Things That Matter

Very interesting great man.

Brett Baier (sp) did an hour interview on FoxNews this Saturday evening. Interestingly he initially went to McGill in Montreal together with his older brother in the late 60s where both were to study medicine.

Charles developed an interest in political writing, and realized that the McGill student newspaper was unreadable because it was so communistic it could have been written in Moscow. He engineered a coup to replace the (Marxist) editor named Portner and became the new editor. (What have I been telling you about our universities in the 1960s).

He moved to Harvard in the early 70s to study psychiatry. He had a swimming accident, became a paraplegic, but still managed to graduate as a psychiatrist on the time allotted for his class. He did not practice long and moved to a government job and became involved in politics.

Sorry if this goes on, but thought that you might be interested in the early years of a great man.

Ken, were it that the likes of Krauthammer and Thomas Sowell were advisors to the idiot playing at POTUS, maybe a bit of common sense would prevail at the WH

From the standpoint of readers of this site, the most important part of the interview, IMO, comes in the second half. It begins with:

HH: "It’s Bach, of course, because in Charles Krauthammer’s brand new book...

and closes with:

CK: "...beautiful things in life have to be protected by the right politics, because if you get them wrong, then you lose everything."

Therein, by way of illustration, Krauthammer references a few disgusting examples from current American politics, and does so in an oddly, for him, abstract, unrealistic, contradictory and naive sort of way. That rankles. Without cataloguing my complaints, he says at one point, "[i]t takes one leader, it takes one turn, it takes a revival of the spirit, and the right said of the domestic and foreign policies [sic]", but then in short order acknowledges, "[w]ell, you know, I do think, all of us would love a shortcut to the policy of outcome that we want [sic]."

The latter is certainly more accurate than the former, and much more consistent with the idea of politics he is espousing. My read is that most here are of the view that the west is certainly on its way down, is still a long way from hitting rock bottom, and that it's going to take a lot more than one president to right this ship.

Nevertheless, Krauthammer's comments about the idea of politics are important and I've not heard them in a long time: they are very much in keeping with Bernard Crick's "In Defence of Politics" (Penguin, 1964), to which I was introduced by the professor in my first political science course, who began the first lecture with the statement, "politics is not science". Readers may wish to have a look at Crick's essay.

Krauthammer's idea of politics is the exact opposite of those contained, for example, in the statement, "The science is settled." By which the speaker did not so much mean that the science was settled (he had no clue, and still doesn't), but that the politics were settled: "this is what's going to happen, no debate, no accommodation, no incremental improvement, holus bolus, no re-evaluation in light of new information, no retreat, no surrender; we have the answer, which is infallible, and you will do what we say."

Which perspective should inform folks as to how our politics became the way they are.