Krauthammer Slips FDR Accolades into MLK Memorial Piece

Krauthammer is one of the most famous and also most baffling pundits on the right side of things.  Maybe there’s a connection.  His latest piece praises a series of great American thinkers, the usual suspects, and then throws in…FDR? CK in his own words:

It is one of the enduring mysteries of American history — so near-providential as to give the most hardened atheist pause — that it should have produced, at every hinge point, great men who matched the moment. A roiling, revolutionary 18th-century British colony gives birth to the greatest cohort of political thinkers ever: Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Hamilton, Washington, Franklin, Jay. The crisis of the 19th century brings forth Lincoln; the 20th, FDR.

Not content to make an utterly complete joke of his lead paragraph, the sports equivalent of slipping Bob Eucker into the 1927 Yankees’ “Murderer’s Row,” Krauthammer goes a step further and makes the FDR administration out to be a “miracle.” (OK, not the administration, but the blue-blooded patrician at the head of it – Franklin Delanooo Roooosevelt.  Big difference, right?)

Such an achievement, such a life, deserves a monument alongside the other miracles of our history — Lincoln, Jefferson and FDR — which is precisely where stands the new Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial.

Charles, you’ve got a big brain and all, but FDR presided over the longest depression in the world at that time. As Mark Steyn notes (in a two hour interview on After America) it was the only “Great Depression” (incidentally, there was nothing great about it), and America actually experienced a depression within a depression in 1938. (That’s five years after FDR was elected to the presidency on a small government platform, for those who are counting.)

For more on why FDR sucks, and why Krauthammer should stop sucking up to people who suck, see recently “Take Hope in the Great Depression” (because it really sucked and America is still here).