I'm no regular consumer of Charles Krauthammer's fables, and yesterday's reminded me why.
Amid his otherwise sensible thesis of the wisdom of electability versus the inanity of in-your-face piety (i.e., Mike Castle versus Christine O'Donnell), Mr. Krauthammer dropped this paragraphic hyperbole:
[T]his is no ordinary Democratic administration. It is highly ideological and ambitious. It is determined to use whatever historical window it is granted to change the country structurally, irreversibly. It has already done so with Obamacare and has equally lofty ambitions for energy, education, immigration, taxation, industrial policy and the composition of the Supreme Court.
The emphasis is mine, even if unnecessary, since the featured sentence above is conspicuously preposterous.
Throughout the prolonged presidential primary seasons of 2007 and '08 the most frequently noted line -- the "narrative" -- on Barack Obama was his fidelity to pragmatism over ideology. Throughout his White House tenure, same line, from both critics and supporters -- those, that is, of any intellectual integrity. Yet what does the highly ideological Krauthammer choose as his lead bugbear to frighten the highly ideological children of the far right?
OK, so let's write off that tactic of Krauthammer's as mere, inescapable projection. But move just two words over: ambitious. This presidential administration is ... ambitious! Oh sweet Jesus piss on the fire and call in the dogs and ring that there alarm. "No ordinary" administration, this, in its ambition. But only if you interpret the Coolidge and Buchanan administrations as normative and the others as unorthodox.
It makes no difference that Krauthammer is either historically unschooled or deliberately misleading. Whichever the case, comically dismissable commentary is the result.
As for the related remainder of Krauthammer's critical insights -- more bugaboos about "structural" change and "lofty ambitions," all naturally of sinister design -- one is nonplussed to conjure many other administrations having bypassed the effort to open its given "historical window." Isn't "change," through the agent of ambition, virtually every administration's raison d'etre? Are not energy, education, immigration, taxation, industrial policy and judicial appointments suitable targets of presidential effort and concern? -- in fact, the very areas of national life which voters themselves targeted for wanted change?
In the hands of a skilled propagandist, however, the perfectly pedestrian can be disfigured into the frighteningly exotic and foreign.
True, the weak-minded wombats who take seriously the likes of Krauthammer's fabled garbage have a heretofore unmet duty to improve their reading comprehension and grasp of reality. I suspect Mr. Krauthammer in fact excels at the latter himself, but only for that fleeting moment before his own robust ideology overshadows and crushes that grasp.