…800-word columns for The Washington Post and 20-second sound bites for Fox News. There is very little intellectual tension, dialectical drama or sense of discovery in his arguments, and very little rhythm, color or finesse to his prose. He floats like a vulture, stings like a jellyfish. (…)
I suspect that if Krauthammer were asked to sum up everything he stands against intellectually in two words, they would be “The Nation.” Virtually every position regularly espoused in this magazine, and on the left generally, comes under his fire. Even where there is a measure of agreement—sexual equality, gay marriage, stem-cell research, evolution—it is grudging and usually accompanied by a rebuke to callow radicals. When it comes to political economy and, especially, foreign policy, Krauthammer’s contempt is unabashed.
Sometimes it unhinges him.
Amusingly, the two examples of “unhingement” offered by The Nation sound like the kind of thing Ann Coulter is regularly castigated for writing. Interesting that, at long last, somebody has bothered to notice that once in a while, male columnists make similarly “cruel” observations — without subsequently attracting “criticism” based upon the size of their (phantom) Adam’s Apples or the diameter of their femurs.
While I’m not an unabashed cheerleader for Krauthhammer, it seems only fair to cite an example of The Nation‘s own idiocy:
In the overcharged ideological atmosphere of Things That Matter, atheism and even veganism are suspect. Krauthammer summons us to remember the wise observation of Arthur Schlesinger (“and many others”) that “declining faith in the supernatural has been accompanied by the rise of the monstrous totalitarian creeds of the 20th century.” For “as Chesterton put it,” Krauthammer continues, “‘The trouble when people stop believing in God is not that they thereafter believe in nothing; it is that they thereafter believe in anything.’ In this century, ‘anything’ has included Hitler, Stalin and Mao.” It has also, I would remind him, included Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein and Albert Camus.
Surely the last three names — not even Einstein’s — don’t come close to cancelling out the first three?
Bertrand Russell in particular was a dangerous fool, whose writings on social and political issues gave the Left’s affection for Stalin, Mao and their ilk an intellectual imprimatur.
