-Pelosi-Reid-Barney Frank administration will find irresistible the temptation to use the tools inherited — $700 billion of largely uncontrolled spending — as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to radically remake the American economy and social compact.

To read the full article, go here.

Krauthammer Makes The Case For McCain

Columnist Charles Krauthammer has a new and timely article, "McCain The Stalwart" that makes the case for electing John McCain president of the United States.

His article reads in part:

The case for McCain is straightforward. The financial crisis has made us forget, or just blindly deny, how dangerous the world out there is. We have a generations-long struggle with Islamic jihadism. An apocalyptic soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. A nuclear-armed Pakistan in danger of fragmentation. A rising Russia pushing the limits of revanchism. Plus the sure-to-come Falklands-like surprise popping out of nowhere.

Who do you want answering that phone at 3 a.m.? A man who's been cramming on these issues for the last year, who's never had to make an executive decision affecting so much as a city, let alone the world? A foreign policy novice instinctively inclined to the flabbiest, most vaporous multilateralism (e.g., the Berlin Wall came down because of "a world that stands as one"), and who refers to the most deliberate act of war since Pearl Harbor as "the tragedy of 9/11," a term more appropriate for a bus accident?

To read the full article, go here.

Krauthammer: Who's Playing The Race Card?

Charles Krauthammer has a new article:

Who's Playing The Race Card?

It certainly isn't John McCain!

Obama: Questions of Character

Charles Krauthammer nails Barack Obama again. These are the opening paragraphs of his latest article on Obama:

Questions of Character
Obama's radical pals shed light on his cynicism, his ruthlessness, and his tolerance for the obscene.

By Charles Krauthammer

Convicted felon Tony Rezko. Unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers. And the race-baiting Rev. Jeremiah Wright. It is hard to think of any presidential candidate before Barack Obama sporting associations with three more execrable characters. Yet let the McCain campaign raise the issue, and the mainstream media begin fulminating about dirty campaigning tinged with racism and McCarthyite guilt by association.



But associations are important. They provide a significant insight into character. They are particularly relevant in relation to a potential president as new, unknown, opaque, and self-contained as Obama. With the economy overshadowing everything, it may be too late politically to be raising this issue. But that does not make it, as conventional wisdom holds, in any way illegitimate.

To read the full article, go here.

Krauthammer: "Pelosi: Save The Planet, Let Someone Else Drill"

Charles Krauthammer has a new article on the idiocy of the Democrats' no-drill energy policy, "Pelosi: Save The Planet, Let Someone Else Drill." It is well-worth a read and the link to the article is below.

This is supposed to be a Democrat year, but with $4.00+ per gallon gasoline prices and the Democrats refusing to allow drilling offshore and in ANWR (Arctic National Wildlife Refuge), which the drilling area is about 1/6th the size of Dulles International Airport, this may not be the blow-out against Republicans after all.

Read the article and you'll see why!

Charles Krauthammer's "Pelosi: Save The Planet, Let Someone Else Drill

Krauthammer's "Audacity of Vanity"

Charles Krauthammer has a new column titled, "The Audacity of Vanity." He begins the piece with:

"Barack Obama wants to speak at the Brandenburg Gate. He figures it would be a nice backdrop. The supporting cast -- a cheering audience and a few fainting frauleins -- would be a picturesque way to bolster his foreign policy credentials."

This is a very revealing article and should be read by everyone.

Here's the link to the article: The Audacity of Vanity