Saturday, June 23, 2018

George Will pegs Jeff Gahan dead to rights: "A Vesuvius of mendacities." Or maybe it was Trump.

Be careful.


Because:


But at least Megarian got an answer.


I've always respected George Will for his writing style and erudition. I appreciate the argument he's making here, and I'd like to believe it matters. Ultimately it does not. Part of it is that Donald Trump's core supporters don't concern themselves with Will, whether they know who he is or not.

Far larger in importance is the irrelevance of his argument. The majority of our current issues as a nation at present pertain to symptoms of diseased capitalism.

My guess?

Will's just fine with that.

Vote against the GOP this November, by George F. Will (Washington Post)

Amid the carnage of Republican misrule in Washington, there is this glimmer of good news: The family-shredding policy along the southern border, the most telegenic recent example of misrule, clarified something. Occurring less than 140 days before elections that can reshape Congress, the policy has given independents and temperate Republicans — these are probably expanding and contracting cohorts, respectively — fresh if redundant evidence for the principle by which they should vote.

The principle: The congressional Republican caucuses must 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. 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.

Consider the melancholy example of House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.), who wagered his dignity on the patently false proposition that it is possible to have sustained transactions with today’s president, this Vesuvius of mendacities, without being degraded. In Robert Bolt’s play “A Man for All Seasons,” Thomas More, having angered Henry VIII, is on trial for his life. When Richard Rich, whom More had once mentored, commits perjury against More in exchange for the office of attorney general for Wales, More says: “Why, Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world . . . But for Wales!” Ryan traded his political soul for . . . a tax cut. He who formerly spoke truths about the accelerating crisis of the entitlement system lost everything in the service of a president pledged to preserve the unsustainable status quo.

Ryan and many other Republicans have become the president’s poodles, not because James Madison’s system has failed but because today’s abject careerists have failed to be worthy of it ...

No comments:

Post a Comment