Free Republic

On Friday’s broadcast of Hugh Hewitt’s radio program, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer reacted to remarks made by President Barack Obama at Thursday’s National Prayer Breakfast. Krauthammer criticized Obama primarily for invoking the Inquisition and the Crusades on the heels of the ISIS video showing the burning of a Jordanian pilot. “I actually think he was doing it, he’ll trot it out when he does the Iran deal, but the more immediate thing was simply to dismiss the barbarism that we saw with the immolation of the Jordanian pilot, and to make everybody believe that this is really nothing out...

Charles Krauthammer tonight slammed President Barack Obama’s remarks today at the National Prayer Breakfast, where Obama compared ISIS attacks to the violence committed by Christians in the Crusades. “Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history. Unless we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ," Obama said.

While Iran’s march toward a nuclear bomb has provoked a major clash between the White House and Congress, Iran’s march toward conventional domination of the Arab world has been largely overlooked. In Washington, that is. The Arabs have noticed. And the pro-American ones, the Gulf Arabs in particular, are deeply worried. This week, Iranian-backed Houthi rebels seized control of the Yemeni government, heretofore pro-American. In September, they overran Sanaa, the capital. On Tuesday, they seized the presidential palace. On Thursday, they forced the president to resign. The Houthi have local religious grievances, being Shiites in a majority Sunni land. But...

On Sunday, at the great Paris rally, the whole world was Charlie. By Tuesday, the veneer of solidarity was exposed as tissue thin. It began dissolving as soon as the real, remaining Charlie Hebdo put out its post-massacre issue featuring a Muhammad cover that, as the New York Times put it, “reignited the debate pitting free speech against religious sensitivities.” Again? Already? Had not 4 million marchers and 44 foreign leaders just turned out on the streets of France to declare “No” to intimidation, and pledging solidarity, indeed identification (“Je suis Charlie”) with a satirical weekly specializing in the most...

The lone wolf is the new nightmare, dramatized and amplified this week by the hostage-taking attack in Sydney. But there are two kinds of lone wolves — the crazy and the evil — and the distinction is important. The real terrorists are rational. Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, had been functioning as an Army doctor for years. Psychotics cannot carry that off. Hasan even had a business card listing his occupation as SoA (Soldier of Allah). He then went out and, shouting “Allahu Akbar,” shot dead 13 people, 12 of them fellow soldiers. To this day, Hasan speaks...

On Tuesday’s broadcast of “The O’Reilly Factor,” Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer weighed in Al Sharpton and his association with President Barack Obama. Fill-in host Eric Bolling noted that Sharpton has made 81 apparent visits to the White House, which conveys a relationship that which Krauthammer indicated was not appropriate.

Utah Sen. Mike Lee defended himself Tuesday against allegations that his point of order vote, which he earned in partnership with Sens. Ted Cruz and Jeff Sessions, contributed to President Barack Obama being able to confirm more of his nominees through the outgoing Democratic Senate majority. “Look, I’ve got tremendous respect for Charles Krauthammer, but he does not have a crystal ball,” Utah Sen. Mike Lee said on the Laura Ingraham radio show.

Old habits die hard. The media are so enamored of the continuing (and largely contrived) story about the great Republican civil war that they fail to appreciate that the real internecine fight is being waged on the other side of the aisle. I grant that there’s a lot of shouting today among Republicans. But it’s a ritual skirmish over whether a government shutdown would force the president to withdraw a signature measure — last time, Obamacare; this time, executive amnesty. And it will likely be resolved with the obvious expedient of funding the government through next year, except for a...

It’s not exactly the Ems Dispatch (the diplomatic cable Bismarck doctored to provoke the 1870 Franco-Prussian War). But what the just-resurfaced Gruber Confession lacks in world-historical consequence, it makes up for in world-class cynicism. This October 2013 video shows MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber, a principal architect of Obamacare, admitting that, in order to get it passed, the law was made deliberately obscure and deceptive. It constitutes the ultimate vindication of the charge that Obamacare was sold on a pack of lies. “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” said Gruber. “Basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter...

Charles Krauthammer said on Fox News tonight that amnesty via executive order is an "impeachable offense."

Krauthammer: [Obama] played as the puzzled observer. He was asked about the meaning of the election, and he said “I’ll leave to others the reading of tea leaves.” Was this really a subtle result? Was this sort of complicated and nuanced? This was the worst wall-to-wall, national, unmistakable, unequivocal shellacking that you will ever see in a midterm election, and it happened on just about every level. You’ve got in the House the Republicans now have the largest majority since 1929.

Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer projected a big win for the Republicans in November, giving them a 70 percent chance of winning the Senate.(VIDEO-AT-LINK) “If the GOP can’t win back the Senate in a climate like this, maybe the party ought to look for another country,” he told Fox News host Bill O’Reilly Tuesday. Krauthammer explained why he thinks the climate is ripe for the win: "The reason is this is essentially a referendum on Obama. In 2010 it was a referendum on his ideology. The overreach with Obamacare, the stimulus, cap and trade, and now, six years in, it’s referendum...

The president is upset. Very upset. Frustrated and angry. Seething about the government’s handling of Ebola, said the front-page headline in the New York Times last Saturday. There’s only one problem with this pose, so obligingly transcribed for him by the Times. It’s his government. He’s president. Has been for six years. Yet Barack Obama reflexively insists on playing the shocked outsider when something goes wrong within his own administration. Charles Krauthammer writes a weekly political column that runs on Fridays. View Archive RSS The IRS? “It’s inexcusable, and Americans are right to be angry about it, and I am...

What was the Islamic State thinking? We know it is sophisticated in its use of modern media. But what was the logic of propagating to the world videos of its beheadings of two Americans (and subsequently a Briton) — sure to inflame public opinion? There are two possible explanations. One is that these terrorists are more depraved and less savvy than we think. They so glory in blood that they could not resist making an international spectacle of their savagery and did not quite fathom how such a brazen, contemptuous slaughter of Americans would radically alter public opinion and risk...

Krauthammer: "Obama Clearly A Narcissist," "Lives In A Cocoon Surrounded By Sycophants" CK: Oh, you’re not young enough. Actually, I probably got it second-hand, for all I know. But that’s a real abuse. Psychiatrists, doctors and others who use their science, or even the global warming folks, you know, you have your expertise, and some people just use it to try to bludgeon other people with their authority. So I decided when I left psychiatry never to use my authority. But let me just say as a layman, without invoking any expertise, Obama is clearly a narcissist in the non-scientific...

On April 5th, 1996, Charles Krauthammer gave his reasons for supporting the 1994 Clinton Assault Weapon Ban.   The column was called "Disarm the Citizenry.  But Not Yet." in the Washington Post.   Ultimately, a civilized society must disarm its citizenry if it is to have a modicum of domestic tranquillity of the kind enjoyed in sister democracies like Canada and Britain. Given the frontier history and individualist ideology of the United States, however, this will not come easily. It certainly cannot be done radically. It will probably take one, maybe two generations. It might be 50 years before the United...

Are you familiar with Candide - Voltaire’s satirical treatise on the foolhardiness of perpetual optimism at the expense of reality?The truth is, we really can’t afford much more optimism in the Age of Obama. There comes a point when not allowing reality to intrude on your version of the world, when preferring the unfounded optimism of Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss borders on absolute delusion. It seems our own Dr. Krauthammer - a Doctor of Psychiatry not Philosophy – agrees. He has diagnosed our semi-retired President as suffering from just that: “The image of a man in denial on the verge of delusion....

<p>The Obama administration is highly exercised about “inversion,” the practice by which an American corporation acquires a foreign company and moves its headquarters out of the U.S. to benefit from lower tax rates abroad.</p> <p>Not fair, says President Barack Obama. It’s taking advantage of an “unpatriotic tax loophole” that hardworking American families have to make up for by the sweat of their brow. His treasury secretary calls such behavior a violation of “economic patriotism.”</p>

Krauthammer On Obama's Foreign Policy: 'The Strategy Is To Do Absolutely Nothing' August 28 Charles Krauthammer ripped President Obama's foreign policy Thursday on "Special Report with Bret Baier," blasting the president for holding a news conference at which he said, "we don't have a strategy yet" for dealing with ISIS in Syria. "The president of the United States, in the middle of a real crisis, a few days after the beheading of an American...gets in front of the world and says, I don't have a strategy," the syndicated columnist and Fox News contributor said. "If that is true, don't say...

President Obama is impatient. Congress won’t act on immigration, he says, and therefore he will. The White House is coy as to exactly what the president will do. But the leaks point to an executive order essentially legalizing an enormous new class of illegal immigrants, perhaps up to 5 million people. One doesn’t usually respond to rumors. But this is an idea so bad and so persistently peddled by the White House that it has already been preemptively criticized by such unusual suspects as (liberal) constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley, concerned about yet another usurpation of legislative power by the...