Charles Krauthammer, seen here in 1984, died on June 21 at 68.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-charles-krauthammer-dies-20180621-story.html: Charles Krauthammer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post columnist and intellectual provocateur who championed the muscular foreign policy of neoconservatism that helped lay the ideological groundwork for the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, died June 21 at 68.
"I believe that the pursuit of truth and right ideas through honest debate and rigorous argument is a noble undertaking," he wrote in a June 8 farewell note. "I am grateful to have played a small role in the conversations that have helped guide this extraordinary nation's destiny. I leave this life with no regrets."
His prolific work extended far beyond politics and foreign affairs to touch on complex social problems that he had first encountered in his medical practice. He wrote poignantly - and at times caustically - about societal treatment of the mentally ill. Many patients, released from psychiatric facilities at the urging of civil libertarians, were set adrift on the "very mean streets" because of a fantasy of "a Rockwellian community ready to welcome its eccentrics," he wrote in Time in 1985.
"In the name of a liberty that illness does not allow them to enjoy," he concluded, "we have condemned the homeless mentally ill to die with their rights on."
After mass shootings, Krauthammer argued, Democratic leaders made "totally sincere, totally knee-jerk and totally pointless" calls for stricter gun laws instead of addressing what he regarded as the more relevant underlying issue: the failure of families and the state to ensure effective psychiatric intervention for those who need it.
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