Krauthammer Fiddles While Rome Burns

The Dow's plunged to 8,500 (wasn't it at 13,000 earlier this year?), the credit markets are freezing up, and Krauthammer wants to talk about Ayers and Rezko and Wright.

My basic take on Krauthammer has been that, unlike many of the WaPo op-ed writers, he's really a pretty smart guy; it's just that he's bought into a wildly different set of assumptions about reality. If you're writing from a world where the sky is green, the water orange, and the trees are purple, you're going to approach things in a different way than if you're a resident of this reality.

But it's hard to envision the alternate universe where Ayers and Rezko and Wright tell us a great deal about Obama, but Mccain's associations (e.g. the flock of lobbyists running his campaign) and Palin's (e.g. crazy anti-witch preacher) tells us nothing about them. Even in good times, this would be sheer political hackery.

But it's not good times. We're in the midst of a worldwide financial crisis unprecedented in my 50+ years. We can let Krauthammer decide, as the hurricane rages, that Obama would hang the pictures all wrong on the living room walls. Too bad the hurricane won't blow Chuckles right off of the nation's op-ed pages.