CUTTING EDGES: <i> Making Sense of the Eighties</i> by Charles Krauthammer (Random House: $17.95; 220 pp.)

There are useful things in a daily newspaper that you would not think of collecting in a book. The world’s weather could make a topic for a writer, and certainly marriage does, but a four-year compilation of weather reports or wedding announcements would likely not sell at all.

To a lesser degree, the same is true for the commentary written in the rhythms of a weekly magazine. They help us out of our daily blur by providing perspective and a place to draw breath. But with two or three years gone by, what seemed like a larger reach tends to seem like the fidgets.

Martin Peretz’s The New Republic, probably our most influential political weekly, employs, and occasionally loses, some highly talented short-sword gladiators. Their viewpoint oscillates around the center--a center that has drifted rightwards--but is armed with lucidity, curiosity and the kind of trenchant wit traditionally associated with more extreme positions. This is a center that will hold--or so you imagine Kinsley, Krauthammer, Wieseltier and the other editor-writers vowing--with its teeth.

Charles Krauthammer’s teeth are in good shape. The trouble with this collection of his pieces for The New Republic, along with several for Time, the Washington Post and Commentary, is that what they were chewing has been swallowed and digested.

True, many of the subjects--nuclear disarmament, Reagan’s foreign policies, the fads that wax and wane in American life--are still around. But Krauthammer’s style, most suitable for a weekly, is to feed on other people’s fatuousness in order to regurgitate his own good sense.

It takes a very strong writer, indeed, to make the silliness of the week live on, so that a few years later you can appreciate the cleverness with which he goes after it. Orwell bestowed immortality upon his Boy’s Weeklies in all their awfulness. Having lassoed and branded “Jane Fonda’s Workout Book” and Enver Hoxha’s habit of winning Albanian elections by a very large margin, Krauthammer doesn’t manage to bring them in on the kicking hoof.

Most of these pieces, then, are trophies. And some are very good ones. In a section called “Myths,” he notes an American tendency to believe other societies must, fundamentally, be like us. He derides “those who have held a mirror to the world and see only themselves.” So the Soviet Union continues to baffle us, and our policymakers never quite accept that Saudi Arabia, so reasonable in some ways, is implacably vowed to Israel’s extinction.

A blurred perception is his meat. He takes a swipe at what he calls “survivor chic”--our need to celebrate rescued hostages as heroes. We have trouble, he writes, “distinguishing courage, which requires choice, from tenacity, which doesn’t.”

He has any number of provocative phrases. Speaking of the tendency of the Eighties to turn away from introspection and make money, he writes: “Its interest in the navel is not contemplative; the Eighties approach starts with developing the right diet for it, then finding a market for the diet and a tax shelter for the proceeds.”

Even better is his note on the cult of the future, practiced by everyone from Gary Hart to Jack Kemp. Its emptiness is appropriate, he comments. “In a country that annually borrows $200 billion from posterity to pay for the present it seems proper that rights to the future be reserved for those who, when they use the word, mean nothing at all.”

Krauthammer, who thinks of himself as a Scoop Jackson Democrat--big government, big stick--is often scathing about Reagan, but much more so about liberals who don’t share his tough-guy variant of the faith. He is no Neo-Con, but his liberalism has walked so permanently bent over backwards as to slip its disks, giving him pains and a lowering irritability.

What survives best is not the irritability but the out-and-out anger. He assails quite brilliantly a public television broadcast showing a woman who prepares to commit suicide surrounded by her approving family and friends. He makes a low-keyed but moving denunciation of the decision to implant a baboon’s heart, instead of a human heart, in the Baby Fae case. Experimentation won out over therapy, he argues, examining the issue with impressive seriousness.

I suspect there is a relationship between his heartfelt though elegantly phrased fury in these instances, and the fact that he was once a doctor.

One of the most interesting things in the collection, in fact, is the introduction in which he tells of his wandering career. At Oxford, studying political science, he admired the orderly notebooks of a friend working on medicine. He went back to Harvard and enrolled in the medical school.

“Medicine promised not only moral certainty,” he writes, “but intellectual certainty, a hardness to truth, something not be found in the universe of politics.” Eventually, it wasn’t to be found in medicine either. He was surprised that the New England Journal of Medicine carries editorials.

He went back to political science, to politics and to writing. He had learned, he said, respect for ambiguity.

I’m not certain how good the lesson was. A will to certainty peeps through Krauthammer’s talent for wit and irony. He tended to clatter down the lids on his subjects when he wrote about them, and what he returns to us now are mostly specimens.