Slick or Sick Charlie? “Brilliant” Obama Out-Foxed the Republicans on Tax Bill and is the True “Comeback Kid”! Huh?

         Charles Krauthammer is a smart guy all right…always worth reading…but even though often on the same page he should never be taken as a dependable true friend of the Republican party or conservatism generally.  He’s moved from pundit to ingenious column-ing manipulator ala Walter Lippmann…and like Lippmann is willing to shuck many a moral absolute along the way.   

        Starting as speech-writer for Vice President Mondale he later seemed to abandon the Democratic party when its foreign policy turned mildly then vigorously anti-Israeli cum anti-Semitic. He found in the Republicans a willingness to defend Israel and its promise as the only democracy in the Middle East that should never be extinguished. That’s what I believe and up to now have acknowledged  his writings have brought comfort to the Republican party in the past but he is fond of  setting his own  course.  He dazzles but his course is often purposefully misleading for his own complicated ends.

       But Dr. Krauthammer zeal for the survival of Israel extends beyond it tohis reckoning that militant aggrandizement befits a “great power.” Which means he is a cheerleader for every foreign excursion that portrays the U. S. as brandishing muscle—particularly in the Middle East.   In many ways he is a column-writing Metternich.

        There are many reasons for identifying Krauthammer with Henry John Temple, 3^rd Viscount Palmerston [1784-1865]—Lord Palmerston  who served variously as either prime minister or foreign secretary and as either Tory or Liberal, when his country stood bestride the world.

       Palmerston’s credo was this: Britain has no permanent friends but permanent interests.  That was Lippmann’s credo by which he became the most influential political columnist of the 30s to 60s and it is Krauthammer’s now.

      Cunning, opaque, almost indecipherable as to his clear intent,    Krauthammer uses his column ingeniously.  Last week he wrote that by bowing to the Republican tax program to continue the Bush tax cuts down-the-line including the much maligned cuts for the rich,  Barack Obama suckered the Republicans, pulled the wool over their eyes, deserves the sobriquet “Comeback Kid” and forecasts his reelection is “more likely than not.”      Puleeeze!

          That is enough to entice liberals who have looked askance at Obama to rush to Charlie and beg “give me a drag on that stuff.”   But of course Charlie has got hold of some bad weed there.

      Obama’s historic lows in the polls are sufficient to show that Dr. Krauthammer is playing a trick on all—mostly the Democrats but also on Republicans.  This president has sunk under 50% in approval, one of the worst ratings in memory.National Journal’s polling has 60% of the populace saying  it’s going in the wrong direction, 30% in the right. Thanks to him the Democrats have lost their majorities in Congress.  The next  House is heavily Republican.  The next Senate though technically Democratic will be all but officially non-Democratic. 

          Yet we’re to believe from Krauthammer that because he was taken to the cleaner’s by the Republicans, Obama is on the cusp of reelection?  His rationale is that Bill Clinton took five months from the shellacking he took in the midterms to regain momentum but here Obama has done it by ingeniously snookering Republicans by winning passage of the tax bill that they wanted in just a few weeks!   One must rub his eyes and say, com’on Charlie, give us a break!

          Of course, Krauthammer’s spurious rhetorical pyrotechnics aside, a cursory look at the package he describes as a brilliant Obama triumph shows that it’s 76% Republican-written and 12% Democratic-written. It was supported by the Tea Parties, Freedom Works, Paul Ryan, Ron Paul, a majority of prominently-mentioned Republican presidential candidates and The Wall Street Journal.   This is the great triumph Obama hath wrought!

           As to the host of ultra-liberal malcontents on the Left who are blasting Obama, Krauthammer dismisses them by sayingwhere else do they have to go?   That’s a major error I thought even average pundits have been cured of.   Where else can they go?   Gee, Charlie, they can stay home!   That’s the story of most debacles in American history.

       Movement people on the Right and Left have done this all the time!    What does Krauthammer think happened just last November 2?   A serious drop-off of Obama supporters—independents, young people, women….all except the blacks and eventhey didn’t show up at the polls in the strength they did for him in 2008!   What does he mean where else do they have to go?  What happened to Republicans in 2006 when conservatives stayed home and allowed the Dems to give George W. Bush a “thumpin’” by seizing control of Congress?   

         What was Krauthammer’s hidden intent in writing a column maintaining Obama was ingenious in saddling up with a largely Republican tax bill? He’s mischievously and famously opaque and indecipherable. One guess: Probably to show Obama he will gain a strong new ally—him —if the president moves to the center on other issues particularly foreign-defense…and that the praise is done to puff the case for the fumbling, flailing Obama to  further adopt more of Bush foreign-defense objectives as he has in Afghanistan.  Hence it’s a love note. If Obama heeds the siren call Charlie Krauthammer will write more love notes.

          Barf me with a spoon if he’s not outrageous in laving the soft-soap of  sycophantic praise for Obama’s “brilliance.” Few imagine now that Obama is “brilliant,” just endowed with Sidney Poitier’s egregious drawing room manners as in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?—and Krauthammer the cynic knows it.

          Thus Charles Krauthammer should never be recognized as a conservative neo or moderate (nor as a liberal one for that manner).   One of the disagreeable habits he exhibits is a stunning denseness about the great object of his affection: israel.

       Israel’s greatest allies here aren’t Catholics, not even Jews who run secular and unobservant.  They’re evangelicals who believe biblical tie-ins between the Jews and Christianity.     Why if Charles wants to shore up support for his goal of a strong Israel does he fool around with alienation of its prime supporters?   Why does Charles toy with Christianity’s virulent secular enemies?   Why?    As Norman Podhoretz wrote: God saw them dancing around the Golden Calf and almost despaired with what he called “this stiff-necked people!”

      Make no mistake, today’s Golden Calf is secular, godless, hedonistic, decadent liberalism made manifest in setting a bonfire to enduring absolutes.  Including to what used to be called Judeo-Christian.  Toleration is one thing; moving homosexual practice to acceptability  is quite another.  

         So last night there was Charlie Krauthammer on Fox saying that don’t ask don’t tell will be all right because…hey…it’s inevitable!  It’s generational!  The last generation was benighted on several issues but not us. But tying the threat of homosexual ardor that could disrupt the military in times of war as “generational” and linking it with acceptance of civil rights for racial minorities is fallacious pseudo intellectual fantasy and Krauthammer knows it.

           This is the cynic in him; it is also the liberal stiff-neckness that afflicts so much of a once religious people of which Podhoretz complains.  It’s a shame that Slick Charlie cannot see fit to cooperate with those of us who understand along with the importance of Israel the need to preserve the safeguarding of families, as well as preservation of this nation from decadence as written in God’s law as given to Abraham. 

           But that’s  Slick…maybe Sick… Charlie.