The Tundra Tabloids has a lot of respect for Charles Krauthammer for many different reasons, he’s a strong conservative on many issues and a staunch pro-Israel advocate, and for that I’m thankful. He also has been right on many of his political observations, that said, there are some worrisome aspects to Krauthammer that the TT finds troubling.
His easy dismissal of Tea Party candidates like Angle and O’Donnell raised a lot of eyebrows at the time, as well as his dismissal of Geert Wilders. It appears that Krauthammer isn’t as astute in his recent analysis on current events, home and abroad, as in times past, otherwise why would he so easily write off O’Donnell as being unelectable, but say nothing of the same about the Democrat’s Marxist friendly Coons, or completely get Dutch defender of European democracy, Geert Wilders, so miserably wrong?
Some of Krauthammer’s brass works have lost their shine, and we, as well as he, should admit as such. Andy Bostom educated Krauthammer not too long ago on both counts, that being Islam and Geert Wilders, yet nothing has been heard from him that would lead us to believe that he’s taken something to heart over the issues Bostom raised.
Now writing at Big Peace, it’s Diana West’s turn, to return, to something she wrote five years ago:
At Pajamas Media, David Solway asks a question I, too, have been pondering, and includes a nice mention of The Death of the Grown-Up:
And when Krauthammer proceeds to dismiss “Islamism” as merely “an ideology of a small minority,” he loses credibility, revealing a state of denial more plausibly associated with America’s coastal elites, public intellectuals, academic limpets, and media dilettantes like Paul Krugman, Peter Beinart, Thomas Friedman, David Remnick et al. Andrew Bostom takes Krauthammer roundly to task for his “fundamental ignorance of mainstream, classical Islamic Law” and for his “uninformed, incoherent musings on Geert Wilders and Islam.” Diana West, too, inThe Death of the Grown-Up, castigates Krauthammer for going “all mushy on us,” passing off as “Islamist” what is plainly part of “Islam as a whole, as a historical continuum, as the theology of what we know as terrorism, as a rationale for dhimmi repression.” How someone as presumably knowledgeable as Krauthammer could become on this matter a charter member of the middlebrow illiterati is troubling.
Krauthammer is not alone here, of course. Examples abound of commentators and officials displaying the same mental block that separates, for example, the Islamist group, the Muslim Brotherhood as recently noted here. As a mental block it is more than a semantic nicety. I turn back to my book, to the final chapter called “Men, Women … Or Children?” to explain what I mean.
From The Death of the Grown-Up, pp. 199-201
