“Mr. Conservative,” George Will, is a fraud.
His Trump phobia has done great damage to the conservative movement and, in the process, has helped the radical left.
Will enjoyed the fruits of conservative celebrity for many years. Still, I saw signs of his fraud 40 years ago. Appearing on the idiotic “Agronsky & Co.” talkfest, Will whined that “Americans were undertaxed.” (George was comparing Europe’s welfare states with its American cousin and wasn’t impressed.)
Then I crossed paths with Will a few years ago and was confirmed in my suspicions that he was a faux conservative.
Indeed, recently the Washington Post columnist dropped all pretense of his supposed conservatism or any connection to the movement fathered by William F. Buckley Jr. and his National Review. That magazine is where Will began making a name for himself in the 1960s. But that all changed over a few generations.
So great was his hatred for Donald Trump that he endorsed Joe Biden for president in 2020, even though, as a longtime Washington media power player, he knew of Biden’s recklessness and sleaze.
(Editor’s note: Gregory Bresiger is officially barred from Facebook and, Ibsen or no Ibsen, is officially branded “An Enemy of the People.” Special forces, including armed scuba divers, will be breaking into his casa in the middle of the night).
Indeed, in the 1950s, Buckley and his allies were tired of President Dwight Eisenhower’s “me too” welfare state policies. Still, Buckley never went on a tantrum and backed Ike’s opponent, the pretend intellectual Adlai Stevenson, the Illinois liberal governor who never had a bad word for the sleazy Democratic Cook County political machine. Its caudillo, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, was a “genius” vote counter who helped put Camelot I, Jack Kennedy, in the White House.
By contrast, Will, the phony who once advised President Reagan and represented the conservative cause on the ABC show “This Week with David Brinkley,” topped even his seedy self recently with a new nauseating pronunciamiento.
In a recent column, Will wrote that the GOP should “repent by denying Trump” the GOP presidential nomination.
This is not surprising since Will gave us the feckless Biden and took a hand in elevating Nancy Pelosi. In 2018, “conservative” Will called for the voters to oust Republican lawmakers in the House and Senate. He wanted the number of GOP elected officials to be “substantially reduced.”
“So substantially that their remnants, reduced to minorities, will be stripped of the Constitution’s Article I powers that they have been too invertebrate to use against the current wielder of Article II powers,” Will wrote in June 2018. “They will then have leisure time to wonder why they worked so hard to achieve membership in a legislature whose unexercised muscles have atrophied because of people like them.”
So, Will wanted more of the socialist squad? Well, as they used to say on the idiot box show in the 1950s: “You asked for it.”
Will backed Biden and congressional Democrats. Yet, he certainly knew better. Will, the man who wanted to destroy a Republican Congress and enthrone the swamp, is the one to tell us to repent and sin no more.
De veras?
It’s as though con artist Elmer Gantry is summoning us to his confessional box — the same one where he heard the confession of the nubile Lulu? — to cleanse our souls.
As an editorial slave once laboring for Traders Magazine, I had the decided displeasure of seeing Will live about 20 years ago. He gave a paid — I’m sure, well paid — speech at the Security Traders Association conference in Washington. Will’s arrogance hit the ground running. Will, Mr. Baseball, began by telling some of the delegates from Canada that “hockey is boring.” Will’s theme was “The Republicans Are Doing a Better Job of Running the Welfare State than the Democrats.”
What?
I thought one of the major premises of the modern conservative movement was to “stand athwart history” and stop the welfare state. Given that millions of Americans today have been suckered into that welfare state and refuse work because the government pays them to stay home, Will’s discourse, then and now, is fraudulent but relevant. One sometimes finds truth in lies.
I wanted to shout out in the middle of his speech: “What about Russell Kirk, Edmund Burke and Robert Taft, men you profess to admire, what would they think of your valentine to the New Deal and the Great Society?” (The former never reversed the Great Depression. The latter never wiped out poverty, as documented in Charles Murray’s book “Losing Ground.” That’s a book I’m sure Will read but momentarily forgot when cashing the Security Traders Association check).
So, when Will finished with his epistle, I couldn’t resist running up to this holy man, begging for his blessing and abasing myself, or appearing to do so.
“Great speech, Mr. Will,” I said as I saw the little man puffing up. Then I broke Will’s balloon. “Yes, sir,” I continued. “Now I know why I’m a libertarian and not a Republican.”
The air went out of the Will dirigible.
“Libertarian!!!” he bayed and rushed toward his next payday.
