Since learning of Charles Krauthammer as a conservative commentator (just in time to learn of his death, today June 21), I have been paying more attention...and he is too conservative for me. However, I cannot help but admire him...here are some of his best-known quips, do you have a favourite?
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"In explaining any puzzling Washington phenomenon, always choose stupidity over conspiracy, incompetence over cunning. Anything else gives them too much credit."
"Washington is the only place in the world where a gaffe is when a politician accidently speaks the truth." (This is certainly one of my own favourites!)
"There's a reason why in New York Harbor we have the Statue of Liberty, not the Statue of Equality."
"Better to be paralyzed from the neck down than the neck up." (Charles Krauthammer is a quadriplegic, paralyzed in a diving accident.)
"The left is entering a new phase of ideological agitation no longer trying to win the debate but stopping debate altogether, banishing from public discourse any and all opposition. The proper word for that attitude is totalitarian. It declares certain controversies over and visits serious consequences from social ostracism to vocational defenestration upon those who refuse to be silenced." (I think this is referring to post-modernism and the social justice warriors...such as the folks who went after liberal and progressive Bret Weinstein at Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA.)
"Loyalty to the President is great, but loyalty to truth, integrity, and country is even better." (I read that Charles Krauthammer refused to support Donald Trump's candidacy.)
"Every two years the American politics industry fills the airwaves with the most virulent, scurrilous, wall-to-wall character assassination of nearly every political practitioner in the country - and then declares itself puzzled that America has lost trust in its politicians."