In one of literary critic Northrop Frye's more famous essays, he wrote that "The axiom of criticism must be, not that the poet does not know what he is talking about, but that he cannot talk about what he knows."
In that there's an axiomatic germ for the political critic, for the bullshit that flows from the knowing pens of the commentariat's Krauthammers can scarcely be judged by the bullshit-creationists themselves, for there would go the whole ballgame.
Charles Krauthammer's mind is sharp. Indeed in the art of political columnizing, minds such as his rarely come sharper. I love his writing. It's clearly the product of first-rate analysis as a starting point; it's crisp, full of oxygen; and above all, it screams that he knows what he's talking about, but he can't talk about what he knows, for to do so would only unravel the mysteries of his propagandistic inventions, which generally are things of real, poetic beauty.
His latest, for instance, is a majestic echo of his fallacious oldie that "Obamacare is a full-scale federal takeover [my emphasis] ... a fraud from the very beginning." That's about as declarative as a right-wing distortion can get. Charles knows, however, that he can't leave it at that--that as a professional columnist he must "elaborate" on his assertion, so that the bullshit can morph into the objective authority of a conservative pronunciamento. And this is how he does just that, to prove Obamacare's federal takeover-ism:
The law was designed to throw people off their private plans and into government-run exchanges where they would be made to overpay--forced to purchase government-mandated services they don’t need--as a way to subsidize others.
Ain't that a beaut? To throw people off their private plans and into government-run exchanges. Not into exchanges populated solely by yet more private plans, which is the reality of Obamacare's rather peculiar socialism, but into government-run exchanges--which, while true, is simultaneously a brutal distortion of the law's fundamental "design."
Krauthammer knows that. But he can't say it.
Nor can he dare to concede that according to his definition of a federal government "takeover" of American health insurance, private insurance collapsed under government takeovers upon the Progressive-era creation of regulatory, state insurance commissions.
So enjoy your privatized holiday shopping today, if you can. For according to Charles Krauthammer, it's all a socialist humbug; it's all a part of a massive Leninist scheme--the roads you're taking are government roads, the stores' sprinkler systems are government-mandated, and the prices you pay are offensively slightly higher because those impoverished cashiers and stockers are kept barely alive by a government-enforced minimum wage.
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