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“[T]he most astonishing thing is the lack of any urgency,” Krauthammer said. “As you say, Congress will be back in a week. He says, ‘I can strike in a day or a week or a month,’ as if he is a judge handing down a sentence and the execution can be any time in the future. There is a war going on. Do you think everybody is going to hold their breath, hold their arms, step aside until Obama decides when he wants to go to Congress? “But the idea that you make the case, you leak the details, you...

BRET BAIER: Charles, to hear the president make this case, and this is really the first time we've heard him make it, it is an interesting way he's phrasing it. CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: I was surprised by the phrase 'shot across the bow.' When you shoot across the bow of an enemy ship, you are telling it to stop or we will sink you with the next round. When Obama says we're doing a shot across the bow, but then we're going to go home, this will stop, it will be limited, three days, we don't want an Iraq war. So...

Former Cleveland congressman Dennis Kucinich, who has met repeatedly with Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, was quoted yesterday in a Capitol Hill newspaper as saying that a U.S. military strike on Syria would turn the U.S. military into "al Qaida's air force." ...

On Tuesday’s broadcast of Fox News Channel’s “Special Report,” network contributors Juan Williams and Charles Krauthammer debated the merits of North Carolina’s new voter identification legislation signed into law this week by North Carolina Republican Gov. Pat McCrory. Williams said there are circumstances in which photo identification is necessary, but since voting is a right, he argued that identification shouldn’t be a requirement. “When I look at the polls, most Americans support voter ID,” Williams said. “Most Americans are pretty clear in their thinking that if you have to, as Gov. McCrory said, show some ID to get in the...

Jen Psaki, blameless State Department spokeswoman, explained that the hasty evacuation of our embassy in Yemen was not an evacuation but “a reduction in staff.” This proved a problem because the Yemeni government had already announced (and denounced) the “evacuation” — the word normal folks use for the panicky ordering of people onto planes headed out of the country. Thus continues the administration’s penchant for wordplay, the bending of language to fit a political need. This would all be comical and merely peculiar if it didn’t reflect a larger, more troubling reality: The confusion of language is a direct result...

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: I find it astonishing that he goes around making speeches in which he deplores the state of the economy, the growing income inequality, chronic unemployment, staggering middle class income, and it's as if he has been a bystander, as if he's been out of the country for the last five years. It's his economy; he's the president. He's talking as if this is the Bush economy, I don't know, the Eisenhower economy, and he just arrived in a boat and he discovers how bad the economy is. This is a result of the policies he instituted. He gave...

On Friday’s “Special Report,” Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer went against the conventional wisdom of some in the conservative movement by arguing efforts to defund President Barack Obama’s 2010 health care legislation at the expense of shutting down the federal government was “really dumb.” “Never issue a threat you’re not prepared to in the end honor and deliver on,” Krauthammer said. “And if the Republicans imagine they’re going to either stop the funding of the government or refuse the raising of the debt ceiling, they’re out of their minds. It would be a catastrophe in the end. All the president...

<p>A lawyer for Tea Party groups targeted by the IRS says his clients haven't even been contacted by the FBI, which is supposed to be investigating the matter. This development comes after former FBI Director Robert Mueller told lawmakers he didn't know who the lead investigator was in the probe.</p>

There has been a lot of conversation, and rightfully so, about the ramifications of the Obama administration's potentially illegal delay of the employer mandate portion of the train wreck known as ObamaCare. Many are saying that this proves that ObamaCare will fail and go down as one of the all-time "told you so" moments in political history -- while others insist that the delay is a stroke of political brilliance and/or exemplary caution needed for such an undertaking. Regardless of how that argument plays out, this official shilly-shally shows beyond any doubt that a number of conservative intellectuals out-thought themselves...

<p>Under the Defense of Marriage Act, the federal government does not recognize same-sex marriages even in states that have legalized it. This week, the Supreme Court ruled DOMA unconstitutional.</p> <p>There are two possible grounds, distinct and in some ways contradictory, for doing so. The curious thing about the Court’s DOMA decision is that it contains both rationales.</p>

On Friday’s “Special Report” on the Fox News Channel, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer criticized President Barack Obama’s speech on Wednesday at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. The speech was sparsely attended compared to the speech Obama had made at the same venue back in 2008 during his first presidential election campaign. And as part of the “All-Star Panel” Friday “Lightning Round” segment, Krauthammer won the privilege of posing the question to his colleagues on how to define the speech. “Obama gave a speech in Germany this week,” Krauthammer said. “Was it a) a stirring defense of the United States...

The war in Syria, started by locals, is now a regional conflict, the meeting ground of two warring blocs. On one side, the radical Shiite bloc led by Iran, which overflies Iraq to supply Bashar Assad and sends Hezbollah to fight for him. Behind them lies Russia, which has stationed ships offshore, provided the regime with tons of weaponry, and essentially claimed Syria as a Russian protectorate. And on the other side are the Sunni Gulf states terrified of Iranian hegemony (territorial and soon nuclear); non-Arab Turkey, now convulsed by an internal uprising; and fragile Jordan, dragged in by geography....

We’re running out of letters here, people! We’ve used up so many on our acronym list of new and evolving scandals: IRS, FBI, CIA, DOJ, EPA, DOA, ATF, HHS, and GSA that we need to buy a few more vowels. Just since Wednesday we’ve had to add the LGBT (no vowels, thank goodness) and the NSA (extra “A” required) controversies to our ever expanding list of co-conspirators. Boy, we just cannot make some of you people happy. First you complain about Big Guy getting all the news he doesn’t know anything about on the news and at his press conferences:...

On Dennis Miller’s radio show on Thursday, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer reacted to what Miller called “the new normal” — lowered expectations for the American economy — calling President Barack Obama a “fraud” and comparing him to “a Wizard of Oz.” “It is amazing, and there are two parts to that,” Krauthammer said. “The first is, ‘You didn’t build it.’ This is the ideology of, you know, ‘I built the roads, I gave you your grade school.’ And thus, if you invent the iPad, I did it, you didn’t — which is just preposterous. And the other part of...

Krauthammer on O'Rielly Factor: I think there is a bigger story here  that will in time come out.  The biggest scandal of all, the biggest question is what was the president doing in those eight hours. He had a routine meeting at five o’clock. He never after during the eight hours when our guys have their lives in danger, he never called the Secretary of Defense, he never calls the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he never called the CIA Director, Who does he call?  But in five hours he calls the Secretary of State. And after the phone call she...

Columnist Charles Krauthammer on the “O’Reilly Factor” Tuesday night said the “biggest scandal of all” regarding the Benghazi attacks on Sept. 11, 2012, has yet to emerge. “I think there is a bigger story here, here’s the one that will in time come out,” Krauthammer said. ”The biggest scandal of all, the biggest question is: What was the president doing in those eight hours?” “He had a routine meeting at five o’clock. He never after, during the eight hours when our guys have their lives in danger, he never called the Secretary of Defense, he never calls the Chairman of...

Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer on Friday said the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative organizations could be “fatal” for the Obama administration if it turns out that anyone in the White House was aware of it. Appearing on Fox News’ “Hannity,” Krauthammer called the IRS situation “the one scandal that people have a visceral sense about” — it’s the one U.S. institution, besides the military, that can do very serious harm. Going after conservative groups based on their politics is “a violation that everybody — left or right– understands,” he added. Krauthammer urged that there’s no suggestion that Obama knew...

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: It's clear that that the press has turned. I'm not sure how permanent it will be but this is surely different than what we've seen over the four years being acolytes and cheerleaders and really supine. And the reason I think, a, is the accumulate of scandals all at once and the remarkable coincidence that the president was speaking early on about conspiracies and don't worry about government, tyranny, you know. The IRS scandal, which is the second most powerful agency in government as an agent suppression of political speech is almost a definition of tyranny. But that...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Now, I've had people say, "Rush, how do we handle this? What's the best way to deal with all this?" See if you agree with this. Dr. Krauthammer on Fox News Special Report during the All-Star Panel last night, Bret Baier said, "Charles Krauthammer, when the president says there's no 'there' there, it almost seemed that he was challenging reporters to say, 'No, really, there's no "there" there.'" KRAUTHAMMER: The one advice I'd give to Republicans is stop calling it a huge scandal. Stop saying it's a Watergate. Stop saying it's Iran-Contra. Let the facts speak for...

Fate is fickle, power cyclical, and nothing is new under the sun. Especially in Washington, where after every election the losing party is sagely instructed to confess sin, rend garments and rethink its principles lest it go the way of the Whigs. And where the victor is hailed as the new Caesar, facing an open road to domination. And where Barack Obama, already naturally inclined to believe his own loftiness, graciously accepted the kingly crown and proceeded to ride his reelection success to a crushing victory over the GOP at the fiscal cliff, leaving a humiliated John Boehner & Co....