Charles Krauthammer And The Self-Deception At "Core of American Conservatism"

On March 6, 2009 Real Clear Politics published Charles Krauthammer's column entitled Deception at Core of Obama Plans. It would be hard to cite a case of greater self-deception.

Krauthammer starts by attacking President Obama about the 8,570 earmarks in Congressional bills that the President supports despite having posed as opponent of earmarks. But one wonders where was Mr. Krauthammer when tens of thousands of the most revolting earmarks passed through George W. Bush's desk on their way to the bridge to nowhere for eight years, with the "conservative" President's veto pen remaining permanently glued in his pocket.

Krauthammer goes on to attack President Obama's address to Congress. And indeed, as Krauthammer avers, Obama's explanation of our current economic difficulties is total fantasy and his proposed cure—universal, national health care, a cap-and-trade energy tax, and a major federalization of education with universal access to college as the goal—is among the greatest non sequiturs ever foisted upon the American people.

But where was Krauthammer's ire when President Bush sought American security by guarding the borders and sovereignties of foreign countries at a cost of thousands of American soldiers' lives lost or maimed and trillions of dollars we didn't have wasted—while leaving America's own borders and its own sovereignty unprotected?

Bush's great non sequitur has cost $864 billion so far [Congressional Research Service, October 15, 2008 PDF]. It will likely cost another $865 in the next ten years. According to some estimates, e.g. those of Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz, it's The Three Trillion Dollar War.

Even apart from the terrorists trickling and vicious gangbangers streaming into the country steadily through its joke of a border, just the number of Americans killed every year by illegal alien drivers far exceeds those killed on foreign fronts.

As far as the costs are concerned, Robert Rector's research points to the average life-time costs to the American taxpayer of $1.3 million for each low-skill household. There are at least 15 million such households between the legal and illegal low-skill immigrants in both Bush's and Obama's America.

My calculator cannot handle the number of zeros required to compute the total cost, but this fiscal and social capital disaster is as much among Mr. Bush's greatest failings as it will be among Mr. Obama's.

Of course, Krauthammer does not mention this issue, for it does not register on the neocon radar screen. Evading the ten-ton rhino in his living room, he does identify correctly the "safer" causes of the economic collapse:

"Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pushed by Washington (and greed) into improvident loans, corrupted bond-ratings agencies, insufficient regulation of new and exotic debt instruments, the easy money policy of Alan Greenspan's Fed, irresponsible bankers pushing (and then unloading in packaged loan instruments) highly dubious mortgages, greedy house-flippers, deceitful homebuyers."

But there were reasons for the reasons. "Conservatives" of Mr. Krauthammer's cut prefer not to notice that this is, to a large degree, a Diversity Recession. While, as Krauthammer notes, the causes of the collapse do not include the absence of universal health care or cap-and-trade carbon levy or the dearth of college graduates, it does include, unmentioned by Krauthammer, George W. Bush's far-out fiscal, demographic and ideological delusions as to the education of the uneducable and as to the viability of granting mortgages to "minorities" who are major credit risks.

Mr. Krauthammer goes on to attack President Obama for focusing on an agenda of social services and energy supply transformation while "our financial house [is] on fire."

"What's going on?" he asks, and finds the answer in Rahm Emanuel's dictum, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before." [In Crisis, Opportunity for Obama, Wall Street Journal, November 21, 2008]

"Things. Now we know what they are," announces Mr. Krauthammer, finding that the stock markets' precipitous decline is a reaction to the suspicion that Obama sees the financial crisis as an excuse for enacting his socialist agenda.

"Health, education and energy" concludes Mr. Krauthammer, "are not the cause of our financial collapse. And they are not the cure. The fraudulent claim that they are both cause and cure is the rhetorical device by which an ambitious president intends to enact the most radical agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime."

One wonders whether our "conservatives" will ever get off a diet of Gerber's apple sauce fed on a silver spoon by momsie on the cozy set of "The American Dream."

If one thing ought to have been clear about Barack Obama when he ran for President, is that this was a committed, radical Socialist—a Black revanchist and an enthusiastic apostle of the Third World.

Fraudulent claim?  Has Mr. Krauthammer read Saul Alinsky? For Barack Obama has. Obama is doing exactly what he has set out to do.

The verbiage that's been bubbling so effortlessly from Candidate and now President Obama's lips has been obvious froufrou tacked on to a large gallery of names that, besides Alinsky, includes Frank Marshall Davis, Khalid al-Mansour, Antoin  Rezko, Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, Nadhmi Auchi, Louis Farrakhan, Raila Odinga and others.

Were Krauthammer & Co. fooled for even a moment? And where was a GOP presidential candidate pointing all that out to the American electorate?

Perhaps nothing indicates both Barack Obama's and Rahm Emanuel's honesty better than the maneuver to move oversight of the census to the White House. As that great theoretician of power, Josif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, is supposed to have said: "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything."

It's time conservatives realized that railing against Tweedledee is useless if they failed to decry Tweedledum.

Maybe Tweedledum and his cluelessly partying party were "Capitalist" and Tweedledee and his party are Socialist.

But if the enormous cultural-Marxist delusions, egregious errors and pusillanimity of the former lead to the election of the latter, where is the outrage?

Takuan Seiyo [Email him] is a multiethnic and multilingual Euro-American immigrant, writer and former international media executive. A happy and highly contributive Californian for decades, TS left as a demographic, political and fiscal refugee. He is now content to live in Japan, a country that does not actively pursue its own extinction, where he is an oft-fingerprinted and respectfully discriminated-against minority.