Charles Krauthammer takes rank hypocrisy to new lows, according to Glen Greenwald. After reading the Krauthammer column in question, I don’t think that Greenwald overstates his case.
CK’s column is like a sandwich. In the top slice, he deplores “the inevitable rush to get ideological mileage out of the carnage.” The main filling in the sandwich is ideology. There is some anti-Obama vinegar in there as well. The bottom slice is from the same dough as the top: “we can agree to observe a decent interval of respectful silence before turning ineffable evil and unfathomable grief into political fodder.”
Perhaps we can agree to do that, but CK seems incapable of living up to any such agreement. At around the same time as he was writing the article, he was on Fox News talking about the Virginia Tech shootings. He stated his suspicion that the phrase “Ismail ax” has “more to do with Islamic terror… than it does with the opening line of Moby Dick.”
I was tempted to write a satirical piece alleging that anti-whaling demonstrators would picket at Virginia Tech, on the grounds that “Ismail ax” was an incitement to slaughter cetaceans. But I couldn’t write anything as ridiculous as CK. And I couldn’t write anything as apt as the article I linked to a couple of days ago.