"Charles Krauthammer, who died on June 21, wrote one of the articles about terrorism that has most influenced me..."

"... and possibly one of the most influential articles to me on any topic. It came out when I was 20 years old, in the middle of college, forming my views and writing style. I've read it over and over since then, and it's hard to describe the impact this short piece has had on me. In one paragraph, Krauthammer simply quotes another great writer, V.S. Naipaul, who died on August 11. The quotes are from before September 11. Naipaul later said: 'I saw this calamity coming, but no one was interested.'"

Writes my son John, linking to the Krauthammer article "The Enemy Is Not Islam. It Is Nihilism" (Weekly Standard). From that article, dated October 22, 2001:

The distinguished Indian writer and now Nobel Prize winner V.S. Naipaul, who has chronicled the Islamic world in two books ("Among the Believers" and "Beyond Belief"), recently warned (in a public talk in Melbourne before the World Trade Center attack), "We are within reach of great nihilistic forces that have undone civilization." In places like Afghanistan, "religion has been turned by some into a kind of nihilism, where people wish to destroy themselves and destroy their past and their culture . . . to be pure. They are enraged about the world and they wish to pull it down." This kind of fury and fanaticism is unappeasable. It knows no social, economic, or political solution. "You cannot converge with this [position] because it holds that your life is worthless and your beliefs are criminal and should be extirpated."...

This worship of death and destruction is a nihilism of a ferocity unlike any since the Nazis burned books, then art, then whole peoples. Goebbels would have marvelled at the recruitment tape for al Qaeda, a two-hour orgy of blood and death: image after image of brutalized Muslims shown in various poses of victimization, followed by glorious images of desecration of the infidel--mutilated American soldiers in Somalia, the destruction of the USS Cole, mangled bodies at the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Throughout, the soundtrack endlessly repeats the refrain "with blood, with blood, with blood." Bin Laden appears on the tape to counsel that "the love of this world is wrong. You should love the other world... die in the right cause and go to the other world."...

Goodbye to Charles Krauthammer.

"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, died Thursday. He was 68."

FoxNews reports.

"I leave this life with no regrets. It was a wonderful life — full and complete with the great loves and great endeavors that make it worth living."

"I am sad to leave, but I leave with the knowledge that I lived the life that I intended."

Charles Krauthammer — revealing that he knows he has "only a few weeks left to live" — says goodbye (WaPo).

"What happened today is that the United States joined the jackals at the U.N."

"That was a phrase used by Pat Moynihan, the great Democratic senator, the former U.S. ambassador who spoke for the United States standing up in the U.N. and to resist this kind of disgrace. To give you an idea of how appalling this resolution is, it declares that any Jew who lives in the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem, the Jewish quarter, inhabited for 1,000 years, is illegal, breaking international law, essentially an outlaw, can be hauled into the international criminal court and international courts in Europe, which is one of the consequences. The Jewish quarter has been populated by Jews for 1,000 years. In the war of Independence in 1948, the Arabs invaded Israel to wipe it out. They did not succeed, but the Arab Legion succeeded in conquering the Jewish quarter. They expelled all the Jews. They destroyed all the synagogues and all the homes. For 19 years, no Jew could go there. The Israelis got it back in the Six-Day War. Now it’s declared that this is not Jewish territory. Remember, it’s called 'the Jewish quarter,' but it belongs to other people. And any Jew who lives there is an outlaw. That’s exactly what we supported. The resolution is explicit in saying settlements in the occupied territories and in east Jerusalem."

Said Charles Krauthammer.

In 2012, running for re-election, Obama spoke at the meeting of AIPAC, the big Jewish lobby. He said, “Is there any doubt that I have Israel’s back?” That’s why he didn’t want do it while he was in office. That’s why he didn’t want to do it in 2016 so it would injure Hillary and show to particularly American Jews, who tend to be Democratic, that it was all a farce. He does it on the way out, and that’s part of why it’s so disgraceful. He didn’t even — he hid it until there would be no consequence. Now he is out the door and the damage is done for years. That resolution cannot be undone.

ADDED: From the Washington Post editors: "The Obama administration fires a dangerous parting shot." The NYT has no editorial response yet.

AND: Outside of the opinion pages, the NYT does have a news article, "Obama, Trump and the Turf War That Has Come to Define the Transition." that begins:

President-elect Donald J. Trump and President Obama have been unfailingly polite toward each other since the election. But with Mr. Trump staking out starkly different positions from Mr. Obama on Israel and other sensitive issues, and the president acting aggressively to protect his legacy, the two have become leaders of what amounts to dueling administrations.

The split widened on Friday when the Obama administration abstained from a United Nations Security Council vote that condemned Israel for Jewish settlements in the West Bank, and allowed the resolution to pass. A day earlier, Mr. Trump had publicly demanded that Mr. Obama veto the measure, even intervening with Egypt at the request of Israel to pressure the administration to shelve the effort....

It was the latest in a rapid-fire series of Twitter posts and public statements over the last week in which Mr. Trump has weighed in on Israel, terrorism and nuclear proliferation — contradicting Mr. Obama and flouting the notion that the country can have only one president at a time....

What happened in the U.N. was Obama showing off his power in the face of Donald Trump? Is that what the NYT means to say? That's not just pathetic. It's shocking.

"The soullessness of this campaign — all ambition and entitlement — emerges almost poignantly in the emails..."

"... especially when aides keep asking what the campaign is about. In one largely overlooked passage, Clinton complains that her speechwriters have not given her any overall theme or rationale. Isn’t that the candidate’s job? Asked one of her aides, Joel Benenson: 'Do we have any sense from her what she believes or wants her core message to be?' As she told a Goldman Sachs gathering, after the financial collapse there was 'a need to do something because, for political reasons . . . you can’t sit idly by and do nothing.' Giving the appearance that something had to be done. That’s not why Elizabeth Warren supported Dodd-Frank. Which is the difference between a conviction politician like Warren and a calculating machine like Clinton."

From Charles Krauthammer's "Who I’m voting for, and why: We are enduring a campaign of seemingly boundless cynicism." (He's against both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Me too!)

"You can defend Clinton and say saying 'Oh, this goes on all the time,' but that’s the point."

"They are trying to wipe away this sort of culture of corruption. It is hard to deny that there is a quid pro quo, or at least one was proposed, when the phrase 'quid pro quo' is used to describe the transaction in the documents. This is the 'camera and sausage' factor. I don’t think that we should be shocked that this happens in any bureaucracy, but once you see it in black in white, and you hear the charge that Clinton represents business as usual — and corrupt business as usual — that, I think, accentuates the charge, and makes it a very serious one."

Said Charles Krauthammer, as reported at National Review, talking about the newly released documents showing that a senior State Department Official offered what somebody else called "quid pro quo" to get the FBI to mark a document unclassified.

Is "the 'camera and sausage' factor" an expression we are supposed to recognize? No. A search for the precise term got to the emblematic nothingness of "Real Haunting Caught On Camera: The Haunted Sausage":



I have to assume that Krauthammer meant to gesture at the quote: "Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made." That's the original remark from 1869, and it's less of a famous quote than a famous simile, not always specific to law: Something is like watching sausage getting made. I guess Krauthammer didn't picture himself in the sausage factory, witnessing the gruesome goings-on, but watching video of the process. So a camera is in the sausage factory.

And now, I'm actually watching the video of Krauthammer speaking, which appears at the first link in this post along with the transcription, and I am cursing from down here in this rat hole. Krauthammer did not say "the 'camera and sausage' factor." National Review mistranscribed what was in fact "the camera in the sausage factory." Ah, well, my supposition was correct, and it would have been perfectly easy to understand if it had been correctly transcribed in the first place.

I know. I know you're going to say the important thing here is the State Department and the so-called quid pro quo. Althouse got off on one of her language kicks again. She's always ready to take the off-ramp to Languageville. Stay on the super-highway of current politics, Althouse.

But why? In the future, someone Googling something will find this in the archive because they're interested in the simile that's lived and prospered for a century and a half so far and that will exist, I suspect, for as long as humanity has meat scraps that need to be made into something delicious. No one will remember the outrage of the day that was October 17, 2016.

It would be more useful to amble down another street in Languageville and talk about what "quid pro quo" really means and whether the proposed trade of favors, referred to as "quid pro quo," is really the kind of quid pro quo that we talk about when we talk about political corruption.

ADDED: The 2014 Supreme Court case McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission talks about the phrase "quid pro quo" quite restrictively:

That Latin phrase captures the notion of a direct exchange of an official act for money. See McCormick v. United States, 500 U. S. 257, 266 (1991) . “The hallmark of corruption is the financial quid pro quo: dollars for political favors.” Federal Election Comm’n v. National Conservative Political Action Comm., 470 U. S. 480, 497 (1985)...

"Only amid the most bizarre, most tawdry, most addictive election campaign in memory could the real story of 2016 be so effectively obliterated..."

"... namely, that with just four months left in the Obama presidency, its two central pillars are collapsing before our eyes: domestically, its radical reform of American health care, aka Obamacare; and abroad, its radical reorientation of American foreign policy — disengagement marked by diplomacy and multilateralism."

So begins a Charles Krauthammer column titled "Barack Obama’s stillborn legacy: At home and abroad, the President's agenda is in tatters."

Donald Trump hits "a new high," nationally — 41%.

That's more than twice as much as his nearest competitor Ted Cruz, who gets 19%, in CNN's new poll. What's most impressive is how stable the numbers are. In CNN's last poll, in late December, Trump had 39% and Cruz 18%. A more negative stability is seen in Rubio's numbers. He had 10% then but only 8% now.

Trump leads "among both men and women, younger and older voters, white evangelicals, conservatives and both self-identified Republicans and independents who lean toward the party." He even leads among college graduates — with 26% (20% for Cruz) — and  tea partiers — with 37% (34% for Cruz). And Trump's supporters are, by far, least likely to change their minds: "70% of Trump's supporters say they are locked in compared with 40% who back other candidates."

Isn't it obvious that Trump will get the nomination? Nothing works on him. You especially can't hope that maybe he'll say something horrible. He's shown time and again that he can say things media people think are fatal gaffes and nothing happens. Nothing bad for him, that is. Many people love the supposedly horrible things.

Trump's case for the presidency rests at least in part on his standing as a political outsider. The poll finds that a broad swath of GOP voters (55%) say they feel completely unrepresented by the government in Washington, and among those voters, Trump holds a 47% to 19% lead over Cruz.

ADDED: The very next thing I looked at —  the front page of the NYT — had: "As Trump and Cruz Soar, G.O.P. Leaders’ Vexation Grows." I laughed out loud. "Vexation" is a funny word. I'm vexed — vexed! — I tell you! Seems like something a movie villain would say. I picture George Will. Look at him here, squirming — squirmishing — as he claims the "New York values" attack is hurting Trump:



The NYT article, if you click in from the front page, is: "As Donald Trump and Ted Cruz Soar, G.O.P. Leaders’ Exasperation Grows." I have no idea why "vexation" seemed like the right word for the front page and delighters in vexation like me got bait-and-switched into mere "exasperation." First paragraph:

Republican leaders are growing alarmed by the ferocious ways the party’s mainstream candidates for president are attacking one another, and they fear that time is running out for any of them to emerge as a credible alternative to Donald J. Trump or Senator Ted Cruz of Texas.

Leaders of the Republican establishment, made up of elected officials, lobbyists and donors, are also sending a message to the mainstream candidates, such as former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, that they should withdraw from the race if they do not show strength soon.

Soon?! It was apparent last October that Bush should withdraw and back Rubio. I wrote on October 29th:

And now, it's really too late for Jeb Bush.

On October 22, I said "It's time for Jeb Bush to withdraw and endorse Marco Rubio"... and now, after last night, it's too late even for that.... And so ends the sad tale of Jeb Bush, the man with cooler things to do than to help the man with the best hope of returning the Presidency to his party.

It's 3 months after I wrote that, and the Republican establishment is "growing alarmed" that it might be getting too late for a mainstreamer to emerge?! They're still waiting to see if Jeb might show some strength? His weakness has been one of Donald Trump's main jokes since last summer. What fool would hold out hope for something different to happen "soon"? But why not pretend there's hope? Why be realistic when there's nothing to be done?

AND: Just about the next thing I look at is David Brooks proving my point. Last lines of his new column "Stay Sane America, Please!":

In every recent presidential election American voters have selected the candidate with the most secure pair of hands. They’ve elected the person who would be a stable presence and companion for the next four years. I believe they’re going to do that again. And if they’re not, please allow me a few more months of denial. 

Sleep well.

WaPo recirculates the old lie that Trump mocked Krauthammer's disability.

I'm only seeing the updated version, which has this correction: "This story has been updated to clarify to whom Trump directed his comment about the 'guy that can’t buy a pair of pants.'" WaPo's reporter Jose A. DelReal was hot to characterize Trump — under fire for supposedly imitating the disability of Serge Kovaleski — as somebody who's a serial mocker of the disabled. As the report now reads:

This is not the first time Trump has been accused of mocking a person’s physical appearance. In a July interview with NBC news, Trump lashed out at columnists Jonah Goldberg and Charles Krauthammer after the latter called the candidate a "rodeo clown."

“I get called by a guy that can’t buy a pair of pants, I get called names?” Trump said at the time.

Critics speculated that Trump had intentionally mocked Krauthammer, who is paralyzed from the waist down, while others said the comments were about Goldberg. Krauthammer contacted The Washington Post on Thursday to say that Trump's comments were about Goldberg, not himself.

I tried to find the original, but Google cache and Wayback Machine take me to a dead end. What's going on there?

Here's my post from last July "Whose pants is Donald Trump talking about?": "Here's the clip. He's obviously talking about Goldberg, not Krauthammer, when he gets to the pair-of-pants hyperbole." Media jumped on Trump back then and got it wrong. The slavering shows. I think it's a good bet that this new WaPo article successfully propagated the meme that Trump is a serial mocker of disabled people.

ADDED: Here's Washington Monthly's contribution to the meme:

Donald Trump mocked New York Times investigative reporter Serge Kovaleski’s disability on a stage in front of thousands of supporters. There’s no denying that he did it or what he meant by it. At another point, Trump said that conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer, who is partially paralyzed, “couldn’t buy a pair of pants.” That was also captured on camera. So, even if there isn’t as much difference between George W. Bush and Donald Trump as people might think, there’s a lot more ammo to use against Trump.

That, written by one Martin Longman, remains uncorrected. There are lots of comments there too, and no one has flagged the error.

AND: At Mashable, the uncorrected meme is repeated by Liza Hearon:

It is not the first time Trump has been criticized for appearing to mock someone's handicap. In July, Trump said, “I get called by a guy that can’t buy a pair of pants, I get called names?” referring to the columnist Charles Krauthammer who is paralyzed from the waist down.

"I'm struck by how Clinton went straight for the hawkish view of ISIS (they're just a bunch of nihilistic, backward people who crave power)..."

"... and passed up the opportunity to urge us to have a greater understanding of the 'root causes"' of terrorism," writes my son John, after last night's debate. Clinton was asked whether we need to "understand" ISIS:

This is a politically tricky question, but she gives a clever response: she first says it's "very difficult to put ourselves in their shoes," but then proceeds to do just that by describing ISIS's worldview as one of "nihilism," "a lust for power," and "rejection of modernity and human rights"....

Clinton sounded much like the conservative Charles Krauthammer, writing in the month after the September 11 attacks:

It turns out that the enemy does have recognizable analogues in the Western experience. He is, as President Bush averred in his address to the nation, heir to the malignant ideologies of the 20th century. In its nihilism [the same word used by Clinton], its will to power [similar to the "lust for power" mentioned by Clinton], its celebration of blood and death, its craving for the cleansing purity that comes only from eradicating life and culture, radical Islam is heir, above all, to Nazism. The destruction of the World Trade Center was meant not only to wreak terror. Like the smashing of the Bamiyan Buddhas [in Afghanistan earlier in 2001], it was meant to obliterate greatness and beauty, elegance and grace. These artifacts represented civilization embodied in stone or steel. They had to be destroyed [that would be an example of the "rejection of modernity," as Clinton put it].

Whose pants is Donald Trump talking about?

I've been mostly ignoring Donald Trump, but something about the Mediaite headline "Trump Steamrolls NBC Reporter, Takes Shots at Krauthammer and Jonah Goldberg" drew me in. Oddly, the post begins with material about how Trump owns a gun, as if the "shots" he was taking at Krauthammer and Goldberg were not merely metaphorical. (Does Trump also own a steamroller?)

And then came Trump’s time to bash all his famous conservative critics.

On Charles Krauthammer, who called him a “rodeo clown”: He’s “a totally overrated person that dislikes me personally. I’ve never met him. He’s a totally overrated guy, doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

On Jonah Goldberg, who compared him to a “failed man”: “I’m worth a fortune. You know, it’s interesting. I went to the best school, got great marks, everything else. I went out, I made a fortune, a big fortune, a tremendous fortune… bigger than people even understand. […] Then I get called by a guy that can’t buy a pair of pants, I get called names?” [Ed. note: Huh? Does anyone know why Trump would think Goldberg can’t buy pants? Send tips to tips@mediaite.com]

That's hilariously loutish, calling Jonah Goldberg "a guy that can’t buy a pair of pants." I googled trump jonah pants to see if Goldberg had responded, and I got to this headline at The Daily Beast: "Trump Teases Critic for Being Paralyzed":

Not content with insulting a female reporter’s intelligence and professionalism, Donald Trump apparently mocked a conservative critic for being paralyzed. Trump in an interview with NBC News was asked about columnist Charles Krauthammer, who is paralyzed from the waist down and has called Trump a “rodeo clown.” In response to criticism from Krauthammer and National Review columnist Jonah Goldberg, Trump said the following: “I went out, I made a fortune, a big fortune, a tremendous fortune… bigger than people even understand,” he said before discussing his plan to release financial statements. “Then I get called by a guy that can’t buy a pair of pants, I get called names?”

Here's the clip. He's obviously talking about Goldberg, not Krauthammer, when he gets to the pair-of-pants hyperbole.

Even if he had used that figure of speech when talking about Krauthammer, he wouldn't have been teasing Krauthammer for being paralyzed. He'd just have stumbled into an unfortunate image. And, look, Krauthammer has responded, and Krauthammer knows it's Jonah whose pants-buying wherewithal was called into question:

"[Trump is] repeating himself. I'm like Jeb on this. I'm done. The man's specialty [is] to suck oxygen, I'm going to be breathing fresh air... And I do want to make an appeal to the viewers out there to crowdsource, to buy Jonah a pair of pants. I think if you look under the table it's disgraceful the way he comes to the show."

The teasing is coming from Krauthammer, and now Jonah has the exquisite distinction of getting fixed in our heads as an icon of panstlessness.

"The fact is that by the end of Bush’s tenure the war had been won. You can argue that the price of that victory was too high. Fine."

"We can debate that until the end of time. But what is not debatable is that it was a victory. Bush bequeathed to Obama a success. By whose measure? By Obama’s. As he told the troops at Fort Bragg on Dec. 14, 2011, 'We are leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people.' This was, said the president, a 'moment of success.' Which Obama proceeded to fully squander. With the 2012 election approaching, he chose to liquidate our military presence in Iraq. We didn’t just withdraw our forces. We abandoned, destroyed or turned over our equipment, stores, installations and bases. We surrendered our most valuable strategic assets, such as control of Iraqi airspace, soon to become the indispensable conduit for Iran to supply and sustain the Assad regime in Syria and cement its influence all the way to the Mediterranean. And, most relevant to the fall of Ramadi, we abandoned the vast intelligence network we had so painstakingly constructed in Anbar province, without which our current patchwork operations there are largely blind and correspondingly feeble. The current collapse was not predetermined in 2003 but in 2011. Isn’t that what should be asked of Hillary Clinton? We know you think the invasion of 2003 was a mistake. But what about the abandonment of 2011? Was that not a mistake?"

Writes Charles Krauthammer.

"Not much annoys me more than the stereotype that to be liberal is to be full of guilt."

"To be socially liberal, in my view, is to be more mindful of compassion and empathy for others. On the basis of that compassion we choose to make lifestyle choices (taking public transport, boycotting Nestle, going vegetarian, donating to charity for example) and do our bit. But given that humans are full of contradiction between what they should do and what they want to do, there is always some conflict."

Wrote Sunny Hundal in a 2007 Guardian article titled "The guilt-free liberal." I'm looking into the topic of "liberal guilt" after my post earlier this morning in which I rejected Power Line's "liberal guilt" theory of why Brian Williams lied. I said:

I've spent decades deeply embedded among liberals and guilt just doesn't seem to be the central force in their psychology. "Liberal guilt" is some kind of meme among conservatives, and it doesn't resonate for me.

Meade questioned "Is 'liberal guilt' a conservative meme?" That got me searching. My report from decades of embedding amongst the liberals is that liberals think they are good, not bad. They feel like repositories of virtue — "mindful of compassion and empathy for others," as Hundal put it. They tend to guilt-trip conservatives, who are regarded as lacking compassion and empathy.

Meade and I also got into a conversation about the difference between "guilt" and "shame," which would take me a long time to pursue in a blog post, so I'll just quickly recall the anti-Walker protesters who endlessly shouted "Shame! Shame!" Conservatives were supposed to be ashamed of not caring enough about the plight of the unionized public employees. These protesters evinced no shame or guilt about themselves. They seemed to feel ultra-righteous.



That photograph of mine first appeared in a March 2011 post titled "Shame, shame, shame. Where is the shame?" ("Is it in wearing a gray hoodie under a tailored blazer, a little black derby hat, and a smelled-a-fart expression while carrying a pre-printed 'SHAME' sign when the guy marching after you is wearing a windbreaker and carrying a handmade 'TAX the RICH' sign?..."). "Shame!" — by the way — was #5 on my 2012 list of "Top 5 Wisconsin Protests That In Retrospect Sound Like Pro-Walker Protests Against the Protests."

Anyway, back to "liberal guilt." If you Google "liberal guilt," the top hit is a Wikipedia article, but it's not an article titled "Liberal guilt," it's an article titled "White guilt." And the second hit is a 2008 Slate article titled "In Praise of Liberal Guilt." The subtitle says a lot about what made the term "liberal guilt" go viral among conservatives: "It's not wrong to favor Obama because of race."

If you Google "liberal guilt" and "Obama," among the nearly 32,000 hits you get are a syndicated Charles Krauthammer column under the headline "Obama's Speech Plays On Liberal Guilt" [dead link, but this might be the column]; a Mark Steyn post [dead link] on the National Review Online that describes "a Democrat nominating process that's a self-torturing satire of upscale liberal guilt confusions" ; a column by self-styled "crunchy con" Rod Dreher, who suggests [dead link] the mainstream media coverage of Obama indicates that "liberal guilt will work [on them] like kryptonite." Even liberals make fun of liberal guilt. A couple of years ago, Salon coyly proposed [dead link] supplementing the Oscars with the Liberal Guilt Awards and awarding political dramas with "Guilties."

My working theory is that "liberal guilt" got traction as a race-neutral way to accuse people of voting for Obama out of "white guilt" and that the term metastasized into a way to impugn any liberal policy with the idea that it is not rational but emanating from someplace emotional. Of course, those who recast liberal guilt as compassion and empathy are conceding that their predilections come from an emotional place, but they are proud of that, not guilty (or ashamed). Many conservatives react to this prideful confession of emotion by asserting that conservative ideas come straight from the rational mind unclouded by emotion. In my view, that's the most emotive position of all, and I would recommend that conservatives present their ideas as grounded in compassion and empathy, as — obviously — some of them do.

Charles Krauthammer supports Obama's decision on Bergdahl.

"Had the choice been mine I would have made the same choice... It’s a difficult decision, and I would not attack those who have done otherwise.... These are dangerous militants, but we have long engaged in and all other countries in the West have engaged in hostage swaps where the West always comes out on the short end...."

Why is Krauthammer saying that the Benghazi hearings "are a big political risk for Republicans"?

"Going into the 2014 election, they stand to benefit from the major issues — Obamacare, the economy, chronic unemployment — from which Benghazi hearings can only distract."

Worse, if botched like previous hearings on the matter, these hearings could backfire against the GOP, as did the 1998 Clinton impeachment proceedings. On purely partisan considerations, the hearings are not worth the political risk.

But the country deserves the truth....

So this is the argument pushing back Democrats who say the hearings are purely partisan GOP maneuvering in an election year: On purely partisan considerations, the hearings aren't even worth it! Therefore the GOP must be moving forward on this to bring the American people the truth they deserve.

They’ll get it if the GOP can keep the proceedings clean, factual and dispassionate. No speeches. No grandstanding. Gowdy has got to be a tough disciplinarian — especially toward his own side of the aisle.

What Krauthammer is really trying to say is: Any Republicans who get too hot about the political advantage they're hoping to get from these hearings had better not let it show. Everyone stay grimly judicious, neutral looking, and swathed in truth-findiness.

The Democrats, seeking political advantage (like everybody else), will watch and wait and any drop of slaver that falls from mildly snarling Republican lips will be collected and magnified.



UGH!! Disgusting! Those terrible Republicans! Seeking political advantage over the dead bodies of 4 dedicated Americans. Have they no decency?!

When is an extension not an extension?

When you just testified that you were not going to give another extension.

Okay. I hope you're doing well on this morning's quiz. Here's question 2: When can the administration exceed statutory deadlines without needing to procure statutory authority? I'll make this one multiple choice (with all the quotes taken from Charles Krauthammer's effort at answering the question):

a. When "the administration decides that morning" that's "how it wants the law to read."

b. When it's "sort of comical" or "cynicism raised to the level of comedy."

c. When the administration is dealing with "one of the longest laws in American history, thousands of pages," so that no one can really be expected to "refer[] to section 706-b, or whatever," so "none of [the words] really matter."

d. When they "were lying when they said... the deadline wouldn't change" and "Everyone knew they were lying."

e. When "nobody really cares" about the statutory text or the fact that it's been lied about.

f. When you actually don't want any deadline, because you want an endless period of open enrollment, because you want to let people wait until they have a big medical expense before they buy insurance, because that's the way to "send all the companies into bankruptcy."

g. All of the above.

h. All of the above except f.

"Yes, I'm afraid one surefire sign that Pop has turned crackpot is that he starts to consider Charles Krauthammer [as] quite the cutting philosopher."

"A related symptom is when someone starts quoting Thomas Sowell as if he were de Tocqueville.... I consider myself blessed. My parents have not succumbed to the swine flu of Fox. Their TV addictions are Judge Judy, Judge Joe Brown, Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz (basically any show fronted by a judge or purported doctor), a few soap operas, the local Baltimore news, Jeopardy!, Wheel of Fortune, and, my father's personal favorite, Married...with Children reruns. This has kept them admirably sane and unsour, especially compared to the Simpsons grandpas shaking their canes at the sight of that radical red Harry Reid, and of course they have ME to beam the sweet light of reason from my command post in Manhattan should they ever find themselves trapped in a waiting room with that hectoring parrot Sean Hannity on the TV screen."

"ME" = James Wolcott, at Vanity Fair. 

1. I read that because, in search of blogging inspiration this morning, I impulsively opened all the bookmarks in my file labeled "left."

2. That was funny, funny of the palpable bitchery kind.

3. How irritated/amused are you by the crap your family members watch on television?

4. What exactly are they watching and why do you think it's any worse than the crap you are watching?

5. What do you think they think of the crap you watch?

6. How genuinely demented would your family members need to be before they'd stop serving as raw material for your humor writing?

7. Imagine them writing about you, with exactly the same form of humor you use about them. What do they write?

"I’m not a global warming believer. I’m not a global warming denier."

"I’ve long believed that it cannot be good for humanity to be spewing tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. I also believe that those scientists who pretend to know exactly what this will cause in 20, 30 or 50 years are white-coated propagandists."

Says Charles Krauthammer, giving the "settled science" climatologists an easy opening for rebuttal — that word "exactly."

Who pretends to know exactly what will happen in the future?

Krauthammer may have some decent points here, but if you're going to call other people propagandists, you'd better strip your own writing of propaganda. Don't propagandize about propaganda. Or should I say: It takes one to know one.

"Here we are... Super Bowl, in New Jersey... Christie can appear on the scene... look like he’s got all this behind..."

"... him, and the lawyer releases the letter precisely on the eve of the big day in order to ruin it."

ADDED: TalkLeft — who's no Christie fan — says:

The lawyer's letter, which was carefully and ambiguously worded, didn't prove anything, let alone that what Christie said at the news conference was false....

She's looking closely at the text of the letter and the transcript of the press conference.

The letter doesn't even allege to whom the Administration Order was communicated. If the lawyer meant it was communicated to Christie, why didn't he say so? And alleging evidence exists "tying Mr. Christie to having knowledge" isn't a claim there's evidence Christie did have knowledge. Why the word play?

More at the link. 

Nice interview with Charles Krauthammer on "The Daily Show."

Video here. Krauthammer was good at connecting with the liberal Jon Stewart, in part because — as he says in the interview — he was once a liberal himself and in part because he had some ready and charming parries in the form of — this quote is from memory — "That's an excellent argument. Unfortunately, it's wrong...."

He was pushing his new book, "Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics," which comes out on October 30th.