He’s mad at everybody like us.
As I watch The Five, he’s right. Krauthammer’s not the Grinch. He’s a charming guy who is just somehow deeply sad. I have never seen him shift in his chair like this. I do know how smart he is. And I am learning what physical fatigue can do to, well, everything. Once again, Raebert is right.
He’s the only hound in the pundit world.
I know he has a book out. But it’s great to see him so gregarious and lighthearted. Even though you can see that he’s a sad man.
Friendship doesn’t save a man like this. Love doesn’t either. Don’t ask me how I know. Maybe admiration will take the tarnish off the shine of his genius.
Oh yes. He is that. Even when I disagree with him, I know he is that.
I love Krauthammer, almost no matter what he says. Did you see the hour special Fox did on his bio, RL? It was moving and inspiring. At age 22, as you know, a diving accident severed his spine and instantly changed his life forever, which, up to that moment had been blessed by brains, ambition, good looks, athleticism, and a Harvard scholarship. Many of us, myself included, would have likely spent our lives from there forward in a sullen, hopeless heap, focusing on injustice and fate. None of that for Krauthammer, whose accomplishments ever since have been enormous.
A family friend suffered the same injury while a teenager and through that I’ve learned about the courage required to face each day, enduring steel rods in one’s back to stay upright, daily catheterizations, the loss of sexual abilities, the pain and fatigue of movement, the endless surgeries to correct other bodily dysfunctions caused by the injury. He does so well at overcoming those obstacles that many who have watched him on television for years are not even aware of his disability.
My admiration of him is nearly inexpressible. I will NOT tolerate a bad word.
Well said. But I will continue to disagree with him when I do. That’s not a bad word. That’s honest intellectual conflict.
I didn’t mean that to apply to you, RL; I had in mind commenters on other blogs who call him a RINO squish, or bad termpered, or supercilious and haughty, or other derogatory descriptors. I wanna punch them, that’s what I mean by “I will not tolerate.” Of course most of them have IQs 50 points below CK’s — and I’m being generous about their attributes — so it shouldn’t trouble me, but does.
I disagree with him at times too, most recently when I thought his criticism of Ted Cruz’s actions and the alleged harm it did Republicans was greatly overstated at the least, and were possibly opinions he now regrets. Nonetheless, my admiration of his capabilities and for the way he’s lived such an extraordinary life is undiminished. I don’t believe you and I have any argument about this at all.
It was actually your words on this site and the last that made me turn the corner on Krauthammer. I’ll humbly confess that I had a hard time taking him seriously and allowed my first impressions of him to pre-judge him as just another odd act in a crowd of talking heads. This was years ago, but when you wrote about his actual arguments and brilliant commentary on Instapunk, you opened my eyes. I should been listening to what he was actually saying, of course.
Barbara, I didn’t know any of his bio and history, and it makes me respect him all the more. I feel foolish to admit my past blindness, but I thank you both for snapping me out of it.
Mr. Krauthammer said on an national stage what I find myself regularly telling people in my own life about climate change: that to call any scientific issue ‘settled’ and beyond further investigation is both anti-scientific and ‘shockingly arrogant’ (though it no longer shocks me).