I am so weary of all the hand-wringing about folks telling each other to shut up. In the case of George Will, the reason the Washington Post should fire him isn’t because he wrote something impolitic and offensive; it’s because he’s a terrible columnist who contributes nothing but partisan bile to the national debate. He’s awful, therefore he should find employment elsewhere. The Washington Post almost never gets rid of their columnists. David Broder soldiered on for more than a decade past his expiration date, and Richard Cohen has been smelling rancid for at least fifteen years.
It’s almost too rich to see Ron Fournier writing about honesty in journalism, but it’s not a bad place to start when looking to clean up the mess at the Post. What are George Will, Jennifer Rubin, and Charles Krauthmammer (to pick just three obvious examples) contributing to the national discourse? The answer is, mostly bullshit.
Why did George Will write that rape victims enjoy a privileged status on college campuses? It was either to be provocative or simply to poke a finger in the eye of his political opponents. But, either way, it wasn’t an honest argument. It was the rough equivalent of Rush Limbaugh’s assertion that women want access to birth control because they want to have a lot of sex. That’s really not much different than the implication that college women want to get raped because it confers status on campus. It’s just trolling.
But George Will shouldn’t be fired because he wrote something revolting. He should be fired because he makes the paper worse and needlessly pits people against each other.
Ask yourself, is George Will a decent person. If not, why are you paying his mortgage?
The word troll should be used more often in meatspace. Anyone who knows a bit about Internet culture knows that trolls aren’t “provocative” in any positive sense; they deserve to be banned.
Ramesh Ponnuru should remember that MLK quote that Obama is fond of quoting: The moral arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice. It’s still early days for the bigots rights movement, and there’s a lot of work today, but that’s no reason to get discouraged. With perseverance, the day will come when everyone will be judged neither by the color of their skin nor the content of their character, but what really matters: how much they make.
“The answer is, mostly bullshit.”
Yes, I am being Mean, oh sooo mean! Double entendre
Doesn’t Ruth Marcus also work at the house Kaplan Ed?
I suppose someone at the pond could write a mini-history of the newspaper pundit, but it seems to me that in the old dayz, these guys (and they were guys) were experienced journalists who started writing columns. When did we get the “national” syndicated newspaper pundit?
Will became the face of American conservative punditry a long time ago, the 70s as I recall. I don’t think he was ever anything in journalism other than a professional “conservative” mouthpiece. He was someone that the “conservative” fool could seek out to be assured they were getting a proper (i.e rightwing) take on the event in question, an early “conservative” forerunner of the “select the news you want to hear” approach.
There were others in the niche like Cal Thomas but they were clearly low grade imbeciles and the idea behind Will was that he was the unimpeachable “intellectual” conservative, way, way above a mere journalist, more a philosopher/historian/theologian rolled into one. He could play the certified conservative “expert” on every topic from generalship to economics–although he’s an actual expert on absolutely nothing and his books are the same sort of cobbled together political boilerplate that have littered bookstores for decades. Clearly Will wrote this script himself and still plays the heroic bow-tied conservative male, graduating to teevee and celebritydom at some long ago point.
But as his movement has degenerated into know nothing crankery, macroeconomic illiteracy, anti-science boobery and dog whistling racism, ‘ol George has been forced to play along to maintain his “market”—otherwise he’d be quickly denounced as an irrelevant RINO, and all the sappy Baseball’s So Intellectual columns couldn’t save him. So he’s had to go whole hog on almost every morsel of the increasing insanity, never standing in the way of self-retardation, from stimulus demonization to global warming denial to (now) rape minimizing. Hell, what did he write about the Birth Certificate?
Anyway, he’s been nothing but a manufactured-and-approved “conservative” product, delivering the conserva-shit door to door for decades and decades, and he appears to have no shame about diving ever deeper into the rightwing sewage if that’s what’s required by Team Conservative. He’s a cover for vile and stupid opinions, whatever they may be, on the American Right.
So yes, George Will is terrible in all ways, just like everything sold under the Team Conservative product line–from Hannity to Krauthammer to Beck to Coulter. How in hell did they never create a logo, so the trashbags could be assured of receiving a “quality” conservative product? I suppose they finally did that with Fox….
“Self-retardation” for the win.
They can pick any one or more of a lot of perfectly good reasons, including the fact that he’s offensive. As far as I know, being an asshole is not a legally protected class. If they finally decide they don’t want what he’s selling, they’re under no legal or ethical obligation to keep buying it.
Besides which, it’s not like he’ll starve. Even if the Post comes to its senses, there’s obviously still a big lucrative market out there for his brand of wankery.
When did we get the syndicated newspaper pundit? Certainly prior to H. L. Mencken and Walter Lippmann.
Will’s current (second) wife is a piece of work as well. Speechwriter for Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry.
In other news, the Naval War College just canned John Schindler for a Wiener shot. An NSA information warrior just flamed out IOW.
Ask yourself, is George Will a decent person?
That’s exactly the problem. Village denizens do ask that question, constantly, and the answer is overwhelmingly affirmative. We rub elbows with them at all the right parties and they’re jolly decent people, every one of them. Sure, the stuff they write might be toxic bilge, but that’s just for the illiterati and thus of no consequence. The real question, slightly rephrased, is: are they our kind of people?
That’s the only way in which any of these bloviators are forced to be accountable, and they would not have their jobs in the first place had they not mastered that game long ago. In terms of what they write, it might occasionally matter in St. Louis or some other barbaric outpost, but never, ever in Sally Quinn’s living room.
I believe he is. Perhaps his commentary on certain issue is just stating his point of view without thinking other’s feeling.
Feature, not bug.
Exactly what they are aiming for.