I’ve occasionally been tempted to take a spirited personal issue with someone. Temptation won out in this case. It has been festering a while.
George Will is the quintesental lemon in a basket of oranges. No one knows exactly what it is doing there, and everyone is at a loss to explain the problem with it.
Will has an obsession with baseball often littering his columns with analogies to bring home his point. Sometimes it’s a strike and sometimes it’s a ball. But the man has a cultish crush on it as much as his lust for words.
He uses his high-brow style, occasionally citing ‘inside baseball’ factoids that co-opt his pros adding a sports flair to the editorial page. He short circuits his intelligence with vignettes proving baseball has been very good to George will.
Here is where the pine tar gets a little thick
His elite inside politics overdubbing of Washingtonian issues lends itself to criticism as ivory-tower academia crossbred with elitism. His writing is condescending to the masses he hopes to cleanse by his rhetorical palate. We are not as intelligent as he is.
So the irony is thick here in that today the tables have turned and Washington’s “inside baseball” politics is now the chief problem, not the anecdote to it.
It was not long ago that he declared the anger of people was off base. It was more like frustration, as far as the Dr Good-Will diagnosed it. We are having a childish pout.
I’m sure in certain sections of snobsville his critiques fit like a well-worn ball glove, but in other places they fall on deaf ears — bored as much with his rhetoric as with a rain delay at Wrigley Field, or by sipping watered-down Gatorade during a no-hitter.
I don’t suppose George would see the waste deep irony in his soliloquy. He has bashed inferior folks of rural America as “incapable of cognitive thought or rational argument.” He insisted people may only come into the Republican Party “on our terms, not theirs.” He referred to the grown-ups in the conservative movement, himself among them.
There’s that inside baseball mantra again that they just don’t understand how the game is played. Barring that problem would render their co-opting strategy unnecessary.
Birds of the feathered nest
Who could forget Obama’s words:
“It’s not surprising. Americans get bitter. They cling to their guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or their anti immigrant sentiment (racists) … as a way to explain their frustrations.”
Though dripping in arrogance, it is water drawn from the same trough Will drinks from.
So what this really comes down to is George Will is a poster child for the elite-ruling class establishment. He exemplifies everything that is wrong with it, while demonstrating how little is right about it. If not for their media-accommodated, cushy chairs of news punditry — covering the very DC cesspool they are immersed to their eyeballs in — they would lead hum drum but far less lucrative lives. Rather they’ve become self-anointed adherents in ‘lifestyles of the affluent and influential.’
“…the John Birch society tapped into something, George Wallace tapped into something, and it was up to the grown-ups in the labor movement in the late 1940’s, and the grown-ups in the conservative movement in the 1960’s to read those elements the riot act, and say: come back in, but come back in on our terms because we are not going down the road you want to go”…
And George Will tapped into something, as noted, plugged in and then hard wired his worldview into it. He’s been running on that straight juice, with an occasional baseball analogy to break up the arrogance. In 2015, Will said “there is no frontrunner. There won’t be a Republican race to speak of until this course and vulgar man, who is at the center of this argument, is marginalized.” No frontrunner?
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