Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics
Mill held that truth emerges from an unfettered competition of ideas and that individual character is most improved when allowed to find its own way uncoerced. That vision was insufficient for 20th-century American liberalism.
Charles Krauthammer • Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics
Politics is the moat, the walls, beyond which lie the barbarians. Fail to keep them at bay, and everything burns.
Charles Krauthammer • Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics
An al-Awlaki preaching in Virginia is a security problem. An al-Awlaki preaching at Ground Zero is a sacrilege.
Charles Krauthammer • Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics
Up New York’s Sixth Avenue with its series of seven sculptures to Latin American leaders, culminating at Central Park with magnificent statues of Bolívar, Martí and San Martín. To Washington Square Park, where they will find the Italian revolutionary Garibaldi, while his more republican counterpart, Mazzini, resides along West Drive not very far fr
... See moreCharles Krauthammer • Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics
But for President Obama, the word Islamist may not be uttered. Language must be devised to disguise the unpleasantness. Result? The world’s first lexicological war. Parry and thrust with linguistic tricks, deliberate misnomers and ever more transparent euphemisms. Next: armor-piercing onomatopoeias and amphibious synecdoches.
Charles Krauthammer • Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics
Liberals cannot quite bring themselves to support state regulation of the soul. (Indeed, by “family values,” they mean not sexual morality but subsidized child care and a living wage.) So they have come up with their own alternative: not care for the soul but care for the body. Health is their religion, the body their temple.
Charles Krauthammer • Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics
On foreign policy, as the cliché goes, I didn’t leave the Democratic Party. It left me. Not so on domestic policy. The Democratic Party remained true to itself. I changed. The origin of that evolution is simple: I’m open to empirical evidence. The results of the Great Society experiments started coming in and began showing that, for all its good in
... See moreCharles Krauthammer • Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics
Why should Jews, a people with such an epic tradition, present themselves to America solely as victims of the greatest crime in history?
Charles Krauthammer • Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics
First, what holds domestic society together is a supreme central authority wielding a monopoly of power and enforcing norms. In the international arena there is no such thing.