Shakespeare observed that a conscience "makes a man a coward," which I guess is why Charles Krauthammer can so fearlessly make such a fool of himself:
The authentic Obama is a leveler, a committed social democrat, a staunch believer in the redistributionist state, a tribune, above all, of "fairness" — understood as government-imposed and government-enforced equality.
That’s why "soak the rich" is not just a campaign slogan to rally the base. It’s a mission, a vocation. It’s why, for all its gratuitous cynicism and demagoguery, Obama’s populist Rose Garden lecture on Monday was delivered with such obvious — and unusual — conviction.
I'm actually embarrassed for Krauthammer. Someone has to be; he himself appears incapable of self-restraint or even the most primordial of human conscience. He sees a blank page and he simply cannot resist spewing hateful anti-Obamaism all over it.
Hateful is one thing, but Krauthammer's hate is also eccentrically untethered from any common ground of linguistic understanding. Obama is a leveler? -- a cynic? -- a demagogue? Well, then Rick Perry is a qualified climatologist, Sarah Palin a humble homebody, and Eric Cantor a bookish samaritan.
Were an Anti-Krauthammer to analyze the actual Krauthammer in the latter's Krauthammerian style, he would find it quite easy -- perhaps even irresistable -- to characterize the Post columnist as a kind of reincarnated propagandist of the P.J. Goebbels school: a man utterly vacant of ethical constraints or intellectual fairness, while bubbling over with feral prejudices and inexplicably wild hatreds.
I myself am too cowardly to insist on such an analysis, however, because somewhere in my hardening, darkening heart there still lies some remnant of a human conscience. I'll give him the benefit of doubt. Who knows. Maybe Krauthammer only writes such crap because it sells, and he's happy to sell it.