Failure of the Will

The Op/ed section of today's SF Chron bristled with the now-famous rant by right-wing pundit George F. Will. Titled, "Why Harriet Miers should not be confirmed", Will rails on the newly-nominated Supreme Court pick and her lack of experience.

George Will's an interesting guy. He likes using big words. He likes feeling superior to others, as if his political punditry is his passive-aggressive way of getting back at that cute girl or popular guy who wouldn't give two shits about the dorky over-achiever who always bragged about the high score he earned in math class. Sometimes Will does possess the knack for astutely pointing out actions or positions taken by newsworthy individuals that are incorrect, stupid, idiotic or just plain dumb. However, and more often than naught, I read Will with the distain towards someone who lives in a parallel universe with a self-possessed case of entitlement who believes that everyone must hear what he thinks. Today's column keeps Will in the latter of my two categories.

Will rightly believes that Miers shouldn't be confirmed based on her lack of experience. He's also correct that Bush's "Trust me" position on the Miers nod, with absolutely no empirical evidence of her positions on legal issues, holds no water. I also love reading Will's growing frustration with the man who, just four years ago, was seen as the savior of the federal government from everyone not-from-Mayberry: "He [Bush] has neither the inclination nor the ability to make sophistocated judgments". I'd like to leave the quote there, except, admittedly, it is incomplete. However, I do like the sound of this sentence defining the last four and a half years of the Bush presidency. Will continues: "Few presidents acquire such abilities [to construing the Constitution (the completion of the first quote)] in the course of their presidential careers, and this president, particularly, is not disposed to such reflections." How much more damning press can the President take, considering this quote is from someone so far right that he makes Barry Goldwater question his party affliation?

Will's points are well taken, yet the man fails to support his reasons of Miers' rejection. Why Will is unconvincing and even repugnant is seen in his reasonings against Bush. Will states that Bush has burned his bridges with the Right because he signed the McCain-Feingold bill which limits, in Will's mind, "political speech." Limiting campaign funds is speech? If that's the case, then bribery should be on the to-do list of the Good Samaritan starting tomorrow. We're watching Tom DeLay going to jail (thankfully - read this week's Newsweek to see just what a major prick - and all in the name of Jesus - he is. Chickens, meet roost) for "political speech"? Sorry, George, but if you gave ABC a million dollars in order to say on Sunday morning whatever you wanted, you'd be fired. Access to the poltical process via funds is bribery, not political speech, you tool.
Second reason for Will's short circuit in rational thought comes in his attack on Bush's naming a woman in the interests of diversity: "Identity politics [Will rants about Miers having solely X chromosomes for the sake of the Court being "diverse"] holds that one's essential attributes are genetic, biological, ethnic or chromosomal - that one's nature and understanding are decisively shaped by race, ethnicity or gender". This is where my rationality and non-partisanship self-immolated. Does Will, like most well-meaning nineteenth century landed white men, believe that white men still possess the ability to serve as guardians of the rest of the nation and act, vote and run the world as if they "knew" what was best for us? Where in Hell does he believe that someone is capable of understanding the world from a universal, singular perspective? Myopic, sexist and racist as he believes his views actually are not. Does he believe that he can make medical decisions for a woman giving birth since he's seen a video of a baby popping out of the birth canal and therefore, because he can describe the process in three-syllable words, should have the final say on what should happen in the delivery room simply because he says so? Finally, as we are different - in myriad ways, in exactly the ways Will points out yet fails to understand - that because the differences in perspective have been quashed by those with white upper-class, well-educated penises, that people should just listen to those with those white upper-class, well-educated penises talk, using a body part just down the street from said reproductive organs?

I just received my latest New Yorker magazine (as usual, WAY late - why do we still test whether postal employees use drugs? Maybe if mine DID drugs, I'd get my mail on time!) and it's a killer. Hendrik Hertzberg, in an essay bringing to readers' attention the growing fear of the possible threat of nuclear terrorism, quotes Graham Allison's book, "Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe" and how nothing has been truly done in the last four and a half years to stop this terrible threat. Hertzberg, quoting Allison: "'Americans are no safer from a nuclear terrorist attack today than we were on September 10, 2001. A central reason for that can be summer up in one word: Iraq.' The invasion and occupation have diverted essential resources from the fight against Al Qaeda; allowed the Taliban to regroup in Afghanistan; fostered neglet of the Iranian nuclear threat; undermined alliances critical to preventing terrorism; devasted American's standing with the public in every country in Europe (and, I must, say in this country, too) and destroyed it in the Muslim world; monopolized the time and attention of the President and his security team; and, thanks to the cry-wolf falsity of the claims about Iraqi weapons systems, 'discredited the larger case for a serious campaign to prevent nuclear terrorism.'" I'm not sure whether this is the most damning summation of the Bush presidency or the necessary epitaph for the worst president in the history of the United States. All I know is that the truth speaks as a clarion that the citizens of this country, fooled twice (shame on us both times) need to wake up and start a political revolution, one that returns this country on the path established pre-2001 and one that is void of neocon rightwing religio-messianic reactionary clueless freaks that have any sort of connection with that lame-ass family from Houston that likes to think it's got true New England roots.