I can't really improve on what my blogging colleagues have offered in defense of Charles Krauthammer. But at least let me explain.
In an interview at The Politico, Joe Klein has attacked Krauthammer's views as a commentator on the basis of the latter's quadriplegia.* Klein asserts, "There’s something tragic about him," referring to Krauthammer's physical disability and confinement to a wheelchair. "His work would have a lot more nuance if he were able to see the situations he’s writing about."
Why Klein found it necessary - whatsoever - to mention Krauthammer's physical immobility is beyond me. The legitimate evaluation of another's ideas should be on the basis of accuracy, insight, rigor, wisdom, and all those other superlatives we normally lavish upon those who illuminate the great questions of the day. Even with those whom we disagree, civil and reasoned discussion would indicate the appropriate decorum as a matter of course. Klein, as it turns out, is on record with a long line of scurrilous attacks against neoconservatives. So his entirely inappropriate comments on Krauthammer's, ahem, "stunted" intellect should be understood properly as the form of political demonization that they are.
To be clear, of course, Klein's arguing not only that Krauthammer's unable to travel and see the world, but that his condition of quadriplegia itself has reduced him to a status deserving of disparate treatment. That is to say, one's views can't really be "so far above" everyone's if he can't literally see beyond the line of people in front of him.
That's the double entendre here, and it's undeniable. But some will deny it anyway. It's no surprise, for example, that Spencer Ackerman - who once called called for President's Bush's execution - would suggest that it's "a strained read" to find bigotry in Klein's comments. Ackerman doesn't stop there, by the way. He goes on to argue that an understanding of Klein's comments as pure ableism would be "pretty transparently stupid."
Ackerman is responding to John Podhoretz at Contentions. Read Podhoretz in full to really understand the depths to which Klein sinks. For some additional friends who have no problem seeing Klein's bigotry, see Allahpundit, Betsy Newmark, The Blog Prof, Fausta, Jules Crittenden, and Tom Maguire.
My sense is that Charles Krauthammer is a man of towering intellect and achievement. I've been a fan of his writing for nearly two decades. His analysis in "The Unipolar Moment", in Foreign Affairs (1991), was essentially vindicated by the chain of events in international politics leading up to the Iraq war of 2003. And his classic essay, "The Unipolar Moment Revisited," published in The National Interest (Winter 2002/03) is perhaps the most important article on the theoretical case for Operation Iraqi Freedom ever published.
I was personally disappointed in December of 2006 - amid the high point of American difficulties in Iraq - when Krauthammer temporarily renounced the clarity of vision that had made him peerless among columnists at the time. I'm referring to his essay at RealClearPolitics, "Past the Apogee: America Under Pressure." With a U.S. defeat in Iraq not unlikely, Krauthammer suggested that America had gone from the "apogee of our power" to a "moment of despair." Of all people, I couldn't believe that Charles Krauthammer was on the verge of repudiating the neoconservtive vision of power, justice, and right in the cause.
Events in 2007 of course, in the Bush administration's surge strategy under General David Petraeus, served to save the mission, and in a sense the vision of the war's architects. I had never myself thought that America was "past the apogee," and it bothered me that such a great proponent of American preponderance might entertain the notion. It never crossed my mind, however, to suggest that if it wasn't for Krauthammer's disability, "His work would have a lot more nuance ..."
But Klein's not unusual for those writing on the partisan left. And that's all I have to say about that ...
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* Correction appended, 5:57pm.
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