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Charles Krauthammer was on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart last week. It is not often a guest gets the whole program, but Charles did. We have links so you can watch. Daily Caller with the story.
On Wednesday’s edition of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer faced off against left-leaning show anchor Jon Stewart on conservative ideology and the way it is presented.
In this rare appearance on Stewart’s program, Krauthammer was promoting his new book, “Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes, and Politics,” and explained how in working on the book he realized when he had made the transformation from liberal to conservative.
STEWART: Thirty years — do you ever look back on some of these writings and think, ‘What was I thinking?’
KRAUTHAMMER: It’s worse than that. The worst part of writing the book was going all the way back and reading the million words I’d written. By the end of this process I was near suicidal. I couldn’t believe I had written some of that stuff.
STEWART: So, what has the growth process been like?
KRAUTHAMMER: The growth process? Well, I was once a liberal.
STEWART: So the early writings showed hope?
KRAUTHAMMER: And then came change. …
John Fund posts on the sting used to catch the White House minion who tweeted nasty items about Valerie Jarrett.
President Obama’s aides went to extraordinary lengths to uncover the identity of a senior official who was using Twitter to make snarky comments about White House staffers. Suspicion gradually centered on Jofi Joseph, the point man on nuclear nonproliferation at the National Security Council. So at a meeting in which everyone was in on the scam an inaccurate but innocuous news tidbit was revealed. When Joseph used his anonymous Twitter handle #natlsecwonk to broadcast the tidbit he was caught and promptly fired. He was not fired for revealing any secrets, but for making disparaging comments about thin-skinned administration players ranging from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel.
What apparently intensified the campaign to identify the “snarker” was a comment about Valerie Jarrett, the senior Obama adviser who has her own Secret Service detail and appears to exercise an inordinate amount of power behind the scenes. Joseph tweeted “I’m a fan of Obama, but his continuing reliance and dependence upon a vacuous cipher like Valerie Jarrett concerns me.”
Jarrett, an old Chicago friend of both Barack and Michelle Obama, appears to exercise such extraordinary influence she is sometimes quietly referred to as “Rasputin” on Capitol Hill, …
… Whether Jarrett’s influence is all too real or exaggerated is unknowable. What is known is the extent to which she has long been a peerless enabler of Barack Obama’s inflated opinion of himself. Consider this quote from New Yorker editor David Remnick’s interview with her for his 2010 book The Bridge.
“I think Barack knew that he had God-given talents that were extraordinary. He knows exactly how smart he is. . . . He knows how perceptive he is. He knows what a good reader of people he is. And he knows that he has the ability — the extraordinary, uncanny ability — to take a thousand different perspectives, digest them and make sense out of them, and I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually. . . . So what I sensed in him was not just a restless spirit but somebody with such extraordinary talents that had to be really taxed in order for him to be happy. . . . He’s been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do.”
Up against a court flatterer of that caliber it’s no surprise that Jarrett has outlasted almost everyone who was in Obama’s original White House team — from chief of staff Rahm Emanuel to political guru David Axelrod to Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. All are known to have crossed her, and all are gone. As one former Obama aide once told me: “Valerie is ‘She Who Must Not be Challenged.’”
When the revealing histories of the Obama White House are written it will be fascinating to learn just how extensive her role in the key decisions of the Obama years was.
Bret Stephens on president bystander.
Is there a method to President Obama‘s style of leadership, his methods of decision-making, his habits of attention, oversight and follow-through? In recent months I’ve been keeping a file of stories that might suggest an answer. See what you think.
“President Barack Obama went nearly five years without knowing his own spies were bugging the phones of world leaders. Officials said the NSA has so many eavesdropping operations under way that it wouldn’t have been practical to brief him on all of them.
“They added that the president was briefed on and approved of broader intelligence-collection ‘priorities,’ but that those below him make decisions about specific targets.”
—The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 28, 2013
“HealthCare.gov is the highest-profile experiment yet in the Obama administration’s effort to modernize government by using technology, with the site intended to become a user-friendly pathway to new health insurance options for millions of uninsured Americans.
“‘This was the president’s signature project and no one with the right technology experience was in charge,’ said Bob Kocher, a former White House aide who helped draft the law.”
—The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 28, 2013
“For the people who go out, on to the edge, to represent our country, we believe that if we get in trouble, they’re coming to get us, that our back is covered. To hear that it’s not, that’s a terrible, terrible experience.”
— Gregory Hicks, former deputy chief of mission in Libya, on “60 Minutes,” Oct. 27, 2013
Call Mr. Obama’s style indifferent, aloof or irresponsible, but a president who governs like this reaps the whirlwind—if not for himself, then for his country.
Stephens is from the Journal. Here’s Richard Cohen from the Washington Post. one of his fans no less.
Where is Casey Stengel when we need him? In 1962, as the manager of the brand new and determinedly hapless New York Mets — 40 wins, 120 losses — he looked up and down his bench one dismal day and wondered, “Can’t anybody here play this game?” That phrase kept coming at me recently as I watched the impressively inept performance of the Obama administration in both foreign and domestic policy. On a given day, this administration makes the ’62 Mets look good.
This is a surprise — at least to me. If Barack Obama has an image, it is of the infinitely cool, cerebral leader. The man can give a rousing speech, but he is, at heart, a planner and a plodder. Both of his presidential campaigns were exercises in micromanagement — digital all the way. Obama was the better candidate, but he had, by far, the better organization.
Yet this same man has lately so mishandled both domestic and foreign policy that he is in mortal peril of altering his image. This unsettling and uncharacteristic incompetence became shockingly clear when Obama failed to come to grips with the Syrian civil war. I did not agree with the president’s do-nothing policy, but at least it was both a policy and intellectually coherent. What followed, though, was both intellectually incoherent and pathetically inconsistent — a “red line” that came out of nowhere and then mysteriously evaporated and a missile strike that was threatened and then abandoned. It was a policy so wavering that if Obama were driving, he would be forced to take a breathalyzer.
The debacle of the Affordable Care Act’s Web site raised similar questions about confidence. This was supposed to be Obama’s Big Deal. The president has other accomplishments — navigating out of the Great Recession was no minor feat — but restoring the status quo does not get your face on Mount Rushmore. It takes achievement, a program — something new and wonderful. The Affordable Care Act was supposed to be it. …
And Jennifer Rubin. She’s not a fan.
The list is growing every week: The IRS scandal, the deteriorating security situation in Libya, spying on German Chancellor Angela Merkel, spying on journalists and the Obamacare mess. Those are just a few of the things we have been told at one time or another that President Obama he didn’t know about before learning about them in the media. Note to media: You have a critical job in briefing the president, so err on side of over-inclusion.
Then there are the things he had wrong or knew better but said anyway: There is a fatwa in Iran against nuclear weapons, “You will get to keep your health-care plan,” the Benghazi attack was related to an anti- Muslim video, and no predecessor had been compelled to negotiate a budget deal in the context of a potential government shutdown.
This prompts several questions: Who is running the government? Why is the president content not to know so many things? At this point one has to conclude he is intentionally ignorant. If he really wanted to be in the loop, people who didn’t inform him would be fired and the pace of “I didn’t know” excuses would slow. Instead it’s ticked up. Perhaps he refuses to hear bad news. Maybe his second-term team is hopelessly incompetent. Whatever the reason, Obama’s ignorance is no longer (if it ever had been) a valid excuse. His continual cluelessness is an indictment now of his administration’s collapse.
But it also got me wondering. There may be a whole list of things of which the president is unaware or confused that accounts for his erratic performance. Perhaps he does not know that. . .
His is the weakest economic ”recovery” since the Great Depression.
The top 10 percent of taxpayers account for 70 percent of the income tax paid.
The Iranian breakout time for a nuclear weapons capability is now as short as a month and new sites are still being announced.
He did not “end” wars in the Middle East. Sectarian violence is mounting in both Iraq and Libya.
Millions of people may eventually be dropped by their current health-care insurance plan, dwarfing the number who have signed up for Obamacare.
Our allies in the Middle East — virtually all of them — are shaken by U.S. timidity.
The list goes on. You would think the president at some point would be embarrassed to be the least-informed man in Washington, D.C.