Krauthammer

Charles Krauthammer has died and there were a bunch of people on Twitter and in columns mourning the loss of the last principled conservative or whatever. And this is a joke. Charles Krauthammer was a terrible person who advocated terrible policies that hurt and killed people. I don’t care if he was the nicest man personally who ever lived. His impact on the nation was terrible. His impact on the Middle East was even worse. Henry Farrell:

Krauthammer’s writing was a wasp’s nest of chewed over paper, spittle and venomous indignation. It employed spleen as a poor substitute for critical intelligence, characteristically and systematically misrepresented the evidence to the point where it was impossible not to think that he was deliberately lying, and was thoroughly riddled with malice. His vicious insinuation that Francis Fukuyama was an anti-Semite is one example of the last. His mendacious vendetta against Hans Blix, who had the impertinence to be right about WMD in Iraq (Krauthammer later preferred to brush his own WMD claims under the carpet), is another. There were many more. The best that can be said is that Krauthammer was a clear writer, not in the sense that he was usually a clear thinker, but that it was clear who his enemies were; that he was intelligent enough to have known better, and that very, very occasionally, he did. While his personal qualities may have made up for his faults as a writer to those who loved and admired him, as a public figure and as a public intellectual, he was and will remain an example to be avoided rather than emulated.

Some of Krauthammer’s “finest” moments that showed up on LGM:

The time he whined about changing the name of the Washington Racists, which he conceded was racist but was mad Barack Obama made him feel bad about it.

The time Krauthammer demanded Obama submit to Republican ransom demands to destroy the safety net in exchange to raise the debt ceiling.

Here’s Krauthammer complaining about Muslims daring to build a mosque near the World Trade Center site.

Of course, Krauthammer discussing how much George W. Bush got right in Iraq.

And who could forget Chuck’s deep-seated desire to bomb Iran after his desire to bomb Iraq?

There’s so much more. Krauthammer was a terrible columnist and a person who did a great deal of damage to the world. His passing should not be mourned.

Let this be an open thread on how terrible Chuck Krauthammer was.