Political Forums - Charles Krauthammer

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Charles Krauthammer

I don't think I ever agreed with him, but still....

Quote:

"This is the final verdict. My fight is over."

Charles Krauthammer, the famed conservative columnist, informed readers on Friday that he is confronting an aggressive form of cancer.

"My doctors tell me their best estimate is that I have only a few weeks left to live," he wrote.

Krauthammer shared the devastating news in a short, matter-of-fact note on the website of the Washington Post, where he has been a columnist since 1984.

http://money.cnn.com/2018/06/08/medi...ews/index.html

His anti-Trump columns aren’t at the level of greatness of Jennifer Rubin, but he can hit pretty hard. I think you’ll find much to agree with in them.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/peopl...r/?tid=a_mcntx

I do not have access to Wapo off the front page.

Here's one of his columns. I think it's fair to spread it around a little at this point....

Quote:

Bungled collusion is still collusion

By Charles Krauthammer Opinion writer July 13, 2017

The Russia scandal has entered a new phase, and there’s no going back.

For six months, the White House claimed that this scandal was nothing more than innuendo about Trump campaign collusion with Russia in meddling in the 2016 election. Innuendo for which no concrete evidence had been produced.

Yes, there were several meetings with Russian officials, some only belatedly disclosed. But that is circumstantial evidence at best. Meetings tell you nothing unless you know what happened in them. We didn’t. Some of these were casual encounters in large groups, like the famous July 2016 Kislyak-Sessions exchange of pleasantries at the Republican National Convention. Big deal.

I was puzzled. Lots of coverup, but where was the crime? Not even a third-rate burglary. For six months, smoke without fire. Yes, President Trump himself was acting very defensively, as if he were hiding something. But no one ever produced the something.

My view was: Collusion? I just don’t see it. But I’m open to empirical evidence. Show me.

Donald Trump Jr.’s emails aren’t a smoking gun. They’re a blazing gun. Here’s why.

The evidence is now shown. This is not hearsay, not fake news, not unsourced leaks. This is an email chain released by Donald Trump Jr. himself. A British go-between writes that there’s a Russian government effort to help Trump Sr. win the election, and as part of that effort he proposes a meeting with a “Russian government attorney” possessing damaging information on Hillary Clinton. Moreover, the Kremlin is willing to share troves of incriminating documents from the Crown Prosecutor. (Error: Britain has a Crown Prosecutor. Russia has a Prosecutor General.)

Donald Jr. emails back. “I love it.” Fatal words.

Once you’ve said “I’m in,” it makes no difference that the meeting was a bust, that the intermediary brought no such goods. What matters is what Donald Jr. thought going into the meeting, as well as Jared Kushner and then-campaign manager Paul Manafort, who were forwarded the correspondence, invited to the meeting, and attended.

“It was literally just a wasted 20 minutes, which was a shame,” Donald Jr. told Sean Hannity. A shame? On the contrary, a stroke of luck. Had the lawyer real stuff to deliver, Donald Jr. and the others would be in far deeper legal trouble. It turned out to be incompetent collusion, amateur collusion, comically failed collusion. That does not erase the fact that three top Trump campaign officials were ready to play.

It may turn out that they did later collaborate more fruitfully. We don’t know. But even if nothing else is found, the evidence is damning.

It’s rather pathetic to hear Trump apologists protesting that it’s no big deal because we Americans are always intervening in other people’s elections, and they in ours. You don’t have to go back to the ’40s and ’50s when the CIA intervened in France and Italy to keep the communists from coming to power. What about the Obama administration’s blatant interference to try to defeat Benjamin Netanyahu in the latest Israeli election? One might even add the work of groups supported by the U.S. during Russian parliamentary elections — the very origin of Vladimir Putin’s deep animus toward Clinton, then secretary of state, whom he accuses of having orchestrated the opposition.

This defense is pathetic for two reasons. First, have the Trumpites not been telling us for six months that no collusion ever happened? And now they say: Sure it happened. So what? Everyone does it.

What’s left of your credibility when you make such a casual about-face?

Second, no, not everyone does it. It’s one thing to be open to opposition research dug up in Indiana. But not dirt from Russia, a hostile foreign power that has repeatedly invaded its neighbors (Georgia, Crimea, eastern Ukraine), that buzzes our planes and ships in international waters, that opposes our every move and objective around the globe. Just last week the Kremlin killed additional U.N. sanctions we were looking to impose on North Korea for its ICBM test.

There is no statute against helping a foreign hostile power meddle in an American election. What Donald Jr. — and Kushner and Manafort — did may not be criminal. But it is not merely stupid. It is also deeply wrong, a fundamental violation of any code of civic honor.

I leave it to the lawyers to adjudicate the legalities of unconsummated collusion. But you don’t need a lawyer to see that the Trump defense — collusion as a desperate Democratic fiction designed to explain away a lost election — is now officially dead.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinio...fbf_story.html

"Stupid Watergate" indeed!

Nice article DQ. The key point made is: "There is not a statute against helping a foreign hostile power meddle in an American election." This Op Ed piece supports my opinion that the Mueller investigation is a political attack on an anti-establishment populist president who is endangering the health of our republic. Maybe we need legislation to prevent foreign powers from meddling in our elections. I didn't include hostile because that would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to define in this context. For example, Israel has probably meddled in our elections, but are they a hostile power?

It's a political attack if and only if there is no reason to think there may be actual illegality to investigate.

Perhaps Krauthammer's problem here is he doesn't dare call it treason?

"Unconsummated collusion" WTF.
Every day it becomes clearer that the case against Trump is very, very weak... A whole lot of stretching.

The whole probe should be renamed "The Manafort Investigation" dealing with Manafort's decade old hustle in Ukraine.
That seems to be the devolution.

Israel is hostile. It will "vigorously" go against any US person, (including the President) , any US institution, that attempts to present even a smidgen of fairness for the Palestinians.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dondilion (Post 372138)

An article regarding Trump and collusion: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinio...nce-ncna832771

Quote:

Originally Posted by donquixote99 (Post 372136)

It's a political attack if and only if there is no reason to think there may be actual illegality to investigate.

Perhaps Krauthammer's problem here is he doesn't dare call it treason?

Nope, because conspiracy against the US isn't: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-polit...-paul-manafort.

I think the definition of the term 'enemies' in the interpretation of the treason clause of the Constitution needs updating--a thing the Supreme Court has the power to do, although the current one would not. But we don't declare war any more, and modern techniques allow nations to fight in non-traditional ways.

Quote:

Originally Posted by nailer (Post 372194)

An article regarding Trump and collusion: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinio...nce-ncna832771

Thanks! An eye opener on the legal definitions.

If Mueller cannot find Trump on collusion charge, then he has missed the boat and will end up in "witch hunt" territory.

There's "collusion" by statute definition, and collusion by intent. Intentional colluding with a foreign power for political advantage apparently occured, call it what one may.

Quote:

Originally Posted by donquixote99 (Post 372196)

I think you just changed the subject from treason to enemies.

Congress changes the Constitution, not the Supreme Court. And as such it would be Congress who would update the definition of enemies to meet your criteria. We haven't been in a declared war for 74 years. However we were in a Cold War with Russia for four decades and neither Congress nor The Supremes felt the need for a definition change. I doubt they will be changing it anytime in the foreseeable future.

RIP, Charles Krauthammer. One of the few thoughtful conservatives.

From the WaPo, where he was a columnist:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local...c2e_story.html

Dr. Krauthammer, whom Bush named to the President’s Council on Bioethics, was never completely a partisan warrior. He differed from many cultural conservatives by favoring legalized abortion and stem-cell research and abhorred the idea of “intelligent design,” calling it “a fraud,” “today’s tarted-up version of creationism.”

He scolded the tea party, a loud minority within the GOP that tried to force its way legislatively with government shutdowns, as the “suicide caucus.” It was one thing to be a “blocking element” in the minority, he said, but their tactics were no way to govern.

Dr. Krauthammer was apoplectic about the rise and election of President Trump, calling him a “moral disgrace” for his initial refusal to fully condemn a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville and a walking “systemic stress test.”

“He had great lucidity of thought and was an extremely pungent polemicist,” Heilbrunn said of Dr. Krauthammer. “Those traits manifested themselves once more in his searing denunciations of Donald Trump as a phony. They showed that Krauthammer wasn’t simply a reflexive, unthinking conservative who was peddling the party line. He had real discernment and independence. At bottom, he was an intellectual, not just a journalist, with real literary flair and style and insight.”

"At bottom, he was an intellectual, not just a journalist, with real literary flair and style and insight.”" WP

I'll bet Chuckles is sitting by a roaring fire in the warm place tonight, grinding his ghostly teeth over that description. :D

Rest in peace, Charles. You will be missed.

RIP Mr. Krauthammer.