A Man Like Few Others

"Whenever you're faced with an explanation of what's going on in Washington, the choice between incompetence and conspiracy, always choose incompetence." 

"Better to be paralyzed from the neck down than the neck up."


"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?"
Charles Krauthammer, MD.

Mourning the passing of the iconic Charles Krauthammer.

A few bland lines - born in Manhattan to a Belgian mother and Ukrainian father, Harvard educated psychiatrist, speechwriter for Carter VP Walter Mondale. A diving accident in his first year at Harvard left him paralyzed from basically the neck down (he still graduated). Author, speaker, Fox News commentator. Blah blah blah.

In the arena of ideas, he was a titan, a man whose wit and wisdom, his grasp of concepts and vocabulary, often required a rereading to completely digest. His coworkers and contemporaries spoke of his kindness, humility and good humor. I'm sure the recipients of scalpel-like verbal excisions could easily have done without. He was an intellectual, and an unapologetic conservative. If that formulation makes you queasy:


"[They are] 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."

He had good things to say, as well as harsh, about nearly everyone involved in public life. He labeled President Obama as a first-rate intellect, while marveling at how a young man with no paper trail, no history would become president. This truly difiant conservative took time out during the 2016 campaign to brand then-candidate Donald Trump an infant ("I thought he was an eleven year old, but I find I'm off by a decade"), that the man was prone to the occasional gaffe of telling a revealing truth.

One could easily write a worthy blog about Dr. K that merely listed a dozen or so of the more pithy comments advanced over his amazing life. Like this one, written about him by his friend George Will:

"Some people are such a large presence while living that they still occupy space even when they are gone."