Winger

Has anybody been reading Charles Krauthammer lately?

I put his Washington Post column as a link on my sidebar because in general I really like what he has to say. He's a brilliant thinker and talented writer, and a person who has come a long way in life. I have also moved in a similar direction in my political outlook (without all the accolades, unfortunately, but also without the tragedy, thank G-d). After earning a BA at McGill in political science and economics, a Master's at Oxford, and an MD at Harvard (during which time he was paralyzed in a diving accident, which left him in a wheelchair for life), he practiced medicine and psychiatry for three years and quit to work for the Carter administration. He then worked for Walter Mondale as his speech writer during the 1980 presidential campaign. He has worked for the New Republic, a center-left publication, and the Weekly Standard, a center-right publication. He has generally stayed very much at the center of politics, with a turn slightly to the right of where he started. This has been his trademark. He has been regarded as the thinker behind the Neo-Conservative movement, which many left-leaning Democrats oppose. While many agree that President Bush is a blubbering yahoo from the backwoods with no real intelligence other than a knack for hiring the right people to push his agenda and convince enough people to follow him, virtually everyone, left, right, and center, agree that Charles Krauthammer is the brain behind the movement that the Bush administration is supposed to embody.

I have it on good authority from the inside, that there are many Neo-Conservatives who oppose a lot of what Bush has done. Many highly regarded intellectuals and thinkers in that movement think that Bush has gone too far to the right and has become extreme and arrogant. I've read some of their published pieces and heard from acquaintances and colleagues of theirs, and it seems that many who idealize Reagan for his strong stance when dealing with the Soviet Union, and even support such plans as the partial privatization of Social Security and the rebuilding of Iraq and the spreading of democracy according to Bush's plan, would rather have a Clinton-esque Moderate than a right- (or left-) wing administration.

But for some reason, lately Charles Krauthammer has been very outspoken in favor of just about anything the Bush administration has done. Rather than being the voice of reason, as he has always been, he seems to have gone off the deep end. I don't know what exactly caused the change or how long it will last, or how deeply it is now ingrained in him, but I will keep his column linked to my blog for the time being. I just think it's odd.