Updated: Charles Krauthammer and me

Lauri B. Regan  "The death of Charles Krauthammer affected me deeply, for he taught me by word and by example.  This article from four and half years ago explains why.  To my shock and delight, after it was published, he wrote me a personal note of thanks." . . .

● Krauthammer made a 2007 prediction that "If [Bush's] successors don't screw it up, within 10 years NASA will have us back to where we belong -- on other worlds." Five years later, he observed, "Is there a better symbol of willed American decline" than the voluntary "interment" of the space shuttle program. This is all the more poignant as China celebrates its first lunar landing (something to which Krauthammer ironically alludes in his final essay written four years ago), Iran brags of its second launch of a monkey into space, and Obama, clearly screwing it up, has relegated NASA to reaching "out to the Muslim world... to help them feel good...."

● In another 2011 column Krauthammer recognized that Martin Luther King Jr.'s

leadership, moral imagination and strategic genius... turned his own deeply Christian belief that 'unearned suffering is redemptive' into a creed of nonviolence that he carved into America's political consciousness.

"Contrast this with Obama's own ("Goddamn America") church experience and "leadership" of an America in which racial tensions have soared and relations have been set back decades.

. . . 

"Krauthammer observed that Obama's foreign policy is one

designed to produce American decline -- to make America essentially one nation among many. And for that purpose, its domestic policies are perfectly complimentary.

"But he recognized that the Europeans

can afford social democracy without the capacity to defend themselves because they can always depend on the Untied States....

Europe can eat, drink and be merry for America protects her. But for America it's different. If we choose the life of ease, who stands guard for us? . . .

Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics
. . . "A brilliant stylist known for an uncompromising honesty that challenges conventional wisdom at every turn, Krauthammer has for decades daz­zled readers with his keen insight into politics and government. His weekly column is a must-read in Washington and across the country. Now, finally, the best of Krauthammer’s intelligence, erudition and wit are collected in one volume." . . .

Critic-in-Chief  . . . "That is because he has been a brilliant critic of President Obama: a persistent, fearless, profound critic of Obama. Indeed, many conservatives, and some liberals as well, consider him the critic-in-chief. He has been on Obama’s case constantly, for his errors and follies in policy both foreign and domestic. In a column last month, he said that the “commander-in-chief, young Hamlet, frets, demurs, agonizes.” Krauthammer was speaking of the Afghan War. Only in August, Obama had declared Afghanistan to be “a war of necessity.” Now the president seemed very much unsure. Krauthammer concluded his column, “Does anything he says remain operative beyond the fading of the audience applause?' ” . . .

"Krauthammer was admired across the political spectrum, unfailingly elegant and civil, and stubbornly independent-minded." . . . "He was, in particular, a jewel in American conservatism. He wasn’t always one of us. He started his career as a moderate Democrat, a speechwriter for Walter Mondale and then a writer for The New Republic in the 1980s. He was on the right flank of that magazine’s internal fight over the future of liberalism as a resolute Cold Warrior. He became detached from the increasingly McGovernite Democratic party and moved steadily right over the years.
"He believed in American power and the international order it had created, and had no patience for apologists for our enemies or for the gauzy clichés of supporters of “the international community.” A baseline of realism undergirded his thought, and he was equally willing to puncture the fantasies of the Left and, as necessary, the irrational enthusiasms of the Right." . . .