Obamacare is making Americans’ health care more expensive, not less. How can that be? Charles Krauthammer explains that when you arbitrarily sever one sixth of “the biggest economy on Planet Earth” from a functioning market system and then try winging the planning of its operation, bad things are inevitable.
Charles Krauthammer, reflecting on the debt ceiling compromise, tells Fox News that the Tea Party Movement has done what it set out to do. It has changed the topic of America’s political debate.
Not so very long ago, at the time of his State of the Union address in January, Barack Obama was talking about more stimulus, “investment” in non-existent and uneconomic technologies, and the United States was firmly on the path to becoming another European-style welfare state. Looking back, Obama seems to be living in a different era. We are now in the period in which Americans recognize that government expansion and spending has gone too far, entitlements need to be rolled back, and the purposes and abilities of government re-evaluated. Obama has become a relic of the past, a fossil, and the Tea Party has been responsible.
Krauthammer, I think perfectly correctly views the still-pending-enactment debt bargain as a limited victory, but also as a turning point.
The same Charles Krauthammer had warned last Thursday:
I have every sympathy with the conservative counterrevolutionaries. Their containment of the Obama experiment has been remarkable. But reversal — rollback, in Cold War parlance — is simply not achievable until conservatives receive a mandate to govern from the White House.
Lincoln is reputed to have said: I hope to have God on my side, but I must have Kentucky. I don’t know whether conservatives have God on their side (I keep getting sent to His voice mail), but I do know that they don’t have Kentucky — they don’t have the Senate, they don’t have the White House. And under our constitutional system, you cannot govern from one house alone. Today’s resurgent conservatism, with its fidelity to constitutionalism, should be particularly attuned to this constraint, imposed as it is by a system of deliberately separated — and mutually limiting — powers.
Given this reality, trying to force the issue — turn a blocking minority into a governing authority — is not just counter-constitutional in spirit but self-destructive in practice. …
November 2012 constitutes the new conservatism’s one chance to restructure government and change the ideological course of the country. Why risk forfeiting that outcome by offering to share ownership of Obama’s wreckage?
Earlier this week, Al Gore identified the reason we’ve been experiencing a bitter-cold, snow-filled winter recently.
[S]cientists have been warning for at least two decades that global warming could make snowstorms more severe. Snow has two simple ingredients: cold and moisture. Warmer air collects moisture like a sponge until it hits a patch of cold air. When temperatures dip below freezing, a lot of moisture creates a lot of snow.â€
“A rise in global temperature can create all sorts of havoc, ranging from hotter dry spells to colder winters, along with increasingly violent storms, flooding, forest fires and loss of endangered species.â€
Charles Krauthammer is clearly the winner of the subsequent week-long competition in ridiculing Gore.
Warmlist needs a new category for satirical proposed additions.
Barack Obama told ABC News that he is determined to continue to try to pass the health care bill, even if it hurts him politically. “The one thing I’m clear about is that I’d rather be a really good one term president than a mediocre two term president.”
Charles Krauthammer responds that “Well, there is a third option he didn’t consider. He could be a mediocre one term president, and that’s what he been thus so far in his first year. And because mediocrity does not usually encourage the electorate to re-elect you that might account for being a one termer.”
Krauthammer describes the democrat response to their defeat in Massachusetts as “a marvel of obliviousness, of obtuseness, and of unbelievably condescending arrogance.”
Charles Krauthammer discusses Barack Obama with the German news magazine Spiegel.
SPIEGEL: Mr. Krauthammer, did the Nobel Commitee in Oslo honor or doom the Obama presidency by awarding him the Peace Prize?
Charles Krauthammer: It is so comical. Absurd. Any prize that goes to Kellogg and Briand, Le Duc Tho and Arafat, and Rigoberta Menchú, and ends up with Obama, tells you all you need to know. For Obama it’s not very good because it reaffirms the stereotypes about him as the empty celebrity.
SPIEGEL: Why does it?
Krauthammer: He is a man of perpetual promise. There used to be a cruel joke that said Brazil is the country of the future, and always will be; Obama is the Brazil of today’s politicians. He has obviously achieved nothing. And in the American context, to be the hero of five Norwegian leftists, is not exactly politically positive. …
SPIEGEL: What major mistakes has Obama made?
Krauthammer: I don’t know whether I should call it a mistake, but it turns out he is a left-liberal, not center-right the way Bill Clinton was. The analogy I give is that in America we play the game between the 40-yard lines, in Europe you go all the way from goal line to goal line. You have communist parties, you have fascist parties, we don’t have that, we have very centrist parties.
So Obama wants to push us to the 30-yard line, which for America is pretty far. Right after he was elected, he gave an address to Congress and promised to basically remake the basic pillars of American society — education , energy and health care. All this would move America toward a social democratic European-style state. It is outside of the norm of America.
SPIEGEL: Yet, he had promised these reforms during the campaign.
Krauthammer: Hardly. He’s now pushing a cap-and-trade energy reform. During the campaign he said that would cause skyrocketing utility rates. On healthcare, the reason he’s had such resistance is because he promised reform, not a radical remaking of the whole system.
SPIEGEL: So he didn’t see the massive resistance coming?
Krauthammer: Obama misread his mandate. He was elected six weeks after a financial collapse unlike any seen in 60 years; after eight years of a presidency which had tired the country; in the middle of two wars that made the country opposed to the Republican government that involved us in the wars; and against a completely inept opponent, John McCain. Nevertheless, Obama still only won by 7 points. But he thought it was a great sweeping mandate and he could implement his social democratic agenda.
Scott Johnson strongly recommends Charles Krauthammer’s crucial new essay in the Weekly Standard, supplying an even better alternative title: The Will to Cower.
The single most important essay on the Obama administration’s first year is Charles Krauthammer’s “Decline is a choice.” It presents a sort of unified field theory of Obamaism, usefully collecting evidence to advance the argument that Obama’s domestic and foreign policy positions work together to support the decline of American power.
As Krauthammer more broadly puts it: “The current liberal ascendancy in the United States–controlling the executive and both houses of Congress, dominating the media and elite culture–has set us on a course for decline. And this is true for both foreign and domestic policies. Indeed, they work synergistically to ensure that outcome.”
Charles Krauthammer thinks James Madison would wonder at the Constitutional feasability of Barack Obama’s federal intrusion into manufacturing, which recently reached the point of the president providing a federal guarantee of the repair or replacement of every component of millions of automobiles.
As Krauthammer observes, Obama “has now gotten himself so entangled in the car business that he is personally guaranteeing your muffler.” But, he notes:
Obama has far different ambitions. His goal is to rewrite the American social compact, to recast the relationship between government and citizen. He wants government to narrow the nation’s income and anxiety gaps. Soak the rich for reasons of revenue and justice. Nationalize health care and federalize education to grant all citizens of all classes the freedom from anxiety about health care and college that the rich enjoy. And fund this vast new social safety net through the cash cow of a disguised carbon tax.
Obama is a leveler. He has come to narrow the divide between rich and poor. For him the ultimate social value is fairness. Imposing it upon the American social order is his mission.
Fairness through leveling is the essence of Obamaism.
In the cultural echo-chamber of the liberal establishment, the justification for the US invasion of Iraq has been thoroughly exploded, its results labeled and inventoried in the lumber room of disaster, and a suitable location for the headmount of George W. Bush’s presidency selected on the wall above the foreign policy pundits’ bar.
The president’s poll numbers are decidedy unattractive, and Republican candidates are approaching the 2006 elections with the forlorn air of Emperor Valens’ legions advancing to meet the Gothic cavalry at Adrianople.
One of the highlights of last Sunday’s Times was Paul Berman‘s oleaginous review of Francis Fukuyama’s America at the Crossroads, a coat-reversal-cum-grovel appearing in public with a dust jacket.
It looks so much better to place one’s moment of conversion at a period in the past when the fortunes of the side one is rejoining did not appear quite so propitious as they do at present, and Fukuyama takes care to supply a story of his gasping aloud at the deluded optimism of the Neoconservative company he found himself in at a speech delivered by Charles Krauthammer in 2004.
Unfortunately for Fukuyama, Krauthammer reads the Sunday Times Book Review, and is only too eager to decline the role of strawman and debunk Fukuyama’s convenient account of feckless and provocative Neocon bragging.
It was, as the hero tells it, his Road to Damascus moment. There he is, in a hall of 1,500 people he has long considered to be his allies, hearing the speaker treat the Iraq war, nearing the end of its first year, as “a virtually unqualified success.” He gasps as the audience enthusiastically applauds. Aghast to discover himself in a sea of comrades so deluded by ideology as to have lost touch with reality, he decides he can no longer be one of them.
And thus did Francis Fukuyama become the world’s most celebrated ex-neoconservative, a well-timed metamorphosis that has brought him a piece of the fame that he once enjoyed 15 years ago as the man who declared, a mite prematurely, that history had ended.
One can only advise members of the liberal foreign policy establishment to listen very carefully at all their upcoming speeches over the next few years. You never know, the tide may turn in favor of the Bush Administration, and the United States, and you might hear Francis Fukuyama gasping again.