I wish I could use the name of Oga Bangura in my letter to the editor below instead of Charles Krauthammer: both peddle anti-Obama vitriol! Then again, we hope that Oga Bangura will soon return to the honorable precincts of true Pan-Africanists.
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"Charles Krauthammer: A Flawed Witness to History's Making" (Letter to the Editor, Public Opinion, Nov 1, 2102).
Charles Krauthammer has patented and planted anti-Obama vitriol in a dogmatic Petri-dish of newspaper opinion pieces. Krauthammer's piece head-lined "President Obama stoops, somehow fails to conquer," Public Opinion. October, 27, 2012, is an example of his craft. Absolutely, we all ferry reasons to why we think Obama or Romney won the debates. But this normative choice is not about slaughtering truth to give life to absurdity. Krauthammer is captive to a cruel craft that retails untruth to sanctify quaint relics of expired dehumanizing ideologies. His craft cuts pathways of a blatant disregard for the wholeness of evidence in journalism. Krauthammer's jaundiced view that Obama is "not a good debater," based on the third debate, unmasks his cruel aversion to Obama. Krauthammer celebrates Romney because the latter imputed some apology-tours and failure to visit Israel to Obama. But Obama didn't struggle in his response. He articulated the genealogy of his travels and its kinship to Israel; as well, he used the visit as an auspicious moment to renew his faith and enrich his perspectives on lessons offered by the Jewish Holocaust. Obama contrasted that Romney actually used his visit to Israel to harvest money for his political campaign. Krauthammer writes that "Obama lost. His tone was petty and small..." Yet Krauthammer was the same person who gulped down Romney's saccharin of new and unceremonious positions spiced with falsehoods during the first debate, insisting that Romney's spate of ungraceful flip-flops was a shift to the axis of a moderate. Krauthammer gleefully sanitizes Romney's unhinged flip-flops as follows: "Romney chose to do a Reagan." Not the least, Krauthammer parodies Obama's metaphor of horses and bayonets as reductionist. As a seasoned journalist, Krauthammer should use nuance and objectivity to capture the unfolding historical moment.
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