Patterico's Pontifications

6/21/2018

RIP Charles Krauthammer

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:23 pm



I haven’t watched much TV in general, or Fox News in particular, for quite some time. But the death of Charles Krauthammer still touched me because I used to be an avid fan of Special Report with Brit Hume and enjoyed watching Mr. Krauthammer on “the panel” many a night.

So while there are a lot of tributes out there, there’s nobody I’d rather hear from than Brit Hume. And here he is.

[Cross-posted at The Jury Talks Back.]

20 Responses to “RIP Charles Krauthammer”

  1. Ding.

    Patterico (115b1f)

  2. Amazing man, Mr. K. May God welcome him as a friend.

    felipe (023cc9)

  3. Please excuse a multiple posting- however, WADR, would rather ‘hear’ from Krauthammer himself:

    Closing the New Frontier

    By Charles Krauthammer – February 12, 2010

    “We have an agreement until 2012 that Russia will be responsible for this,” says Anatoly Perminov, head of the Russian space agency, about ferrying astronauts from other countries into low-Earth orbit. “But after that? Excuse me, but the prices should be absolutely different then!”

    The Russians may be new at capitalism, but they know how it works. When you have a monopoly, you charge monopoly prices. Within months, Russia will have a monopoly on rides into space.

    By the end of this year, there will be no shuttle, no U.S. manned space program, no way for us to get into space. We’re not talking about Mars or the moon here. We’re talking about low-Earth orbit, which the United States has dominated for nearly half a century and from which it is now retiring with nary a whimper.

    Our absence from low-Earth orbit was meant to last a few years, the interval between the retirement of the fatally fragile space shuttle and its replacement with the Constellation program (Ares booster, Orion capsule, Altair lunar lander) to take astronauts more cheaply and safely back to space.

    But the Obama 2011 budget kills Constellation. Instead, we shall have nothing. For the first time since John Glenn flew in 1962, the United States will have no access of its own for humans into space — and no prospect of getting there in the foreseeable future.

    Of course, the administration presents the abdication as a great leap forward: Launching humans will be turned over to the private sector, while NASA’s efforts will be directed toward landing on Mars.

    This is nonsense. It would be swell for private companies to take over launching astronauts. But they cannot do it. It’s too expensive. It’s too experimental. And the safety standards for getting people up and down reliably are just unreachably high.

    Sure, decades from now there will be a robust private space-travel industry. But that is a long time. In the interim, space will be owned by Russia and then China. The president waxes seriously nationalist at the thought of China or India surpassing us in speculative “clean energy.” Yet he is quite prepared to gratuitously give up our spectacular lead in human space exploration.

    As for Mars, more nonsense. Mars is just too far away. And how do you get there without the stepping stones of Ares and Orion? If we can’t afford an Ares rocket to get us into orbit and to the moon, how long will it take to develop a revolutionary new propulsion system that will take us not a quarter-million miles but 35 million miles?

    To say nothing of the effects of long-term weightlessness, of long-term cosmic ray exposure, and of the intolerable risk to astronaut safety involved in any Mars trip — six months of contingencies vs. three days for a moon trip.

    Of course, the whole Mars project as substitute for the moon is simply a ruse. It’s like the classic bait-and-switch for high-tech military spending: Kill the doable in the name of some distant sophisticated alternative, which either never gets developed or is simply killed later in the name of yet another, even more sophisticated alternative of the further future. A classic example is the B-1 bomber, which was canceled in the 1970s in favor of the over-the-horizon B-2 stealth bomber, which was then killed in the 1990s after a production run of only 21 (instead of 132) in the name of post-Cold War obsolescence.

    Moreover, there is the question of seriousness. When John F. Kennedy pledged to go to the moon, he meant it. He had an intense personal commitment to the enterprise. He delivered speeches remembered to this day. He dedicated astronomical sums to make it happen.

    At the peak of the Apollo program, NASA was consuming almost 4 percent of the federal budget, which in terms of the 2011 budget is about $150 billion. Today the manned space program will die for want of $3 billion a year — 1/300th of last year’s stimulus package with its endless make-work projects that will leave not a trace on the national consciousness.

    As for President Obama’s commitment to beyond-lunar space: Has he given a single speech, devoted an iota of political capital to it?

    Obama’s NASA budget perfectly captures the difference in spirit between Kennedy’s liberalism and Obama’s. Kennedy’s was an expansive, bold, outward-looking summons. Obama’s is a constricted, inward-looking call to retreat.

    Fifty years ago, Kennedy opened the New Frontier. Obama has just shut it.

    # # # #

    Farewell, New Frontier

    By Charles Krauthammer – April 20, 2012

    As the space shuttle Discovery flew three times around Washington, a final salute before landing at Dulles airport for retirement in a museum, thousands on the ground gazed upward with marvel and pride. Yet what they were witnessing, for all its elegance, was a funeral march.

    The shuttle was being carried – its pallbearer, a 747 – because it cannot fly, nor will it ever again. It was being sent for interment. Above ground, to be sure. But just as surely embalmed as Lenin in Red Square.

    Is there a better symbol of willed American decline? The pity is not Discovery’s retirement – beautiful as it was, the shuttle proved too expensive and risky to operate – but that it died without a successor. The planned follow-on – the Constellation rocket-capsule program to take humans back into orbit and from there to the moon – was suddenly canceled in 2010. And with that, control of manned spaceflight was gratuitously ceded to Russia and China.

    Russia went for the cash, doubling its price for carrying an astronaut into orbit to $55.8 million. (Return included. Thank you, Boris.)

    China goes for the glory. Having already mastered launch and rendezvous, the Chinese plan to land on the moon by 2025. They understand well the value of symbols. And nothing could better symbolize China overtaking America than its taking our place on the moon, walking over footprints first laid down, then casually abandoned, by us.

    Who cares, you say? What is national greatness, scientific prestige or inspiring the young – legacies of NASA – when we are in economic distress? OK. But if we’re talking jobs and growth, science and technology, R&D and innovation – what President Obama insists are the keys to “an economy built to last” – why on earth cancel an incomparably sophisticated, uniquely American technological enterprise?

    We lament the decline of American manufacturing, yet we stop production of the most complex machine ever made by man – and cancel the successor meant to return us to orbit. The result?

    Abolition of thousands of the most highly advanced aerospace jobs anywhere – its workforce abruptly unemployed and drifting away from space flight, never to be reconstituted.

    Well, you say, we can’t afford all that in a time of massive deficits.

    There are always excuses for putting off strenuous national endeavors: deficits, joblessness, poverty, whatever. But they shall always be with us. We’ve had exactly five balanced budgets since Alan Shepard rode Freedom 7 in 1961. If we had put off space exploration until these earthbound social and economic conundrums were solved, our rocketry would be about where North Korea’s is today.

    Moreover, today’s deficits are not inevitable, nor even structural. They are partly the result of the 2008 financial panic and recession. Those are over now. The rest is the result of a massive three-year expansion of federal spending.

    But there is no reason the federal government has to keep spending 24 percent of GDP. The historical postwar average is just over 20 percent – and those budgets sustained a robust manned space program.

    NASA will tell you that it’s got a new program to go way beyond low-Earth orbit and, as per Obama’s instructions, land on an asteroid by the mid-2020s. Considering that Constellation did not even last five years between birth and cancellation, don’t hold your breath for the asteroid landing.

    Nor for the private sector to get us back into orbit, as Obama assumes it will. True, hauling MREs up and trash back down could be done by private vehicles. But manned flight is infinitely more complex and risky, requiring massive redundancy and inevitably larger expenditures. Can private entities really handle that? And within the next lost decade or two?

    Neil Armstrong, James Lovell and Gene Cernan are deeply skeptical. In a 2010 open letter, they called Obama’s cancellation of Constellation a “devastating” decision that “destines our nation to become one of second or even third rate stature.”

    Which is why museum visits to the embalmed Discovery will be sad indeed. America rarely retreats from a new frontier. Yet today we can’t even do what John Glenn did in 1962, let alone fly a circa-1980 shuttle.

    At least Discovery won’t suffer the fate of the Temeraire, the British warship tenderly rendered in Turner’s famous painting “The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last Berth to be broken up, 1838.” Too beautiful for the scrapheap, Discovery will lie intact, a magnificent and melancholy rebuke to constricted horizons.
    _______

    Armstrong is gone. Cernan, Shepard and Glenn, too. Now Krauthammer has left us as well.

    Those of us who support a strong and vibrant manned space program know it is a bipartisan endeavor. It is an investment in ourselves and our future with an incalculable potential for rich returns. And yes, it is inspiring. It beckons to the best in us.

    Cronkite knew this. So did Krauthammer. His advocacy will be missed. It is honest writing.

    And true.

    R.I.P., C.K. Ad Astra.

    DCSCA (797bc0)

  4. Journalist Shares Moving Letter Charles Krauthammer Wrote To His Father After Tragic Spinal Cord Accident

    https://www.dailywire.com/news/32161/must-read-journalist-shares-moving-letter-charles-amanda-prestigiacomo

    Positivity can overcome many things.

    harkin (e5c973)

  5. A brilliant man who pretty much maxed-out the gifts God gave to him. Few, myself most assuredly not included, can rightfully claim to have lived such a life.

    Ed from SFV (389633)

  6. What a nice tribute, Ed. Well done. May he Rest In Peace.

    DRJ (15874d)

  7. Imagine being paralyzed in an accident at 22 and still finishing your medical studies on time…mind-boggling.

    harkin (e5c973)

  8. CK was a remarkable man.

    Simon Jester (99147b)

  9. Let’s please remember the standard Charles Krauthammer measured himself against. Immediately after he broke his neck he realized that everyone would be judging him by a new standard. “Great considering…” He’s got a broken neck, he’s mostly a quadriplegic, he’s in a wheelchair, etc. He could in effect do the bare minimum and everyone would praise him for his achievements overcoming adversity.

    He didn’t want that. He wanted everyone to measure him against the old standard of excellence that everyone including himself measured himself against. One of the things that drove him to finish medical school.

    So I shall honor his wishes in death as he demanded in life. The man was infuriating at times. And not merely because he didn’t agree with me. Because he wasn’t quite as objective as he thought. But then, who is? He was always challenging, his mind always powerful. I hope that’s obituary enough for him. It would be for me, but something tells me he wouldn’t settle on what’s enough for me.

    Steve57 (0b1dac)

  10. It royally irked CK when people talked about how courageous he was.

    Steve57 (0b1dac)

  11. I watched the first 40 minutes of Special Report before I had to take off, and it was all about Krauthammer. They really loved the guy. You can’t mistake the combination of grief, memories and affection on their faces, every single one on the show. He really had the gift of clear thinking, humor and nice temperament.

    Paul Montagu (54c2a3)

  12. He didn’t want that. He wanted everyone to measure him against the old standard of excellence that everyone including himself measured himself against. One of the things that drove him to finish medical school.

    Now, there’s an awkwardly worded sentence. Krauthammer beats me again. This would never have gone to print on his watch.

    Steve57 (0b1dac)

  13. Great guy, he will be sorely missed.

    Dave (445e97)

  14. A couple of referrals.

    Fox News did a great one hour documentary on him that coincided with the release of his book in 2013. Bret Baier got him to sit for a long interview — which he had never done before when the subject was himself.

    Second, when the book came out Hugh Hewitt did a multi-hours long radio interview with him going back over his columns that were published in book form. Hugh put up the audios of those interviews on his site last week when Dr. K announced his prognosis. I have listed to a couple of hours, and its just tremendous to listen to him on a whole ranges of topics that had written about over a couple decades.

    shipwreckedcrew (56b591)

  15. Even when you disagreed with him, to his credit he always had a serious rationale for why he believed his thesis. And he would reconsider things.To go from an adviser to the Mondale campaign to an advocate for Reagan simply isn’t done, and yet he did so. Sadly far too many people on all sides never stop to do that. And his personal story is remarkable. He will be sorely missed.

    Bugg (08921e)

  16. I hope someone introduced Krauthammer to Christ before he passed. I would love to speak to him in Heaven someday.

    NJRob (b00189)

  17. The embedded video autoplays when opening the main Patterico page.

    Dejectedhead (81690d)

  18. The video autoplays.

    Brit Hume says that is remarkable that he lived to the age of 68, given his condition, but it still feels very bad. (he had partial use of his right arm and hand. I saw some video on Fox News Sunday I think or was that somewhere else?)

    He had had all kinds of rare or original devices for getting around, probably dating from atime before the FDA wanted to approve all medical devices.

    Sammy Finkelman (02a146)

  19. Please remove the embedded video. The autoplays are ruining my visits to your blog. Thanks.

    Christine (0c8748)


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