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The Left Is Entering A New Phase Of Ideological Agitation No Longer Trying To Win The Debate But Stopping Debate Altogether, Banishing From Public Discourse Any And All Opposition. The Proper Word For That Attitude Is Totalitarian. It Declares Certain Controversies Over And Visits Serious Consequences From Social Ostracism To Vocational Defenestration Upon Those Who Refuse To Be Silenced.

-Charles Krauthammer

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The Left Is Entering

Charles Krauthammer

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The Left Is Entering A New Phase Of Ideological Agitation No Longer Trying To Win The Debate But Stopping Debate Altogether, Banishing From Public Discourse Any And All Opposition. The Proper Word For That Attitude Is Totalitarian. It Declares Certain Controversies Over And Visits Serious Consequences From Social Ostracism To Vocational Defenestration Upon Those Who Refuse To Be Silenced.

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Consider The Oddity Of Those Drug Commercials On Television. Fifteen Seconds Of The Purported Therapeutic Effort, Followed By About 45 Seconds Of A Rapidly Muttered List Of Horrific Possible Side Effects. When The Ad Is Over, I Can't Remember A Thing About What The Pill Is Supposed To Do, Except Perhaps Cause Nausea, Liver Damage, Projectile Vomiting, A Nasty Rash, A Four-hour Erection, And Sudden Death. Sudden Death Is My Favorite Because There Is Something Comical About It Being A Side Effect. What Exactly Is The Main Effect In That Case? Relief From Abdominal Bloating?

The Free Lunch Is The Essence Of Modern Liberalism.

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I Am Not Religious. I Do Not Believe That Personhood Is Conferred Upon Conception. But I Also Do Not Believe That A Human Embryo Is The Moral Equivalent Of A Hangnail And Deserves No More Respect Than An Appendix.

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Majority Leader

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American History

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Mass Destruction

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Individual Choice

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It Is An Axiom Of Political Life That You Never Raise Expectations, Whether In A Political Or Military Campaign, Because Your Defeats Are Then Magnified And Your Victories Discounted.

The Joy Of Losing Consists In This: Where There Are No Expectations, There Is No Disappointment.

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Washington Is The Only Place In The World Where A Gaffe Is When A Politician Accidently Speaks The Truth.

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Obama Is A Man Of First-class Intellect And First-class Temperament. But His Character Remains Highly Suspect.

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There's A Reason Why In New York Harbor We Have The Statue Of Liberty, Not The Statue Of Equality.

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I Think If You're Going To Master Policy, Especially World Affairs, You've Got To Know History.

When Under Attack, No Country Is Obligated To Collect Permission Slips From Allies To Strike Back.

There Is A Mystique About Psychiatry That People Think That You Have Some Kind Of A Magical Lens, You Know, Superman's X-ray Vision Into The Soul. One Of The Reasons I Left Psychiatry Is That I Didn't Believe That.

A Drone Is A High-tech Version Of An Old Army And A Musket. It Ought To Be Used In Somalia To Hunt Bad Guys, But Not In America. I Don't Want To See It Hovering Over Anybody's Home.

Preemption Is A Kind Of Pre-deterrence That Stops The Threat At An Earlier, Safer Stage.

So A Holocaust-denying, Virulently Anti-semitic, Aspiring Genocidist, On The Verge Of Acquiring Weapons Of The Apocalypse, Believes That The End Is Not Only Near But Nearer Than The Next American Presidential Election. (pity The Democrats. They Cannot Catch A Break.) This Kind Of Man Would Have, To Put It Gently, Less Inhibition About Starting Armageddon Than A Normal Person.

Loyalty To The President Is Great, But Loyalty To Truth, Integrity, And Country Is Even Better.

I Believe In What I Believe, And I Think After All These Years I've Heard A Lot Of Arguments, And I'm Convinced By The Superiority Of The Arguments That Are Made On The Conservative Side. I Think That's A Better Way To Run A Society.

I Envy People Who Write Easily. I Enjoy The Process, But It's Not Easeful For Me.

I Think The Editorial Page Of The Washington Post Is The Best In The Country. I Think The Editorials - Considering It's A Liberal Town, Liberal Constituency And From The Liberal Tradition - I Think It's The Best Editorial Page Around. It's Quite Balanced.

There's No Free Lunch. If You Want An Industrial Economy, You Need Energy. If You Want Energy, It Will Produce Pollution. You Can Have It In Two Forms. You Can Have It Dissipated In The Atmosphere - Like Carbon Dioxide - Which Then You Cannot Recover, Or You Can Have The Waste Concentrated In One Small Space Like Nuclear. That Is Far Easier To Deal With. The Idea That You Can Be Able To Create Renewable Energy At A Price Anywhere Near The Current Price For Oil Or Gas Or Coal Is A Fantasy.

If [bush's] Successors Don't Screw It Up, Within 10 Years Nasa Will Have Us Back To Where We Belong -- On Other Worlds.

The Iraquis Can See It. The Kurds Can Feel It. The Jihadists Are Counting On It.

You Can Have The Most Advanced And Efflorescent Of Cultures. Get Your Politics Wrong, However, And Everything Stands To Be Swept Away. This Is Not Ancient History. This Is Germany 1933... Politics Is The Moat, The Walls, Beyond Which Lie The Barbarians. Fail To Keep Them At Bay, And Everything Burns.

This Is How The Great Post-partisan, Post-racial, New Politics Presidency Ends - Not With A Bang, Not With A Whimper, But With A Desperate Election-eve Plea For Ethnic Retribution.

This Is A Formidable Enemy. To Dismiss It As A Bunch Of 'cowards' Perpetuating 'senseless Acts Of Violence' Is Complacent Nonsense. People Willing To Kill Thousands Of Innocents While They Kill Themselves Are Not Cowards. They Are Deadly Vicious Warriors And Need To Be Treated As Such.

Middleness Is The Very Enemy Of The Bold.

History Has Blessed Us With All The Freedom And Advantages Of Multiculturalism. But It Has Also Blessed Us, Because Of The Accident Of Our Origins, With The Linguistic Unity That Brings A Critically Needed Cohesion To A Nation As Diverse, Multiracial And Multiethnic As America. Why Gratuitously Throw Away That Priceless Asset? How Mindless To Call The Desire To Retain It 'racist.

We Must Now Brace Ourselves For Disquisitions On Peer Pressure, Adolescent Anomie, And Rage.

Chess: It's Like Alcohol. It's A Drug. I Have To Control It, Or It Could Overwhelm Me. I Have A Regular Monday Night Game At My Home, And I Do Play A Little Online.

[i]t Is More Than Slightly Ironic That Democrats, The Fiercely Pro-choice Party, Reserve Free Choice For Aborting A Fetus, While Denying It For Such Matters As Choosing Your Child's School Or Joining A Union.

I Would Write My Editorials Using A Manual Typewriter In Pitch-black Darkness... I Would Produce The Whole Thing Without Having Seen The Text.

Fairness Through Leveling Is The Essence Of Obamaism.

The Results Of The Great Society Experiments Started Coming In And Began Showing That, For All Its Good Intentions, The War On Poverty Was Causing Irreparable Damage To The Very Communities It Was Designed To Help.

I Don't Really Care What A Public Figure Thinks. I Care About What He Does. Let God Probe His Inner Heart.

After The Soviet Collapse, Marxism Is A Relic, A Pathetic Anachronism Reduced To Its Last Redoubts: North Korea, Cuba, And The English Departments Of The More Expensive American Universities.

Why Should We Care About The Coup? First, Because We Depend On Yemen's Government To Support Our Drone War Against Another Local Menace, Al-qaeda In The Arabian Peninsula (aqap). It's Not Clear If We Can Even Maintain Our Embassy In Yemen, Let Alone Conduct Operations Against Aqap. And Second, Because Growing Iranian Hegemony Is A Mortal Threat To Our Allies And Interests In The Entire Middle East.

Some Will Protest That In A World With So Much Human Suffering, It Is Something Between Eccentric And Obscene To Mourn A Dog. I Think Not. After All, It Is Perfectly Normal—indeed, Deeply Human—to Be Moved When Nature Presents Us With A Vision Of Great Beauty. Should We Not Be Moved When It Produces A Vision—a Creature—of The Purest Sweetness?

Perfectly Normal

I Happen To Believe That The Preemption School Is Correct, That The Risks Of Allowing Saddam Hussein To Acquire His Weapons Will Only Grow With Time.

The Great Divide In American Foreign Policy Thinking Is Between Those Who Believe In Paper And Those Who Believe In Power.

In Explaining Any Puzzling Washington Phenomenon, Always Choose Stupidity Over Conspiracy, Incompetence Over Cunning. Anything Else Gives Them Too Much Credit.

This Week, Iranian-backed Houthi Rebels Seized Control Of The Yemeni Government, Heretofore Pro-american. In September, They Overran Sanaa, The Capital. On Tuesday, They Seized The Presidential Palace. On Thursday, They Forced The President To Resign.

A Three-year Diet Of Rubber Chicken And Occasional Crow.

Every New President Flatters Himself That He, Kinder And Gentler, Is Beginning The World Anew. Yet, When Barack Obama In His Inaugural Address Reached Out To Muslims By Saying, 'to The Muslim World, We Seek A New Way Forward, Based On Mutual Interest And Mutual Respect,' His Formulation Was Needlessly Defensive And Apologetic.

Mutual Interest

Life And Consciousness Are The Two Great Mysteries. Actually, Their Substrates Are The Inanimate. And How Do You Get From Neurons Shooting Around In The Brain To The Thought That Pops Up In Your Head And Mine? There's Something Deeply Mysterious About That. And If You're Not Struck By The Mystery, I Think You Haven't Thought About It.

So Far As Im Concerned, Ronald Reagan Was The Best President. Nixon Was The Worst. Some Of His Policies Were Okay, But He Disgraced The Office.

Don't Touch My Junk, You Airport Security Goon - My Package Belongs To No One But Me, And Do You Really Think I'm A Nigerian Nut Job Preparing For My 72-virgin Orgy By Blowing My Johnson To Kingdom Come?

I Don't Think You Can Pump Carbon Dioxide Into The Atmosphere Indefinitely And Not Have A Reaction. But There Are Great Scientists Such As Freeman Dyson, One Of The Greatest Physicists Of The Last Hundred Years, Who Has Studied The Question, Who Believes Quite The Opposite. The Reason Transnational Action Is So Difficult Is Because The Major Problem With Climate Change Is, A, That There Is No Consensus, And, B, That The Economic Cost Is Simply Staggering. Reversing It Completely Might Mean Undoing The Modern Industrial Economy.

Some Geopolitical Conflicts Are Morally Complicated. The Israel-gaza War Is Not. It Possesses A Moral Clarity Not Only Rare But Excruciating. [...] For Hamas, The Only Thing More Prized Than Dead Jews Are Dead Palestinians.

For Liberals, The Observation That 'the Peasants Are Revolting' Is A Pun. For Conservatives, It Is Cause For Uncharacteristic Optimism. No Matter How Far The Ideological Pendulum Swings In The Short Term, In The End The Bedrock Common Sense Of The American People Will Prevail.

I Would Say I See Myself As A Psychiatrist In Remission.

After Endless Days Of Commuting On The Freeway To An Antiseptic, Sealed-window Office, There Is A Great Urge To Backpack In The Woods And Build A Fire.

Increasing Public Safety Almost Always Means Restricting Liberties.

Great Leaders Are Willing To Retire Unloved And Unpopular As The Price For Great Exertion.

To Understand The Workings Of American Politics, You Have To Understand This Fundamental Law: Conservatives Think Liberals Are Stupid. Liberals Think Conservatives Are Evil.

Now This Is A Way To Approach Our Healthcare Problems: Increase The Number Of Tax Collectors And Decrease The Number Of Doctors - Brilliant!

I'm Not Against International Institutions That Would Try To Tackle Global Warming. But The Way To Go, At Least In The Short Run, Is To Go To Nuclear Power. It's Amazing To Me That People Who Are So Alarmed About Global Warming Are So Reluctant To Adopt The Obvious Short-term Solution - The Bridge Until The Day When We Have Affordable Renewable Energy - Of Nuclear Power.

For All The Sublimity Of Art, Physics, Music, Mathematics, And Other Manifestations Of Human Genius, Everything Depends On The Mundane, Frustrating, Often Debased Vocation Known As Politics (and Its Most Exacting Subspecialty - Statecraft). Because If We Don't Get Politics Right, Everything Else Risks Extinction.

To Go Into Ukraine And To Take Over, To Invade Crimea, Is A Huge Step. And [russian President Vladimir Putin] Would Only Have Done It With A President Who Has Shown From The Very Beginning That [president Obama] Is Living In A Fantasy World...they Imagine The World As A New Interconnected World Where Climate Change Is The Biggest Threat And They Are Shocked That The Russians Actually Are Interested In Territory.

An Oil Crisis Looms, Prices Are Spiking - And Our President Is Extolling Algae. After Solyndra, Keystone And Promises Of Seaweed In Their Gas Tanks, Americans Sense A President So Ideologically Antipathetic To Fossil Fuels - Which We Possess In Staggering Abundance - That He Is Utterly Unserious About The Real World Of Oil In Which The Rest Of Us Live.

I'm A Former Red Sox Fan, Now Fully Rehabilitated.

Pass Legislation. When Obama Signs, You've Shown Seriousness And The Ability To Govern. When He Vetoes, You've Clarified The Differences Between Party Philosophies And Prepared The Ground For 2016.

There Are Cycles In American Politics. Us Cycles Are Even More Pronounced Because We Americans Have A Totally Entrepreneurial Presidential System. We Don't Have Parliamentary Opposition Parties With A Shadow Prime Minister And Shadow Cabinets. Every Four Years, The Opposition Reinvents Itself.

It Is An Old Liberal Theme That Conservative Ideas, Being Red In Tooth And Claw, Cannot Possibly Emerge From Any Notion Of The Public Good.

Post-watergate Morality, By Which Anything Left Private Is Taken As Presumptive Evidence Of Wrongdoing.

Highfalutin Moral Principles Are Impossible Guides To Foreign Policy. At Worst, They Reflect Hypocrisy; At Best, Extreme Naivete.

It Is Ridiculous To Sue The President On A Wednesday Because He Oversteps The Law, As He Has Done A Dozen Times Illegally And Unconstitutionally, And Then On A Thursday Say That He Should Overstep The Law, Contradict The Law That Passed In 2008 And Deal With This Himself.

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