Republican or Democrat. Conservative or Liberal. Few Would Argue with the Veracity of this Krauthammer Commentary
Krauthammer tells it like it really is. I don’t care where you’re positioned politically or ideologically; you will love this short and concise article (yet it says so much).
…and I would be very surprised if anyone disagrees with it, but lets hear it if you do (leave comments below)!
Charles Krauthammer does a beautiful job of making this nothing but a commentary about the way things are in this, the largest political stage in the world: the United States Presidential race.
This is in stark contrast to the sales pitch that is the typical, propaganda-ridden, biased mainstream news article.
Krauthammer shows that he truly has the pulse and heartbeat of U.S. Presidential politics over the past several decades.
I truly enjoyed this article, and I fully believe you will too!
Without further ado…
Enjoy:
Charles Krauthammer
nndb.com
Charles Krauthammer is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist, political commentator, and physician. Krauthammer’s column is syndicated to more than 275 newspapers and media outlets.
The choice
By Charles Krauthammer, Thursday, November 1, 4:22 PM
“Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not.” That was Barack Obama in 2008. And he was right. Reagan was an ideological inflection point, ending a 50-year liberal ascendancy and beginning a 30-year conservative ascendancy.
It is common for one party to take control and enact its ideological agenda. Ascendancy, however, occurs only when the opposition inevitably regains power and then proceeds to accept the basic premises of the preceding revolution.
Thus, Republicans railed for 20 years against the New Deal. Yet when they regained the White House in 1953, they kept the New Deal intact.
And when Nixon followed LBJ’s Great Society — liberalism’s second wave — he didn’t repeal it. He actually expanded it. Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), gave teeth to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and institutionalized affirmative action — major adornments of contemporary liberalism.
Until Reagan. Ten minutes into his presidency, Reagan declares that “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” Having thus rhetorically rejected the very premise of the New Deal/Great Society, he sets about attacking its foundations — with radical tax reduction, major deregulation, a frontal challenge to unionism (breaking the air traffic controllers for striking illegally) and an (only partially successful) attempt at restraining government growth.
Reaganism’s ascendancy was confirmed when the other guys came to power and their leader, Bill Clinton, declared (in his 1996 State of the Union address) that “the era of big government is over” — and then abolished welfare, the centerpiece “relief” program of modern liberalism.
In Britain, the same phenomenon: Tony Blair did to Thatcherism what Clinton did to Reaganism. He made it the norm.
Obama’s intention has always been to re-normalize, to reverse ideological course, to be the anti-Reagan — the author of a new liberal ascendancy. Nor did he hide his ambition. In his February 2009 address to Congress he declared his intention to transform America. This was no abstraction. He would do it in three areas: health care, education and energy.
Think about that. Health care is one-sixth of the economy. Education is the future. And energy is the lifeblood of any advanced country — control pricing and production, and you’ve controlled the industrial economy.
And it wasn’t just rhetoric. He enacted liberalism’s holy grail: the nationalization of health care. His $830 billion stimulus, by far the largest spending bill in U.S. history, massively injected government into the free market — lavishing immense amounts of tax dollars onfavored companies and industries in a naked display of industrial policy.
And what Obama failed to pass through Congress, he enacted unilaterally by executive action. He could not pass cap-and-trade, but his EPA is killing coal. (No new coal-fired power plant would ever be built.) In 2006, liberals failed legislatively to gut welfare’s work requirement. Obama’s new Health and Human Services rule does that by fiat. Continued in a second term, it would abolish welfare reform as we know it — just as in a second term, natural gas will follow coal, as Obama’s EPA regulates fracking into noncompetitiveness.
Government grows in size and power as the individual shrinks into dependency. Until the tipping point where dependency becomes the new norm — as it is in Europe, where even minor retrenchment of the entitlement state has led to despair and, for the more energetic, rioting.
An Obama second term means that the movement toward European-style social democracy continues, in part by legislation, in part by executive decree. The American experiment — the more individualistic, energetic, innovative, risk-taking model of democratic governance — continues to recede, yielding to the supervised life of the entitlement state.
If Obama loses, however, his presidency becomes a historical parenthesis, a passing interlude of overreaching hyper-liberalism, rejected by a center-right country that is 80 percent nonliberal.
Should they summon the skill and dexterity, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan could guide the country to the restoration of a more austere and modest government with more restrained entitlements and a more equitable and efficient tax code. Those achievements alone would mark a new trajectory — a return to what Reagan started three decades ago.
Every four years we are told that the coming election is the most important of one’s life. This time it might actually be true. At stake is the relation between citizen and state, the very nature of the American social contract.”
That was Charles Krauthammer’s Washington Post article verbatim. But, in case you want to see it in its original form at the Post’s website, you may click here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/charles-krauthammer-the-choice/2012/11/01/59b5bed0-2445-11e2-9313-3c7f59038d93_story.html
Wow, right? Did you enjoy this Krauthammer offering as much as I did? I suppose you can’t quite answer that, perhaps, because you don’t fully know how much I enjoyed it! LOL
Anyhow, I love how Krauthammer forms his words with such eloquence! Masterful articulation. Saying so much, yet remaining concise, and to-the-point.
I wanna be just like Charles Krauthammer “when I grow up”. (I’m 36 already). I’ve always enjoyed writing, and feel I’m pretty good at it in my own right. But I can always get better, yeah?
Thanks for reading. Hope you enjoyed this, and please leave your comments in the comment section below.
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I just can't see how any American can vote for a man that is endorsed by the American Communist party, the American Socialist Party, and the American Nazi Party. I'm not talking about Romney either. It just doesn't make sense. How much of a chance do people think that he would have had 20 or 30 years ago. I can't figure out why this is even a close race.
ReplyDeleteI know, right, Doc?! I don't get it either!
DeleteThere ARE a lot of people out there with questionable intelligence, but I can't imagine that all these people are really THAT stupid. I think it's more an issue, generally speaking, of being deceived and brainwashed by "LAME"stream media. Don't you?
I tend to believe that there are myriads of people who are, simply, naive, in MOST cases. And the exception to this rule is that, yes, there are a bunch of stupid ones. There are 7 billion people in this world; there has to, logically, be people ranging the whole spectrum, right?
Thanks for stopping by. ;)