Dear Mr. Crook,

Mr. Krauthammer has set the level of debate at the level of the schoolyard taunt and you have followed suit. ‘Stupid Democrats’ has the intellectual patina of Mr. Thomas Friedman’s ‘suck on this’. A  strategy  that generates a great deal of a suspect rhetorical heat, but little light, to lapse in to a well worn cliché, although completely applicable, in this instance. Mr. Krauthammer is a propagandist, without intellectual remorse or apology. And in his column, he is at his usual endeavor of promoting his own political agenda, which may not be readily ascertainable to anyone but himself and his confreres: although the usual degradation of Mr. Obama is the operative strategy, no matter the occasion. Mr. Krauthammer confects his own reality and asks us, his readers, to share in this hasty ad hoc creation. No matter how one may approach this re-imagining of this budget compromise, it is the brain-child of an old pol casting aspersions at the party that was victorious in 2008. Although his party will have a beachhead in the New Year, framing the debate is a never-ending set of opportunities; one must plant the seeds of doubt as a matter of ongoing strategy, no matter the dubious provenance. That, in sum, could be considered the central philosophical idea of this Neo-Conservative thinker.