Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter, in the process of telling the Democrats that they need to da*n the torpedoes and go full speed ahead, drops this gem:

Charles Kraut-hammer doesn’t represent any swing voters.

Not having the print edition of Newsweek handy - like pretty much the rest of America - I don’t know if this is reproduced there. But I’m curious: is the ethnic sneer there Alter’s, or his editor’s? I suspect it’s the latter, actually; but you never know.

Moe Lane

PS: What? No, actually, the Democrats should totally listen to Alter. Really. Please.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Charles Krauthammer has the top story at Human Events today.

Obamacare Version 1.0 is dead. The 1,000-page monstrosity that emerged in various editions from Congress was done in by widespread national revulsion not just at its expense and intrusiveness but at the mendacity with which it is being sold. You don’t need a Ph.D. to see that the promise to expand coverage and reduce costs is a crude deception, or that cutting $500 billion from Medicare without affecting care is a fiction.
    
But there is an exit strategy. And a politically clever one, if the Democrats are smart enough to seize it.

Presidents generally start thinking about their legacy in the months before their terms end.  In the case of Barack Obama, his self-absorption began shortly after his election (well, it actually probably began shortly after birth, but I have no information about that period of his life…).  He has thrived on the cult of personality that developed around him during his campaign and thereafter.  He’s addicted to adoration.  And like most addicts, he must feed his addiction.  Unfortunately for the United States, he’s feeding it at our expense, and the latest example is his fixation on destroying “transforming” the health care system.

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I know it’s redundant to tell people to read Charles Krauthammer - really, you are doing Friday wrong if you don’t read his column every week - but he boils down the essential stakes in Iran neatly, and reminds us that this isn’t just about Ahmadenijad vs Mousavi. Samples:

[T]his incipient revolution is no longer about the election. Obama totally misses the point. The election allowed the political space and provided the spark for the eruption of anti-regime fervor that has been simmering for years and awaiting its moment. But people aren’t dying in the street because they want a recount of hanging chads in suburban Isfahan. They want to bring down the tyrannical, misogynist, corrupt theocracy that has imposed itself with the very baton-wielding goons that today attack the demonstrators.

As Bill Clinton might put it: it’s the mullahs, stupid. Krauthammer, as always, looks at this from the broader perspective of regional/global strategic dynamics. The stakes, if the regime falls:

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Charles Krauthammer, a man who is apparently constitutionally incapable of suffering fools at all (and never mind ‘gladly’), waxed wroth on the implication that the President’s response to the ongoing Iranian crisis was in any way similar to Pope John Paul II’s response to the Solidarity strikers:

The president is also speaking in code. The Pope spoke in a code which was implicit and understood support for the forces of freedom.

The code the administration is using is implicit to support for this repressive, tyrannical regime.

We watched Gibbs say that what’s going on is vigorous debate. The shooting of eight demonstrators is not debate. The knocking of heads, bloodying of demonstrators by the Revolutionary Guards is not debate. The arbitrary arrest of journalists, political opposition, and students is not debate.

And to call it a debate and to use this neutral and denatured language is disgraceful.

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On May 20, Politico had an interesting little treatment of columnist Charles Krauthammer crowning him as the most important conservative columnist of the day. A brief overview of his life and his emergence as the most reliable voice against Obamaism served as the main subject for the piece, but a few quotes on Mr. Krauthammer made by other columnists added a sense of how respected Krauthammer is to scribe Ben Smith’s piece. All the quotes were complimentary but shockingly, in one of those quotes, lefty Time columnist Joe Klein seemed to hint that a person in a wheelchair was incapable of really understanding enough of the world to make for a worthy columnist.

For those unaware, Charles Krauthammer has been confined to a wheelchair for several decades after he was injured in a swimming accident as a young man.

Can you imagine? In this day and age, saying that a person in a wheelchair is incapable of really understanding the world because they can’t easily get out there themselves because of their disability? And, how does a lefty columnist get away with saying this? Will no one scold Klein for his conceit that because he has two working legs that this fact somehow automatically makes him better qualified to opine as a columnist than a wheelchair bound Krauthammer?

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