Krauthammer = Tales from the Crypt
I can't look at him without thinking that .
He always struck me as some one who was recently embalmed. See if you can look at him again without thinking that.

Krauthammer needs no excuse, he's in the pundit business, the print pundit business where one's statements are never challenged. He'll keep saying the same old thing, over and over, in his painfully predictable way, and he'll keep his job because...well, I don't know why he keeps his job, but he will.

And he's wrong about commerce in the Most Serene Republic. In the heyday of the Venetian empire, commerce and politics weren't so much intertwined as they were the same thing.

Krazyhammer is just a silly man. He hides his silliness under a cloak of rage and indignation. Why anyone other than other angry, silly people pay any attention to him completely baffles me.

Great post.

Krauthammer has it exactly backwards. One of the good things about capitalism is that you can get rich by means other than fucking people over. That's a recent development. Warren Buffett couldn't have existed until the last 150 or so years, and even then only in a few countries. Buffett himself has often explained that his gift for allocating capital is only useful given the benefits provided by of our legal system, technology, educational system, etc.

He's stupid. What's the mystery?

Cheers,

Alan Tomlinson

hilzoy...why try and wrestle with this guy's writing? fruitless... watchin' the kraut and the kystol and jonah-the-lesser discuss economics is like watching cats read......

I don't normally read Charles Krauthammer...

You should have quit while you were ahead.

Throughout history, people have sought impressive opening statements.

I've never studied European history, and I don't know if Krauthammer has, nor do I care. I have heard of the K Street Project, and I suspect Krauthammer has, too. It started and was in its heyday long before the Bear Stearns bailout. There were balance sheets involved then too, but not of the sort Krauthammer is talking about.

But to make these points, you have to believe that they would matter to someone like CK. I doubt they do.

Krauthammer doesn't need an excuse: he's a propagandist. And contrasting the wretched, corrupt, soft ways of today with the serious, nose-to-the-grindstone ways of our rock-ribbed, hard-boiled, no-nonsense forbears has been a good propaganda technique, since, well, since at least as long as people have been arguing the morality of cloning.

My own best guess isn't that Krauthammer is lazy, but that he's dishonest.

He's trying to persuade, not to tell the truth or provide incisive analysis.

This is called rhetoric, and the Greeks understood it well.

'facts' are an inconvenience, and much of politics is about ignoring them.

Consider Victor Davis Hanson's 'lessons' for the modern world from classical analogies, for wanton misuse of history. Nial Ferguson is often guilty of a much more subtle version of the same.

Hilzoy: Please leave poor, crippled Charles alone. He's gravely wounded because most of his cherished ideas have blown up in his face this year. He's just trying to limp to the pundit's grave yard behind Roger Ailes' castle. Sic transit.

For a read on how Elizabethans made money, get The Pirate Queen: Queen Elizabeth I, Her Pirate Adventurers, and the Dawn of Empire .

You don't have to look to Europe for counter examples. How about the United States in the 1860 and70s? Get a franchise to build a railroad and collect all that land grant money: that was reading balance sheets? Or how about defense contracting?

In a sense I agree with the person who said Krauthammer is silly. He's also doctrinaire and mean minded. So I also agree he shouldn't be read, it's just that the headline was so intriguing.

What's Charles Krauthammer's excuse?

He's sophomoric.

Charlie Kraut should read him some Charlie Marx; for better understanding of the symbiosis between politics and money, I'd particularly recommend Das Kapital.

Nice piece.

Valuethinker mentions Victor Davis Hanson; the only disappearance from the Chicago Tribune's op-ed page that I welcomed more was Linda Chavez's. But I still have to put up with Krauthammer, Dennis Byrne, and Jonah Goldberg - not that I ever read any of them, beyond the headlines, but they waste so much space! Just putting a leader across the top of the page saying "LIBERALS ARE AWFUL!" would serve the same purpose. But the Trib is a generally right-wing paper that somehow managed to endorse Obama this year anyhow - first Democrat in the paper's history, dating back to something like 1841.

as noted historian C. Montgomery Burns reminds us, "throughout history, man has dreamed of destroying the sun."

Republicans should run around like Mavericks, they know what we need are more button and bows for our troops in the war. Buttons and bows are about all they get because they sure do not get good equipment.

We are Mavericks says McCain and Sarah Palin. Well Sarah should take a hard look because America has the best of the best Maverick in place right now. Sarah meets George Bush your President you know.

Did you know the irresponsibility attached to that type of person? And does George fill that list? You bet! The Oxford dictionary addresses this in an alarming way for me. “In 1803 -1870 a well known Texan Samuel A. Maverick a cattle owner left the calves of his herd unbranded. A calf or yearly found without an owner’s brand is considered a master less one, or like a person unaccountable? One who roves?� Mavericks and Roves are what America does not need.

Sometimes unbranded calves became
Mavericks.

Unidentified calves that wandered off from their mothers are called Mavericks. Ranchers generally agreed that a Maverick calf became the property of the ranch onto which it strayed.

This agreement caused problems when some ranchers began “mavericking�—
indiscriminately branding any stray calf they saw. Cattle rustling, rounding up horses or cattle for thievery was far too easy on the open range.

Rustlers rounded up branded cattle, altered the brands, and quickly led them across the border into Dakota Territory or Canada for sale. Law enforcement was difficult over such vast, open distances.

Cowboys, and adventurers likely invented the popular concept of earmarks. Punching a mark in the ear of the cattle was on a way around branding problems.
But, what bothers me is that single ideal that the term Maverick also got attached the cattle owners. Many in the Midwest plains complained about Texas cattle could be diseased because Mavericks are difficult to place in origin.

For me cowboys were interesting, I used to enjoy watching them, now I can not even stand listening to the howling of country western music. Now I have a good laugh to myself at a John Wayne movie, even listening to southern politicians now make me sick.

Worse the irresponsibility coupled with this war has shown me the moral hollowness in George Bush. He is not a good commander. In the sense that forty percent of the forces are National Guard troops all forced to endure an unbelievable amount of grief with personal family economic sacrifice to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is my personal believe that it is immoral to make these men and women to sacrifice the service. Because they are National Guard and not regular army. Regular Army troops should have replace those troops in Iraq a long time ago. That should be the real important part of surge Obama should look at. Actually the media is failed too; those news media embedded in this war have ignored their true responsibility. More over it is a crime to ignore it.

The other day I learned that thousands of veterans have committed suicide, actually more veterans are killing themselves then those killed in the field. If this is true it should be talked about as I write this my personal anger wells up to tear for those men and women that serve, so I will toot my horn, I am a veteran of Vietnam, I walked the walk, and gave my life for the freedom, Thank God I made it out whole, but it only took me a few weeks to figure out how wrong that war was.

George did a good job to confuse America; it took me a lot longer to figure out how wrong this Iraq war is.

Hilzoy, you have hit upon a really useful diagnostic; many rants about the the decline of society or morals begin an implicit "For years, people have debated the morality of X" or they would make no sense. Let X = keeping people alive for years via feeding tubes, or addressing anthropogenic climate change, or financial derivatives, and on and on. Very instructive.

it's a nice-sounding way to start a column.

That's all it is, and all it's meant to be. If Everyman had to start well every time, then Everyman wouldn't write anything.

This idea that, in the good old days you got rich through some form of merit - "You learned to read balance sheets" is Krauthammer's particular metaphor - is a standard piece of Republican mythology. It's the rich paying a compliment to themselves to justify their good fortune. I don't think even Warren Buffet believes this any more, but in any case it's usefully debunked by Nassim Nicolas Taleb in Fooled by Randomness. The idea that merit is financially rewarded is also part of a uniquely American brand of Christianity.

The idea that merit is financially rewarded is also part of a uniquely American brand of Christianity. -- Fred from Pescadero, @ 20:20

Not really; Victorian Brits had the very same idea and acted on it in a similar manner. The poor didn't need (or merit) help, because their poverty was their own fault and a result of sin. The virtuous were rewarded with (earthly) riches; that's how you could tell they were virtuous.

He needs no excuse. He wields his eponymous Krap Hammer; it is supposed to be crap, as smothering the object of his abuse in bullshit is his objective.

He lies, he misleads, he abuses the few ethical standards of his purported profession by “psychoanalyzing� people in his columns, and he does not care, because he is a true believer convinced his banal evils are in the service of good.

Krauthammer is a very stupid man. He managed to get by being very stupid because he is conservative, and conservatives must be very stupid. It's odd because he has some advanced degree or other, so to be stupid, he must be quite disciplined and careful. It's a wonder to behold.

Governments' manipulation of their economies goes back at least to ancient Greece. Look up the meaning of "sycophant" some time. Krauthammer is saying that capitalism isn't what it was. Capitalism never was what it was, Charles.

So where does the second quoted reference (about buttons and calico) come from ? It isn`t in the first document (I have searched it) & since it is such a nice example of absurd (though understandable) behavior I would like to be able to point some people to it.

What work of scholarship is it from ?

"...It is in the religion of ignorance that tyranny begins..." - Benjamin Franklin

Since the dawn of time, Hilzoy has posted really great takedowns of weak, sophomoric arguments.

the thing is, though: they are students. what's charles krauthammer's excuse?

he's an idiot.

My guess is that Larry and Sergey or Bill Gates couldn't read a balance sheet when they started their companies. I think they're all doing ok.

Krauthammer's excuse is that he is bullshitting, exactly as Harry G. Frankfurt, retired professor of philosophy at Princeton, defined it in his essay"On Bullshit.

"It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth—this indifference to how things really are—that I regard as the essence of bullshit."

Which, in Frankfurt's view, far worse than lying:

"Both in lying and in telling the truth people are guided by their beliefs concerning the way things are. These guide them as they endeavor either to describe the world correctly or to describe it deceitfully....The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are."

Frankfurt found bullshit to be the notes, is an inevitable byproduct of public life, "where people are frequently impelled—whether by their own propensities or by the demands of others—to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant."

Pontificators in general have been doing this for years and years. Probably since people got around the campfire and argued about tomorrow's hunt and gather. They take a fallacious premise, declare it as fact and then bend it towards the end argument they are attempting to persuade the listener to. Reality and facts don't matter. It's the creation of a picture, either contrast or flow, that counts.

Gingrich is a master of this. Kristol and the neo-cons found their whole argument on bent history and false deduction. Republicans generally -- and most specifically to the right -- now have no idea where reality is because they are so used to using lies to found their argument on.

Which is why it's so nice, lately, to see Krugman, face to face, keep George Will and his ilk somewhere close to the line of honesty and reality.

Not before time.

"What's Charles Krauthammer's excuse?"

Keeping his job at FOX News?

His key point: balance sheets don't seem to matter whether a company lives or dies and this is a major problem, should not be buried in the fixation on his careless innaccuracy with history.

Citi, AIG, GM. All should be trading at pennies on the dollar and would if not for political patronage that makes the numbers of dubious importance.

Senator Obama, before you're done... you REALLY need to fix this.

Krauthammer is not the first intelligent person whose logic and reason are completely undermined and overwhelmed by economic self-interest, fear, paranoia, and most fundamentally, hatred of anyone essentially different from himself.