Pajamas takes down Krauthammer

It’s so rare for an organ of the conservative establishment to criticize a member of the conservative establishment, not to mention a star of the conservative establishment, that the event should be noted. In a recent piece at Pajamas Media David Solway exposes Charles Krauthammer as both a liberal and as an increasingly incoherent “sage.” Even better, the many comments following the article show that Krauthammer has definitively lost his “conservative” image; the man has just gone too far left too many times, and the conservatives aren’t buying his act any more. This is great news.

There are, however, a couple of weak spots in the piece which show that Solway has not yet really understood Krauthammer. One is where Solway refers to Krauthammer’s “presumed conservative principles.” As I have often pointed out, but as no one else seems to have noticed, Krauthammer has never in his career articulated a single conservative principle. Yes, he astutely anatomizes various liberal falsehoods and follies; but the man has never stood for conservatism or any non-liberal philosophy.

Solway also makes the following illogical argument: Krauthammer opposes the Ground Zero mosque; Geert Wilders opposes the Ground Zero mosque; why, then, Solway asks, does Krauthammer oppose Wilders?

Well, Mr. Solway, maybe Krauthammer’s opposition to Wilders has nothing to do with the Ground Zero mosque, but with some other issue, such as Wilders’s’ firm position that Islamic immigration to the West must end and all sharia supporting Muslims in the West must leave. That’s obviously the reason why Krauthammer, a pro-diversity, pro-immigration social liberal, sees Wilders as a dangerous extremist.

Like most establishment conservatives who support Wilders, Solway seems unconscious of Wilders’s actual positions on what to do about Islam. The pro-Wilders conservatives are not ready to take in the fact that Wilders, the man they admire for his courage, actually wants to remove Muslims from the West.

There is thus an odd symmetry between the establishment conservatives’ respective takes on Krauthammer and Wilders. They’ve lauded Krauthammer for years, not noticing that he is a liberal. And they praise Wilders, not noticing (or not dealing with the fact) that his key positions on Islam and immigration are significantly to the right of their own. As I’ve said before, ultimately the conservative will either embrace the stop-Muslim-immigration policy of the man they support, or they will stop supporting him.

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LA writes:

By the way, I don’t blame Krauthammer for acting more and more like the infallible fount of wisdom and predictor of the future, and thus going increasingly off the rails, as Solway demonstrates he has done. When you are placed in the “star” position on a top TV political program five days a week, and the host, Bret Baier, feeds you questions as though you were the Answerman of the Universe, and Baier and the other guests lapse into awed silence every time you speak, and when the flagship magazine of American conservatism creates a special feature just to report your every pronouncement, you’d have to be a saint not to regard yourself as a sage.

LA writes:

See follow-up entry, “What Charles Krauthammer believed in 1984.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 09, 2011 11:49 AM | Send