RealClearPolitics - Articles by charles krauthammer

The GOP Racing Form, 2012

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Unified Field Theory of 2012, Axiom One: The more the Republicans can make the 2012 election like 2010, the better their chances of winning.The 2010 Democratic shellacking had the distinction of being the most ideological election in 30 years. It was driven by one central argument in its several parts: the size and reach of government, spending and debt and, most fundamentally, the nature of the American social contract. The 2010 election was a referendum on President Obama's experiment in hyper-liberalism. It lost resoundingly. Of course, presidential elections are not arguments in the abstract but arguments with a face.

Real Cuts vs. Smoke & Mirrors

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0500

The most serious charge against Rep. Paul Ryan's budget is not the risible claim, made most prominently by President Obama in his George Washington University address, that it would "sacrifice the America we believe in." The serious charge is that the Ryan plan fails by its own standards: Because it only cuts spending without raising taxes, it accumulates trillions of debt and doesn't balance the budget until the 2030s. If the debt is such a national emergency, they say, Ryan never really gets you there from here.

The President's Speech Was a Disgrace

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0500

"I rarely heard a speech by a president so shallow, so hyper-partisan and so intellectually dishonest, outside the last couple of weeks of a presidential election where you are allowed to call your opponent anything short of a traitor. But we're a year and a half away from Election Day and it was supposed to be a speech about policy," syndicate columnist Dr. Charles Krauthammer said about President Obama's speech.

A Rush of Deficit Demagoguery

Fri, 08 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0500

In 1983, the British Labor Party under the hard-left Michael Foot issued a 700-page manifesto so radical that one colleague called it “the longest suicide note in history.” House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan has just released a recklessly bold, 73-page, 10-year budget plan. At 37 footnotes, it might be the most annotated suicide note in history.

That depends on whether (a) President Obama counters with a deficit-reduction plan of equal seriousness, rather than just demagoguing the Ryan plan till next Election Day, (b) there are any Republicans beyond the measured, super-wonky Ryan who can explain and defend a plan of such daunting scope and complexity, and...

Why Is WH Nice to Our Enemies?

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he’s a reformer.

— Hillary Clinton on Bashar al-Assad, March 27

Few things said by this administration in its two years can match this one for moral bankruptcy and strategic incomprehensibility.

The Professor's War

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0500

President Obama is proud of how he put together the Libyan operation. A model of international cooperation. All the necessary paperwork. Arab League backing. A Security Council resolution. (Everything but a resolution from the Congress of the United States, a minor inconvenience for a citizen of the world.) It's war as designed by an Ivy League professor.

It's Still an Empty Lockbox

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Last week, President Obama's budget chief, Jack Lew, took to his White House blog to repeat his claim that the Social Security trust fund is solvent through 2037. And to chide me for suggesting otherwise. I had argued in my last column that the trust fund is empty, indeed fictional.

WH's Social Security Fraud

Fri, 11 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0600

Everyone knows that the U.S. budget is being devoured by entitlements. Everyone also knows that of the Big Three â€” Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security â€” Social Security is the most solvable.

Back-of-an-envelope solvable: Raise the retirement age, tweak the indexing formula (from wage inflation to price inflation) and means-test so that Warren Buffett's check gets redirected to a senior in need.

Baghdad to Cairo to Benghazi

Fri, 04 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0600

Voices around the world, from Europe to America to Libya, are calling for U.S. intervention to help bring down Moammar Gaddafi. Yet for bringing down Saddam Hussein, the United States has been denounced variously for aggression, deception, arrogance and imperialism.

A strange moral inversion, considering that Hussein's evil was an order of magnitude beyond Gaddafi's. Gaddafi is a capricious killer; Hussein was systematic.

The Blinding Clarity of Wisconsin

Fri, 25 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0600

The magnificent turmoil now gripping statehouses in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and soon others marks an epic political moment. The nation faces a fiscal crisis of historic proportions and, remarkably, our muddled, gridlocked, allegedly broken politics have yielded singular clarity.

At the federal level, President Obama's budget makes clear that Democrats are determined to do nothing about the debt crisis, while House Republicans have announced that beyond their proposed cuts in discretionary spending, their April budget will actually propose real entitlement reform.

Obama's Louis XV Budget

Fri, 18 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0600

Five days before his inauguration, President-elect Obama told The Post that entitlement reform could no longer be kicked down the road. He then spent the next two years kicking - racking up $3 trillion in new debt along the way - on the grounds that massive temporary deficit spending was necessary to prevent another Great Depression.

To prove his bona fides, he later appointed a deficit reduction commission. It made its report last December, when the economy was well past recession, solemnly declaring that "the era of debt denial is over."

Egypt & Future of Arab Democracy

Fri, 11 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0600

Today, everyone and his cousin supports the "freedom agenda." Of course, yesterday it was just George W. Bush, Tony Blair and a band of neocons with unusual hypnotic powers who dared challenge the received wisdom of Arab exceptionalism - the notion that Arabs, as opposed to East Asians, Latin Americans, Europeans and Africans, were uniquely allergic to democracy. Indeed, the left spent the better part of the Bush years excoriating the freedom agenda as either fantasy or yet another sordid example of U.S. imperialism.

Egypt Faces Dangerous Road Ahead

Fri, 04 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0600

Who doesn't love a democratic revolution? Who is not moved by the renunciation of fear and the reclamation of dignity in the streets of Cairo and Alexandria?

The worldwide euphoria that has greeted the Egyptian uprising is understandable. All revolutions are blissful in the first days. The romance could be forgiven if this were Paris 1789. But it is not. In the intervening 222 years, we have learned how these things can end.

Obama Ignores the American People

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0600

The November election sent a clear message to Washington: less government, less debt, less spending. President Obama certainly heard it, but judging from his State of the Union address, he doesn't believe a word of it.

The people say they want cuts? Sure they do - in the abstract. But any party that actually dares carry them out will be punished severely. On that, Obama stakes his re-election.

Everything Starts With Repeal

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0600

Suppose someone - say, the president of the United States - proposed the following: We are drowning in debt. More than $14 trillion right now. I have a great idea for deficit reduction. It will yield savings of $230 billion over the next 10 years: We increase spending by $540 billion while we increase taxes by $770 billion.

He’d be laughed out of town. And yet, this is precisely what the Democrats are claiming as a virtue of Obamacare.