Recently, and by that I mean the past two years or so, Krauthammer's columns give evidence that he's actually breaking down, losing it, becoming... I'm not sure what the clinical term would be, I prefer the Latin bat-shit crazy. He still hits his deadlines, the columns appear. So he's... employable. Not sure who his audience is, at this point... Maybe he doesn't need one. I don't think his bedfellows read him, nor he them. I can't see Big Daddy Irving Kristol subscribing to the WaPo just to access Krauthammer's stuff. I mean... I read it. But I read it for the laughs. And maybe a little schadenfreude.

I blame the Post. They give this nut a prominent place on their page, make it stand out.

They need to be held accountable. It's disgraceful editorial policy, a real failure.

Krauthammer was waxing rhapsodic about Fox "News" not long ago; that's where he should work if they'll have him.

Check out "The Closed World", a book by Paul Edwards, for a detailed analysis of the history of the flawed thinking that informs the foolish faith in high-tech military solutions. Just the account in the introduction of the use of computer-analyzed sensors in Vietnam is worth the price of admission.

I heard that some time ago, Krauthammer took offense at something his Rabbi said during the service and he began screaming at him. It is sad that the diving injury he suffered during med school resulted is his being wheelchair-bound. He is obviously very intelligent and well educated, but he seems every bit as unstable as Glenn Beck. Brit Hume and Bill O'Reilly strike me just about the same way. Of course, I'm certain that I judge authoritarian right-wing types more harshly than I do other people people.

There's also the possibility that Krauthammer is an old-fashioned racist in addition to being an asshat wingnut neocon.

It is physically impossible to distinguish between a warhead and a well constructed decoy balloon in the vacuum of space where the present system targets and intercepts. The system might present an obstacle to a country of limited technical means, but the Russians would have no problem swamping the system with decoys. Why do we persist in spending billions on a system with such an inherent flaw? Beats me. I suppose it’s a combination of greedy defense contractors and stupid political leaders.

I didn't become aware of Krauthammer until he had already eaten the loco weed, so I was unaware that he had been a Scoop Jackson Democrat. That is a very illuminating event. The key characteristic of the Scoop Jackson Democrats that drove so many of them was to always oppose "evil" with force. Remember, Scoop Jackson was first elected to Congress in 1941.

The Neocon defectors from the Democratic Party to the Reaganites justified their move primarily because they objected strongly to the apparently feckless policies of Carter when he did not go after those they defined as "evil" with both feet and a nuke. Reagan promised what they wanted, so Wolfowitz, Pearl and so many switched over to the Republicans. As I said, I was unaware that Krauthammer was one of them.

To make a switch that extreme required strong motivation. And now I think they see Carter redux in Obama. He's not attacking "evil" the way Reagan and both Bush's promised to. But Obama's in power as President. After the last eight years they are powerless to prevent him from - in their view - acting like he supports the evil doers by negotiating with the "evil" enemy. (Of course, those "evil" enemies declare that they are justified by the behavior of the Americans. That's impossible of course. Americans are a unique source of "good" in the world so such allegations must be lies and propaganda.)

I think that's the motivation behind so many of the unhinged attitudes and statements from the extremist right-wing Republicans. They expect massive force to be applied to prevent the slightest gain by the evil-doers, and they don't see it in Obama in particular or in the Democrats/liberals who elected him in general.

I'd say that goes to the misunderstanding that there actually is something that can be called an evil nation or an evil group. The misunderstanding personifies national policies and tries to make them human. That's a problem because while individual humans can be evil, even when they are they don't see themselves that way. Instead they fear strongly and they attack what they fear. When the target of their attacks is America, it feeds the right-wing fantasy that they are evil as a group and they are attacking America based on their evil nature, not because they fear attack by an unthinking colossus - a way the frequently self-absorbed and generally ignorant (and proud of it) Americans can easily be personified. Since they are evil, no force expended to counter them is wrong or unjustified, which justifies the use of military in preemptive invasions and justifies the use of torture on the recalcitrant evil-doers.

You'd think a board certified psychiatrist (Krauthammer) would recognize the inherent error of attempting to personify entire groups of people and even nations as "evil." I'd guess that he at some level realizes that if he did, his personal support from the right-wing would disappear almost overnight. Certainly much or all of his ample paycheck and his personal acclaim would disappear. So he is in effect bought and paid for to be a right-wing propagandist, much as is Bill Krystol who frequently published his work. My bet is that he represses such thoughts and would be angry at reading what I have just written. (Krystol's rag would disappear overnight if Rupert Murdoch's money stopped, as would the Wall Street Journal's Editorial page in its current incarnation. Murdoch is defending his fortune from the masses.)

I've been trying to figure out why the right-wing is so angry, and I think that the base of it is exactly this mistaken idea that the word "evil" has meaning when applied to groups of people. It doesn't.

Evil is a characteristic of individuals, and rather rare. Generally even individuals who perform evil actions are doing so because they have been taught that the actions they take are justified. Any effective negotiator recognizes that, or at least operates on that assumption.

Every Monday that ugly mug stares out from the Chicago Tribune op-ed page, along with a local conservative harrumpher, so Monday sucks before it starts. Bookending the work week on Friday are the golden stylings of the most brilliant opinionist, legend in his own mind, with his head thoroughly up his ass, Jonah Goldberg.
I read 'em anyway, just for the irritation

I think he just wanted to use the word "satrapies" in a sentence that almost made sense. (Maybe it was on a dare from David Brooks)

Newspaper columns seem to depend more on controversy and drawing comments, negative if possible, than any real news or factual content.

These columns are no different that absurd flame bait posts on forums from days gone past.

Military Industrial Complex

Still wondering why these people get any airtime at all.
Not even going to start on reagunz.grew up with him in cali.
All this is pretty much made up same old stuff. You have to go back a few years to check it out but....ussr was never a "real" threat to begin with.
Learn this and you see the grip mic has on the media.50+years now.
Look where all the $$ goes.
Come on. They are always going to have idiots yelling and screaming. They can afford it.
Don't you know this?

I predict that Chuckie Krauthammer will go the way of another discredited neocon-- William Safire. Anyone notice how Bill Safire (one of George W's most fervent enablers) has abandoned his fetid political critique and returned to the safer universe of linguistic gymnastics?

And "journalist" Peggy Noonan now feels free to speak her mind about Palin? What the hell became of the Fourth Estate, anyway?

My sister has often lauded TPM as an exceptional website. So several weeks ago, I began reading TPM on a regular basis.
How disappointing!
Reading TPM, one would think that Bush, Cheney, Palin, Ensign and Sanford are the five most important people in America.
This country is facing incredible problems including a declining economy, the loss of jobs, health care, global warming, rising deficits, declining education...the list goes on and on.
I have to say that TPM is to serious journalism what "Days of our Lives" is to the arts.
TPM...please, get serious.

The present problem with BMD is that, assuming it can actually track an incoming missile, it cannot differentiate between a real warhead and a dummy or decoy warhead. That is where the problem is in a real-world scenario: how many of the multiple warheads are real and how many are decoys? If 500 missiles are launched, with 6 warheads/decoys per missile (just guessing here, some might have more) that gives 3000 targets.
To intercept three thousand targets would require a minimum of 3000 AMM launches. And each AMM would have to have some way of being targeted on one specific warhead; otherwise you could have several AMMs trying to intercept the same warhead/decoy. And remember, the ballistic missiles don't release their multiple warheads until after they re-enter the atmosphere, thus giving even less time for targeting information to be fed into the AMM.
As to the staging of US naval vessels near Hawaii during the North Korean missile test, it wouldn't necessarily be completely a PR gimmick. It was announced that the North Korean missile was going to be launched out over the Pacific. There were no NK missile tracking vessels, that I know of, stationed in the Pacific, so there was no possibility of the NKs destroying the missile if it got near any populated island. The presumption was that said missile was going to splash down somewhere west of Hawaii, but if it continued onwards there was a slight chance of it nearing the Hawaiian islands. It's flight could be tracked by satellite and aircraft, vessels deployed as close as possible to its impact point, and, if need be, AMMs launched to shoot it down. Under those conditions there was a very good chance of actually hitting the thing.
To sum up: as long we get any nuclear-armed foe to launch only one missile at a time and after several weeks of propaganda, one might say we do have a "missile defense".
Now if we could only develop an APD (anti-pundit defense)...

Hm. I read the last column or the Mad Psychiatrist, and it reminds me the skid "Job interview in the Ministry of Silly Walks": "This walk is not particularly silly".

To those who did not watch Monty Python: the walk was very, very silly, but not PARTICULARLY so. The latest opus of Krauthammer is utter nonsense, and is rather snide, but is somewhat short of totally unwarranted invective. I recall when an innocuous statement of Al Gore could bring Krauthammer to conniptions and a declaration that Gore belong to the most vile creatures in the universe.

Right now, he simply overlooks that Russia exctrated from Obama somewhat meaningless and definitely very cheap concessions (but we could have an absolute nuclear superiority! Quoth Krauthammer. Now, nevermore! Get drunk, Krauthammer, and get over it.) and we got some goodies right away, overland supply route to Afghanistan immune from Taliban sabotage, and stalling of the delivery of advanced anti-aircraft systems to Iran.

The ability of our systems to shoot down Russian ICBMs, and the ability of Russian systems to shoot down our planes are both unproven, but as I understand, the latter has better chances to be true, and if true, actual chance of being important.

Actually, Iran and Syria with good anti-aircraft defences and decent missile weapons is something that should give Krauthammer a pause -- were he sane. The whole neo-con project is about identifying a legion of adversaries and ISOLATING THEM. Whatever. To quote Fafblog "Luckily, we are impervious to logic."

Krauthammer's a nut, I thought everyone knew that. I stopped reading his idiocy a long time ago. The WaPo, should dump him.

The key to making sense of Krauthammer's world view is to understand that for him all other issues are secondary to relentless support for Israel. Invade Iraq? Good for Israel. Bomb Iran? Good for Israel. Torture (Moslem) terrorist suspects? Good for Israel.

Obama has backed away from support of Israel's colonization of the West Bank, and he has spoken of Palestinians as human beings with grievances. Obama must be destroyed.

Besides the fact that modern ICBMs all have multiple independent re-entry vehicles, resulting in a "cloud" of incoming warheads that would be impossible to defeat, the fact is that given the distances and speeds involved in shooting down missiles in space, nuclear-tipped interceptors would be required to give a missile-defense system an acceptable degree of reliability. And of course, that would defeat the purpose.

People may point out the Chinese laser that destroyed a satellite. Satellites travel on predictable orbital paths at uniform altitudes with periodic re-appearances over the same place.

The real scandal is that all of the "tests" under the Clinton administration that resulted in "operationalizing" the first missile defense systems, in Alaska, were shams. They were blatantly rigged by giving advance information to the Air Force defense teams so that they knew where to aim the interceptor before the target took off, and the target missile was not allowed to maneuver or deploy anti-radar countermeasures.

In fairness - Tom Clancy World doesn't have enemies that clueless or inconsistent. The world that the right wing lives in is the world of The A-Team.

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