Charles Krauthammer, prominent conservative voice, has died

Charles Krauthammer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and pundit who helped shape and occasionally dissented from the conservative movement as he evolved from "Great Society" Democrat to Iraq War cheerleader to denouncer of Donald Trump, has died at age 68.

His death was announced yesterday by his longtime employers The Washington Post and Fox News.

Krauthammer had announced a year ago he was being treated for a cancerous tumor in his abdomen and earlier this month revealed that he likely had just weeks to live.

"I leave this life with no regrets," Krauthammer wrote in the Post, where his column had run since 1984.

"It was a wonderful life - full and complete with the great loves and great endeavors that make it worth living. I am sad to leave, but I leave with the knowledge that I lived the life that I intended."
He also backed the George W Bush administration's use of torture as an "uncontrolled experiment" carried out "sometimes clumsily, sometimes cruelly, indeed, sometimes wrongly. But successfully. It kept us safe."
But he prided himself on his rejection of orthodoxy and took on Republicans, too, observing during a Fox special in 2013 that "If you're going to leave the medical profession because you think you have something to say, you betray your whole life if you don't say what you think and if you don't say it honestly and bluntly." He criticised the death penalty and rejected intelligent design as "today's tarted-up version of creationism."