Hertzberg on Charles Krauthammer
I’ve only been reading Charles Krauthammer on a regular basis since I moved to Washington, DC in late 2003. And he’s been consistently one of the very most repugnant writers out there—locked in perennial competition with Fred Barnes to win the coveted “America’s Worst Columnist” award. Rick Hertzberg, by contrast, is one of my favorite columnists. And yet they both worked in the Carter administration and both worked for the 1980s version of The New Republic (IIRC, they still list Krauthammer, but not Hertzberg, as a contributing editor). And I’m somewhat obsessed with Krauthammer, yet I take it that he can’t have always been such a rancid rightwinger given that background. Now Hertzberg writes what’s practically a blog post just for me—some reflections on the origins of Krauthammerdom.
31 Responses to “Hertzberg on Charles Krauthammer”
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March 4th, 2009 at 8:54 am
A certain view of Israel and US foreign policy seem to have much to do with it.
March 4th, 2009 at 9:05 am
they still list Krauthammer, but not Hertzberg, as a contributing editor
This says more about the New Republic than it does about Krauthammer or Hertzberg.
(I have to say, though, TNR’s environmental blog, The Vine, is almost shockingly good: the kind of thing they’d normally give to Gregg Easterbrook as a forum for advancing climate change denialism, and instead they gave it to Brad Plumer.)
March 4th, 2009 at 9:08 am
the origins of Krauthammer
I’d always assumed he just irrationally blamed Superman for the loss of his hair.
March 4th, 2009 at 9:12 am
Charles Krauthammer, still a credentialed psychiatrist, coined the term “Bush Derangement Syndrome,” in a column in which he diagnosed certain political preferences and responses as a psychiatric disorder.
How very Soviet of him.
March 4th, 2009 at 9:26 am
I don’t quite understand Matt’s obsession with Krauthammer. He’s not a favorite of mine, certainly. But while Bill Kristol breathes, the “America’s Worst Columnist” competition is a battle for second place. Kristol is the Michael Jordan, Babe Ruth, Wayne Gretzky and Jim Brown of bad columnists. When we’re all old and grey, we’ll be telling our grandkids and great grandkids about the Kristol era. He is transcendent in his awfulness.
March 4th, 2009 at 9:26 am
I once was channel surfing and accidently landed on some channel that had Krauthammer on. I quickly changed the channel without hearing a word he said… but the 3 to 5 seconds he was on my TV pickled every fruit and vegetable in the house! He is, almost literally, a sour-puss.
And since, as has been pointed out, Krauthammer is the one who coined the phrase ‘Bush Derangement Syndrome’ (BDS) I’ll go ahead and accuse him of Obama Derangement Syndrome, or ODS. We can skip all the subtext and short it to ‘odious’.
March 4th, 2009 at 9:37 am
Meh. Kristol is an idiot one or two IQ points above a garden salad. He’s got no choice.
Krauthammer, on the other hand, has both some measure of intellectual heft and the psychological training that OUGHT to enable him to cotton on to the pathologies of the Right. He seems, instead, to have embraced those pathologies with something akin to lust…
March 4th, 2009 at 9:41 am
I think the low point of Krauthammer’s writing was when he used his psychiatric background to do an armchair “diagnosis” of some supposed problem of Al Gore. Disgusting.
March 4th, 2009 at 9:53 am
I think future generations would appreciate us keeping Krauthammerdom out of the lexicon.
March 4th, 2009 at 10:04 am
But while Bill Kristol breathes, the “America’s Worst Columnist” competition is a battle for second place
It’s all a matter of taste, I guess. Kristol is easily the sloppiest, most overexposed, and most predictably dishonest neocon pundit, but to my mind this makes him mostly harmless. Barnes is such a laughable sycophant that I don’t think anyone outside of his own family has paid attention to him in years.
It’s Krauthammer who genuinely merits contempt. He’s a highly intelligent and thoroughly dishonest man, motivated almost entirely by visceral loathing of everyone in the world who disagrees with him. If you look closely at him on television, you can practically see the evil spirit that’s slowly consuming his desiccated flesh.
March 4th, 2009 at 10:06 am
I recall reading a column of his, the only one ever beyond the headline, about his dog’s death and how he was surprised at how deeply it effected him. This from a psychiatrist. To me his response speaks volumes to the kind of person he is – out of touch with his emotional self and the intimacies of his day to day life; and too much “thinking.” That he realized his sadness I suppose is a positive; there’s a heart in there somewhere.
March 4th, 2009 at 10:10 am
The commentariat is on fire this morning. Strasmangelo, Led, Petr, keep up the good work.
March 4th, 2009 at 10:21 am
In the Summer of 2002 I heard Charles Krauthammer speak to a Chicago group (largely Jewish.) The basic premise of his remarks were that his audience – while mainly Democrats – should instead support George W. Bush because of his unwavering support of Israel. . .
He repeatedly made the point that evangelical Christians were Israel’s best allies and that since they voted Republican so too should American Jews. He acknowledged that the “end of times” scenario was not a nice one but mentioned “we can likely take our chances on that occurring anytime soon.”
March 4th, 2009 at 10:25 am
I don’t quite understand Matt’s obsession with Krauthammer.
Kristol comes across as venal–he likes cash and the accouterments of power–while Krauthammer is evil.
March 4th, 2009 at 10:34 am
Someone with chart-fu skillz should graph Krauthammer’s change from Socialist to neo-con along side his rise in income bracket. I can’t blame the stinkin’ rich for advocating policies that benefit them. That’s why they turn so viciously against rich folks who advocate for spreading the wealth. E.g Soros, Hollywood libs.
March 4th, 2009 at 10:46 am
Re John
Mr. John should realize that Mr. Kristols’ father, Irving, one of the original neo-cons started out as a Trotskyite, as did fellow right wing whackjob David Horowitz.
March 4th, 2009 at 10:48 am
Krauthammer is actually worse than Pantload?
The rankings should be:
Jonah Goldberg
Krauthammer
Barnes
George Will
Kristol
In reality they’re all the same black-hearted person.
March 4th, 2009 at 10:56 am
To see into the black hole of the unfolding Krauthammerdämmerung (and may he be toppled from his pedestal someday before I die!), one need only revisit his “Barack Obama is a fraud and a hoax” columns of last spring.
Is there a more vile. tone-deaf misreading of the zeitgeist than that in all of the punditocracy’s rantings? I mean, say what you want about social democracy, but Bernie Madoff doesn’t have anything to do with it….
March 4th, 2009 at 11:23 am
He seems, instead, to have embraced those pathologies with something akin to lust…
Kraphammer has become the poster child for “physician heal thyself”.
But I can remember a time back in the eighties when he was a generally interesting read, as long as you avoided anything he wrote about Israel. I have a dim memory that he was no supporter of the Reagan tax cuts.
I think his descent into true evil pretty well parallels the resurgence of progressives. It was pushback against the neocon century that shorted out his braincells.
March 4th, 2009 at 12:11 pm
I recall reading a column of his, the only one ever beyond the headline, about his dog’s death and how he was surprised at how deeply it effected him. This from a psychiatrist. To me his response speaks volumes to the kind of person he is – out of touch with his emotional self and the intimacies of his day to day life
He’s out of touch with his emotional self because he was deeply affected by his dog’s death? What kind of crap psychiatrist are you?
March 4th, 2009 at 12:33 pm
Krauthammer is like a food critic who never visits a restaurant. He writes about foreign affairs from the comfort of his seat, no doubt reads alot, but has no idea of the on-the-ground dynamics of Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Palestine or any other troubled region around the world. I wonder if he even has a passport. He simply doesn’t know and doesn’t want to know lest the evidence challenge his already solidified conclusions.
March 4th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
Pamelas point (with which you are out of touch…) isn’t the fact of his grief… but the fact that he was SURPRISED at himself for having such grief within him. It’s obvious that the person he wishes to be (and with control over his emotions) is deeply at odds with the person he actually is. Thus “out of touch”. It’s a salient point, well made.
March 4th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
There’s a lesson embedded in Hertzberg’s reminiscence: All Krauthammer really cared about was foreign policy, especially regarding the Middle East. He was willing to suppress or reverse his views on most domestic and social issues to get along with the right-wingers who were most attuned to his foreign-policy agenda.
The blogosphere/wonkosphere has a lot in common with the Krauthammers. Each poster/expert has his or her own hobbyhorse(s) and tends to rate the political leadership according to its (in)action on certain “essential” agenda items. (The same is true of interest groups: The National Rifle Association, for example, is making a gun-law repeal amendment to the D.C. congressional voting-rights bill a litmus-test vote in its ratings.)
Realpolitik, meanwhile, is about setting priorities and making choices in which the good is not held hostage to the perfect (as each of us sees “good” and “perfect”). Voters en masse make such choices in each election. People who obsess on one or a few issues overlook that dynamic, and thus generally misread the voters’ support or opposition to their pet issues.
March 4th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
“Krauthammer is like a food critic who never visits a restaurant.”
Hah, good line, and all too true.
I submit, however, that even though he’s been at it for a relatively short time, Michael Gerson is already worse than Krauthammer and Barnes. He’s such an insufferable, moralizing Bush apologist.
March 4th, 2009 at 1:54 pm
Krauthammer played a huge role in my adolescent liberalism. In the early 90s I read an op-ed of his that basically argued that every Palestinian was trespassing in Israeli government property (West Bank and Gaza) and should be executed.
It was the first direct espousal of genocide that I’d read. His preeminence in my thoughts is what makes him: The Most Repugnant Pundit.
March 4th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
Krauthammer is another example of how the leaders of the Republican movement practically all started off as sensible, fairly liberal Democrats and went grotesque on some subject during the late 1960s or 1970s.
The thing that defines Krauthammer and the other neocons is the cynical embrace of the Christian* Zionism/philo-Semitism that began to emerge as a political stance and political issue in the U.S. in roughly 1968. Philo-Semitism is, after all, essentially a choice to support some groups and kinds of Jews while (intentionally or not) in effect delegitimizing and carrying on anti-Semitic views of select other groups and kinds of Jews. (”Christian*” because it is at bottom identified with and by numbers amounts to a stance of conservative Christians, e.g. the Religious Right, even though its main advocates, fervent supporters, and public figures happen mostly to be Jewish-Americans.)
In the American Culture War, Christian* Zionism is obviously the successor and derivative of Christian* anti-Semitism.
It’s possible to have a lot of contempt and a certain kind of sympathy for Krauthammer. He has a subtle but naive idealism at times that reflects the failures and compromised nature of the positions he embraces, a recognition that the radicalism and particular cynicism he embraces is inadequate and inhuman.
March 5th, 2009 at 12:25 am
Ok so Charles Krauthammer was a formerly liberal democratic Jewish intellectual with hardline “Scoop Jackson”ish foreign policy views that slowly became a neocon & progressively more right wing. Big Deal. This kind of story should be passe at this point to those who follow politics. It’s no surprise to me Krauthammer got hired by TNR. Views like his are practically a requirement. But what’s the excuse for Fred fucking Barnes? The ability to list TNR on his resume is more than Barnes deserves and that’s coming from someone without much respect for TNR to begin with.
March 17th, 2009 at 3:55 pm
Hello. Great job. I did not expect this today. This is a great story. Thanks!
March 18th, 2009 at 4:36 pm
Seems worth while to me