Setting the Record Straight on George Will
With no malice intended, I feel a need to comment on a recent piece here by Kathy Kattenburg regarding George Will’s recent comments on the situation in Iran and President Obama’s response to them. You can take what you will from the discussion and form your own opinions on the Iran situation, but what caught my attention was Kathy’s characterization of Mr. Will’s remarks as being from the “credit where credit is due” department.
Every time I hear this from a liberal, (and it’s often) I grind my teeth at the implication that George Will, being a conservative, must generally be full of crap, but “even a blind squirrel finds an acorn once in a while.” Here’s the secret for most of you who are now nodding their heads in agreement. It’s because George Will says things on a regular basis which anger not only the political Left, but the Right as well. Why? Because he is now, and has always been, an intelligent, independent thinker.
If I had to make a list of the great political writers of my time, very near the top you would find – in no particular order – George Will, James Kilpatrick, James Wolcott, Molly Ivins and Christopher Hitchens. For a long time our local paper ran their Sunday op-ed page with opposing columns from George Will and Molly Ivins. (Until we lost her in 2007.) It was a wonderful pairing. They were both gifted thinkers and writers, though Will takes the ribbon between them as a master wordsmith and architect of the language. The other three on my list are also classic masters of English and critical thinkers. You may not agree with their opinions, but their facts were rarely in dispute and their reasoning was unassailable.
The idea that George Will should be shelved as some sort of doctrinaire Republican mouthpiece is offensive. He angers his own party as well as his opponents on a regular basis. If you take some time to read his body of work you will find a well reasoned, agonizingly researched intellect with much to say and ideas for you to chew on at length whether you wind up agreeing with him or not.
There are few in each generation with the ability to write, speak and debate on Will’s level. I grow weary of hearing him so casually trashed by people who – if you’ll pardon the phrase – couldn’t carry his jockstrap when it comes to mastery of the English language. And I gladly, wholeheartedly include myself in that pack. George is getting on in years, and the literary world will be shockingly poorer when we finally lose him.
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15 Responses to “Setting the Record Straight on George Will”
If you take some time to read his body of work you will find a well reasoned, agonizingly researched intellect with much to say and ideas for you to chew on at length whether you wind up agreeing with him or not.
Like his series of columns on global warming?
Since you mentioned it, I'll tell you one of my pet peeves about conservatives. They overreact; they take a statement or a phrase and go off the deep end because to them, it means the statement or the phrase is saying something much more universal about ALL conservatives.
We've got a difference of opinion here about George Will's overall intellectual and reasoning abilities. You think that if I examine Will's body of work I will find someone with a powerful intellect and superior research, reasoning, and writing abilities. I will admit that I have *not* examined, as a formal matter, Will's entire body of work — and it's entirely possible there are some specific examples out there that I would find as praiseworthy as I did the one I mentioned in my post. But they would not be the overwhelming majority, because what you find to be a rare and uncommonly elevated intellect I consider to be an ideological hack. That is my opinion, which springs from an entire inner well of values, experiences, beliefs, perceptions, preferences, and so on and so on. It does not mean I'm right and you're wrong. It means I dislike (intensely) George Will's political perceptions and conclusions, and you admire them. That's all it means, Jazz. It's not a statement about all conservatives and it's not a suggestion that Will ia a blind squirrel who managed to find a nut. It's rather just what it appears to be on the surface — a political commentator who is reliably (in my view) reflexively right-wing, dim-witted, and dishonest (in his writing) writes something that delightfully contradicts that perception. And I believe in giving credit where it's due.
Oh, and I should have added, no malice perceived or offense taken. At all. Just a bit of feeling exasperated.
Perhaps the comment could have been made as a comment?
Jazz,
your comment that George Will is a great political writer reveals the shallowness of your thought process.
I could comment on Will's lack of intellectual prowess, but the point is that he is a slave to an idealogy, not a thought process or scientific thinking.
An example would be his columns on “Global Warming” which have been widely refuted and ridiculed:
http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/index.php/cs…
If you want to look up to this Washington insider, who toes the line of correctness to his politcal idealogy, don't expect anybody to respect your opinions. They are obviously tainted by a very twisted POV.
But how nice that you recognize Molly Ivins. Too bad your team doesn't have anyone with her insight and wit.
It's a little silly to criticize him as a “slave to an ideology,” as if having an ideology were a defect. He's got a conservative-libertarian point of view, for sure, which puts him some distance from both parties right out of the gate. He puts considerably more value on individual freedom than either party does. Joe, you may consider that a very twisted point of view, but it makes a lot of sense to me.
If you're going to attack him for a particular position he has taken, global warming is a risky choice. Scientific questions are almost never completely settled, and our climatology models have a great deal of settling left to do. His calls for caution may yet prove prescient on either scientific or political grounds.
Dr_J,
welcome your comments, but, “slave to an ideology” is meant to criticize the “slave,” not any idealogy.
sorry you missed that.
and the “twisted point of view” refers to the writer of the post; a mr jazz, not mr will.
perhaps you could read more carefully before you “rebut” a comment.
best wishes for your otherwise intelligent comments in future posts.
BTW,
questioning the “science” of global climate change might make people believe that you don't believe in “science.”
do you believe in “math?”
do you know the difference between “climate” and “weather?”
i wonder.
I agree with folks above that Will's recent string of poorly reasoned global warming articles are not his finest hour. I do find that I read and listen to him quite regularly, that he is intellectually consistent even when it does not support a “party” and that time checking out his views is time generally well spent. That is way ahead of most columnists.
Joe “questioning the “science” of global climate change might make people believe that you don't believe in 'science.'”
You're on thin ice there too. They don't call me Dr J for nothing.
Speaking of global warming, this “Inconvenient Shelf” location by a Bangalore bookstore of Al Gore's tome is, as Mastercard says, “priceless” humor.
http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/timblai…
George Will is like most political pundits, wrong a lot of time and right some of the time.
Will has even, from time to time, engaged in pure partisan hackery. Again, this doesn't make him special.
Like most pundits on both sides, Will's job is to go on tv and lie to the American people. They all sit on stage spewing their talking points regardless to the arguments presented before them. Will completely ignored the NY Times poll on Sunday and went on about the people not wanting the government between them and their doctor, not at all reacting to the fact given to him that an insurance employee is now between a patient and their doctor.
Personally, I'd rather have the government than some employee who's bonus is based on how many claims they can reject.
We need more polls. We need overwhelming proof that the American people want a public health plan. It is the only way to get the moderate dems on board.
“They overreact; they take a statement or a phrase and go off the deep end”
Mirror talk. It's overwhelmingly the Left that runs off emotion rather than reason and leaps routinely to illogical conclusions.
* * *
“If you're going to attack him for a particular position he has taken, global warming is a risky choice. Scientific questions are almost never completely settled, and our climatology models have a great deal of settling left to do. His calls for caution may yet prove prescient on either scientific or political grounds.”
The Church of Global Warming [scowl] … a particular irritant to someone who appreciates climates…
So many people simply believe what they want to believe (activists so often so very much), and the rest of the gullible public has been routinely fooled by at-times-very-stupid, at-times-brutally-exploitive hysteria and alarmism (worse than any kind of “climate of fear” or attendent anger described about the public after the 9-11 attacks). Not one in ten thousand among the public understands global warming or its likely consequences, if it rather than a cooling should likely happen (there is no reason whatsoever for agitation or panic), while the whole global warming “movement” is, as another person has correctly described it, a Convenient Religion complete with demons and hyperbolic visions of an apocalypse, as well as vicious Inquisition-and-worse attacks on anyone who dare not profess unthinking faith and belief in the “problem” and its “solution” — i.e. to question or to hesitate to unthinkingly believe, much less reject, is to commit heresy or apostasy. (The most notorious madrassas turning out brain-broken youth are sometimes more benign than what we see with the Church of Global Warming.) It's not just that I've liked learning about weather and climate for years and that I bitterly resent how the subject of climate has been corrupted and stained, and that for many it's just the latest excuse to impose the kind of government and society so long sought before under other pretenses, but I despise the scummier activist misbehavior that have given such a stench to this “movement” and all the baggage and wreckage that have accompanied it.
They're far worse by several orders of magnitude, and longer-lasting, than anyone they attacked who was participating in the years-long SUV market and road-social trend, a frequent object of their pathology.
Too bad they didn't grow up after the “population explosion” idiocy lost its substance and momentum.
“Joe:
'questioning the “science” of global climate change
might make people believe that you don't believe in “science.”''
You're on thin ice there too.”
Thinner than the Arctic ice sheet, even after another 10-20 years worst case.
Or should that be (properly) redirected right at those who never question it and find that to be horrible?
Shannon Lee: Keep your eye on Pew. It turns out good polls. I'd expect to see polls soon not only on health care but about the broader issue of growth of the federal government, concern about the degree of government interventionism, concern about debt and deficit, etc. On health care I'd expect something before too much longer. Given the hype by the media to support the public-health-care (“reform”) effort, it is almost inevitable.
http://people-press.org/
Also don't neglect this set-of-polls site:
http://www.pollingreport.com/health.htm
I view an augmentation of government in health care, and specifically a greater federal role, as inevitable. The details to me are what are most fascinating. (Extending existing programs like Medicare make the most sense and are simpler than the mess we're seeing now, but special interests have sway back in DC and going openly to Medicare — “single-payer” as say those afraid to refer honestly to what they want — is currently seen as the purview only of the extreme Left like Physicians for a National Health Plan and far-left Dems like Conyers and Kucinich and others who have sponsored the bill Conyers continues to try to get passed.)
Just wait until Kathy reads George Will's column on Obama and federal health care and the “public option” (which everyone with a working mind and without odd leftist blinders knows is an incrementalist advance toward public health care for everyone, as was the case with S-CHIP some months ago).
Incidentally, keep an eye on income limits for public health care programs. Will they rise from as much as 250 per cent of the poverty level to 400 per cent or even higher? Hmmm…