Even though Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum describes Charles Krauthammer as a “hardcore conservative,” he suggested in a Friday post that Krauthammer is too enlightened to be on the same page as most right-wingers regarding Obama White House scandals.
When Krauthammer argued recently against the effort to impeach IRS commissioner John Koskinen, he commented that on matters including the IRS/Tea Party flap and the Benghazi attack, Republicans, despite not persuading the majority of the public of Obama-administration “malfeasance,” had had “the facts and the argument” on their side. Drum wrote, “Does [Krauthammer] really believe this? Or does he know it's baloney but figures he needs some kind of acceptable cover to get Republicans off their Ahab-like zeal for investigating nothingburgers?”
According to Drum, Dr. K does indeed understand that it’s baloney: “Krauthammer knows [that] the problem Republicans have with their mania for investigations is that what turned out to be scandalous wasn't high-ranking, and what was high-ranking wasn't scandalous.” In fact, Drum declared that “Obama has run perhaps the cleanest administration in modern history." Still, Drum contended that even if Krauthammer is pretending to buy into the GOP's scandal-driven mentality, he's partly responsible for phenomena like conservative support for impeaching Hillary Clinton on Day One if she becomes president.
From Drum’s post (bolding added):
Krauthammer is a hardcore conservative, but he's also a very high-IQ conservative. So this makes me wonder: does he really believe this? Or does he know it's baloney but figures he needs some kind of acceptable cover to get Republicans off their Ahab-like zeal for investigating nothingburgers?
As I'm sure Krauthammer knows, the problem Republicans have with their mania for investigations is that what turned out to be scandalous wasn't high-ranking, and what was high-ranking wasn't scandalous. Fast & Furious was scandalous, but it was a local botch. The IRS was slightly scandalous, but never went beyond middle management. Planned Parenthood did nothing wrong at all. And Benghazi—well, that reached the very highest levels, but there's just no scandal to be uncovered. There may have been some bad security decisions, but the evidence of malfeasance by anyone in the Obama administration is all but nonexistent…
…All through the Clinton administration and now the Obama administration, Republicans have been fixated on uncovering the scandals they just know have to be out there. But the plain truth is that Obama has run perhaps the cleanest administration in modern history. It's actually sort of remarkable. There's plenty of stuff you can legitimately disagree about with him, but there's been virtually no scandal of the conventional sort…
…PPP recently polled Republicans in North Carolina, and 66 percent supported the idea of impeaching Hillary Clinton "the day she takes office." This is the conservative movement people like Krauthammer have built. It can hardly come as a surprise to him that their primary mode of governance now consists mostly of an endless quest for malevolent phantoms that Krauthammer and his buddies have been assuring them all along are out there.
