The Heelers Diaries

the fantasy world of ireland's greatest living poet

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Thursday, March 15, 2018

reputations

My sliding scale of favourite commentators has undergone some revision this past year.
Mark Steyn, Laura Ingraham and Ann Coulter would normally have been right up  there among my fave raves.
Since each has more or less endorsed President Trump, I am more leery of them. I think they've made a seismic error of judgement there.
Time will tell.
For more than a decade Steyn, Ingraham and Coulter had been very strong advocating President Bush's decisive interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, yet each seems to have now acquiesced to what I regard as President Trump's opportunistic critique of President Bush and the reasons for those wars.
Hey Mark, Laura, Ann! You don't spend fifteen years telling our troops to die for us and then just change your mind on a whim.
A whim is what I am calling your decision to abandon all your previously stated positions on the Jihad wars due to your penchant for Mr Trump.
Having said that.
Mark Steyn is the finest writer of prose in the English speaking world. Laura Ingraham has a combatively principled depth to her every analysis. Ann Coulter is valorous and vainglorious beyond belief.
But they all plumped for Mr Trump and so our relations have grown strained.
I no longer attend their dinner parties or holiday with them in the Caribbean or send them presents on birthdays and anniversaries.
Of course I never did attend their dinner parties etc etc, but I'm just saying that now, if the chance arose, I probably mightn't.
And so on.
Charles Krauthammer is a commentator of insight, wit and cultured mien, whose contribution to discourse I always classified under the rubrique "a tame Mark Steyn."
In these mordantly unsettled times, I now value much more the insights of the tamer, saner man.
His assessments of Mr Trump were fair and also frank and often funny.
With some self deprecation he never failed to point out how he himself had predicted repeatedly that Mr Trump would never be President.
In the early months of the Trump Presidency, Krauthammer said that it was essential for the President's opponents and the media to give the President a chance to govern.
But he would also comment quietly and to my mind correctly that Mr Trump was not fit for office.
This was real commentary.
Honest. Insightful. And not based on a whim or a fad.
Unfortunately after a particularly trenchant debate about President Trump with Laura Ingraham on the Fox News channel last August, he disappeared off the airwaves.
Reports are circulating that he is receiving medical treatment following an operation.
So there you go.
Of my four nominees for great commentators of our age, one of them is in hospital and the other three have gone completely doolally.
Be careful bold readers.
It could happen to you.

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