Charles Krauthammer

I wasn’t sure where to put this. There was a better mention of it in the “moral decline of the GOP” thread, but i think that’s wrong. Krauthammer represented some of what the GOP has lost, and it will certainly be the lesser without him.

Regardless, totally separate from politics, the man lived an amazing life. This Twitter thread tells a story about him.

One major thing that struck me, is that i was in the same boat as the guy writing that thread, in that up until only a few years ago, i had no idea at all that he was a quadriplegic.

Krauthammer was studying medicine when during his first year at Harvard, at the age of 22, he broke his neck diving into a pool. He severed his spine at the c5 vertebrae, and lost the mobility of all his limbs.

Yet, despite that, he continued on to finish his medical degree. That’s amazing. He then went on to be a psychiatrist, and contributed to some important work on mental disorders.

He was always amazingly intelligent, and he was an important voice of reason in conservative politics that will be missed.

Wow. No idea either. Amazing. Thanks for that.

So true. So true. So many inspiring Krauthammer articles.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1989/08/18/drown-the-berenstain-bears/a3a07642-8095-40df-8512-502ed1090361

My favorite obit on Charles, John was the editor of the Weekly Standard.

You didn’t edit Charles, though. He edited himself. Over and over again. His work would come in from an assistant and be revised continually until the moment of publication. Expressions of frustration about the late hour nearing the time we had to send pieces off to the printer were greeted on the phone with stony silence. Any complaint to one of his assistants (Rich Lowry was one) generated what seemed to a kind of silent terror that crackled through the cables. He was civil, but not necessarily pleasant, in these moments.

Charles existed so apart from his quadraplegic disability in the minds and experiences of those of us who knew him—because of his willed insistence that it be so, a willed insistence that was all the more powerful because it was unspoken—that any anger I might have felt at the imposition of his writerly arrogance seemed entirely permissible … until the moment that I remembered. I would remember he could not put pen to paper. I would remember he wrote by dictating. I would remember it was a goddamned astonishing fact of facts that he could do any of this, let alone do it with such easy brilliance. Think of it. He read widely and paid attention to everything—a man who had some difficulty turning a page. He wrote weekly, this man who could not write.

I know I already said this, but it’s really worth repeating… the fact that so many people simply did not know he was a quadraplegic is… astounding. He was a fixture of politics for decades. He was on TV daily. And certainly, the format of TV new/discussion doesn’t really require you to move around.

But still. It wasn’t simply that it didn’t limit him, but he made it damn near appear that it wasn’t even so.

I don’t know anyone else in the world where this is the case for me.

I had no idea either of his condition. I did not agree with everything he said, but I generally respected his opinion and learned from him.

On his intelligence.

Common subtests on oral IQ tests include having test-takers repeat a string of digits forwards and backwards. The latter requires more mental musculature and is much better correlated with IQ. Charles Murray reports in a footnote to his new Commentary article “The Inequality Taboo:”

The average adult gets a digits-backward score of 5 (Jensen 1998: 263). You may compare your own score with the highest I have observed, 13 and 12, achieved respectively by José Zalaquett, former chairman of Amnesty International, and the political analyst Charles Krauthammer. Zalaquett’s score might have been higher if he had not been in a car weaving through traffic at 70 miles per hour on the New Jersey Turnpike. Krauthammer’s score might have been higher if he hadn’t been driving.

Krauthammer is a paraplegic, so presumably he was operating the gas and brake pedals with one hand while steering with the other while taking the test orally.

Heh, yeah, pretty sure that’s a joke, since I think he was a quadraplegic, not a paraplegic, and I don’t think he could be driving.

I also didn’t know. Something about his appearance and mannerisms seemed “off” to me, and I’ve said and posted some snarky stuff about him.

Now I just feel bad.

I think that’s kind of how he wanted it though. He didn’t want anyone to judge him more easily because he had a spinal injury.

It would have been insulting to him for you to be less snarky about him because he was disabled.

He and I weren’t exactly aligned politically, but I’ve always had an enormous amount of respect for him. It’s a big loss.

And, like many others here, I had absolutely no idea about his injury or condition. Wow.

I don’t know anything about this guy but Krauthammer might be the most badass name I’ve ever heard.

It’s like a sword that Gandalf would use to kill Nazis.

I feel like Wolfenstein 3: Teenage Girls Murder Nazis, Too, GamerGate Shitbags needs a Krauthammer DLC to honor his passing.

Except the things I was snarky about were probably the result of his condition. Like the fact that he looked like he was filmed in Supermarionation

He actually could drive - he recovered some ability to use one arm/hand, and had a car modified to allow him to control it entirely with his hand. He drove every day to work.

Krauthammer was definitely one of my heroes, so this hits pretty hard. His intelligence, dignity and humor will be greatly missed.

That’s nuts.

While reciting 12 numbers backwards :D

My new favorite story about the man.