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Sunday, March 26, 2017

The sad reveal about Charles Krauthammer.

If you’ve ever watched HGTV, the channel that features home renovation, you’ve seen “the reveal.”  That’s when an old house has been shielded by a curtain and, when the renovation’s complete, the curtain is raised and the new house is shown. 

Thanks to the toxic politics in Washington DC, we’re seeing the Charles Krauthammer revealed.

Krauthammer’s a gifted writer and analyst of political events.  He’s viewed as a Conservative, but an acceptable one: on the Right in foreign affairs and socially Liberal.  He holds an enviable position among the Washington chattering classes.  And he intends to stay there.

Which is why he’s echoing the Liberal establishment on a subject that is intellectually indefensible: that Trump lied about being wiretapped.

There is no need to even investigate the NSA, the FBI or any of the 17 intelligence agencies that – among them – apparently monitor our every moment.  The fact that Trump was wiretapped was written about by the NY Times, the Washington Post and an array of global news organizations.

As John Nolte wrote on March 24th:
Our national media has known for months that the Obama administration spied on Team Trump. This was not only common knowledge within the media community, it was no secret. In fact, as you'll see below, for two big reasons, the media was overjoyed that this spying had occurred: (1) they got scoops damaging to Trump, and (2) in their provincial and cultish minds, the very fact that the oh-so pure Obama administration felt the need to spy, could only mean Trump was in bed with Putin.

In fact, the media was actually having a big public party using Obama's spying. Hoo-hah here's a scoop! Whee-hee Flynn said this! Woo-woo palace intrigue! Ha-haaah here's what so-and-so said! Tra-la-la here's what so-and-so did!

But suddenly, when Trump accused Obama of wiretapping him, the media, who had been reporting for months the phone calls that these taps had uncovered, denied that there had been any surveillance of Trump and his team.

They even began using the Bill Clinton defense: “it all depends on the meaning of is.”  They were trying to maintain that if Barack Obama had not personally snuck into Trump Tower with wires and alligator clips hooked to copper phone wires it wasn’t Obama and it wasn’t “wiretapping.” 


Yet Krauthammer sides with the people saying Trump is lying.  On March 19th I wrote about Fox’s Special Report where both “A. B. Stoddard and Charles Krauthammer both stating categorically that Trump’s allegation of being spied on is false.”

A.B. Stoddard is your garden variety “Democrat operative with bylines” as Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds puts it, but Krauthammer has a carefully, and well-deserved, reputation for being smart rather than ideologically correct and must know better.  Here’s what he said (I transcribed the segment myself from a replay of the program) 

“It’s a farce, you know, the idea that everyone in this town – the media – the agencies – the congress – are running around chasing their tails on a story that everyone knows it’s not true, but having to pretend that it might be because he’s the President when we know how it’s going to end.”

I‘m sorry but this is a farce.   

The logic in inescapable.  The only question is whether the surveillance of Team Trump was really “incidental” or if it was deliberate, using surveillance of virtually anyone that Trump and his team could be in contact with as a cover for listening in on Trump’s conversations.   

As Nolte remarks:  this was a “successful Watergate bugging.”

I’m also sorry that it reveals something about Krauthammer - a man with whom I find myself in agreement much of the time.  It shows the power of the Washington establishment that someone as intelligent as Krauthammer is willing to tell lies to maintain his standing in DC.  

That position, for Krauthammer, is an enviable one: a onetime speechwriter for Walter Mondale, he has long-running column syndicated by the Washington Post.  According to his biography, He has written for Time, “served as a panelist for the PBS political roundtable in weekly basis. For the past decade, Charles has been commentator and political analyst for Fox News,” appearing almost daily. 

I suspect that Dr. Krauthammer really doesn’t want to buck a bi-partisan establishment that really, really does not want to open the door to the possibility that Nixon’s “Plumbers” goals of bugging the political opposition was finally realized by the Obama administration thanks to new and improved surveillance techniques.  The Ruling Class is determined that if the Obama administration committed crimes, they will stay properly buried..

The Krauthammer reveal reveals a lot.  It explains why conservatives who get elected and come to Washington are quickly neutered in contrast to Republicans at the State and local level who are so much more successful.  It explains why so many Supreme Court justices nominated by Republicans “grow” in office and why John Roberts was willing to re-write Obamacare so that he could allow it to pass as Constitutional.  It explains why the only people who are willing to stand by Trump are people outside the Beltway who don’t have Washington DC based careers to consider. 


As we get older we learn a lot about family and friends that show them with warts and all.  Each revelation does not make us love them less, but it shows that mere humans are frail.  

Unfortunately Krauthammer’s failure strikes at the heart of our regard for him as intellectually honest.  That’s sad.

1 comment:

matthew w said...

Never thought Krauthammer was much of a Conservative.