He is a psychiatrist who’s a highly respected columnist and political analyst. As such, Charles Krauthammer didn’t just learn about the primitive psychological defense mechanism known as denial years ago; he grokked it. Yet, when it comes to Barack Obama, Krauthammer is exhibiting the very trait he should be expunging from his own psyche.
Krauthammer: Psychiatrist in denial?
During his March 11th appearance on the O’Reilly Factor (video below), Krauthammer again misdiagnoses Obama’s mindset, possibly because the truth is something he refuses to face. In essence, Obama has a psychiatrist in denial.
What’s fascinating is that Krauthammer is very incisive when enumerating all of Obama’s failures in foreign policy, saying:
“There is not a spot in the world — you can go from Syria to Libya, to Iran to China, to Russia to Ukraine, where the United States is not worse off, less regarded, considered weak than it was five years ago. This is a completely failed foreign policy and he seems radically unaware of that.”
Really, Charles? How about the possibility that he’s completely aware of what he’s doing, that it’s intentional, and that he hates America that much? After all, he was mentored by a Soviet Communist and Stalinist in his second decade of life. What was he mentored in? Wouldn’t he necessarily have been taught to hate America?
Yet, Krauthammer insists Obama just doesn’t see what he’s doing. Later in the exchange with O’Reilly, Krauthammer compares Obama with Jimmy Carter, saying that things were much worse on the foreign policy front before Carter woke up. Then, tellingly, Krauthammer said this:
“The problem today, and what really scares me is given the same kind of shock watching Russia invade another country, Obama’s scales remain on his eyes. The stuff he has been saying, this is 19th century behavior in the 21st century, as if a turn of the calendar has changed human nature and the Hobbesian international system is now a gentleman’s club is absurd. It’s what he said in his first U.N. speech. You could attribute that to being naive, but he’s has been around now for five years. He sees the wages of weakness and he does not understand that he is now feeding the bear.”
Did you catch that contradiction? Krauthammer implies Obama can’t be naive and then says he is. Would you like a little cognitive dissonance with your denial, Dr. Krauthammer?
There is a reason why this line of distinction is so important. As a psychiatrist, Krauthammer should know that. If the United States were a human being (and it is a country comprised of human beings) that is being killed, is it being killed via involuntary manslaughter or premeditated murder? While it’s true that the country is destroyed either way, doing so on purpose is a much graver sin and if people like Krauthammer would stop living in denial, maybe Congress would be forced to do its job.
Via RCP: