George Will: un-smart. (Dec 25 edition)

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I've been neglecting George Will for quite a time now, but will give a quick run through his most recent Last Word column in Newsweek: "2008: Rod, Eliot, Yuck."

Will, second para.: If you pay taxes, you'll "probably" have bought a used car company, in effect.

This seems to be putting down the bailout-ish action the government has/will take re the Big Three auto companies. The use of "probably" means what he wrote is at least somewhat unlikely, making it a straw-man argument. Also, if you make what most people do, what you pay in taxes couldn't get you a dealership anyway.

Will: "Cuba being politically primitive..." Primitive as shown by its universal health care system, by a population that has a longer life expectancy than the US's, by having higher literacy rates than in the US, by its surveillance of whoever it wants to watch and/or listen to, by its use of torture (as performed in its US-held Guantanamo Bay), by its government that appoints whoever it wants for political reasons.

That last gets to Will's ill-considered point: Castro ceded power to his brother. Cuba is Communist. The person who will take over H. Clinton's Senate seat will be appointed for political reasons as well. Sarcastically, Will says the latter will happen "because this is a democracy."

The US is a Republic. The Pledge of Allegiance goes something like this "...and to the republic for which it [the flag] stands: One nation, under God..." Fitting that "under God" was added to the Pledge in 1954 because America is not a nation of godless Commies and, seen above, behaves nothing like them.

Then a litany of news items, the likes of which Conservatives love, and which make them angry. Nine out of ten of these items involve small towns, extremely few people, and whatever "wrong" (according to Conservatives) committed, having been either completely fabricated, embellished, or an embellished fabrication. Plus, the "wrongs" committed, nine of ten times, have been rectified by the time a Conservative writes about it. (When this last bit is mentioned to one he/she insists these news items are emblematic of what is happening everywhere.)

What's worst about Will wasting space with non-news in this particular column is that he cares about them, and writes about them at a time when our nation is fighting multiple wars and in its next Great Depression.

Example: In Hayward, California, "a teacher asked her kindergartners to sign cards pledging 'not to use anti-LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered] language or slurs'"

Asked. The kids weren't even forced.

Will gives no context regarding this incident. Readers are obviously supposed to be enraged, no matter the circumstances, that children had been asked to be nice to people who are LGBT.

I bet the teacher (should she actually exist and have done what she did) would even want her kids not to use slurs against an animatronic, homophobic colostomy bag, like Will, that looks human enough on television (though stops seeming so once he speaks).

Near the end of the column, Will mentions a court ruling and, in that context, writes that the slave trade interfered with God's plan.

Which likely means Will is yet another Christian who hasn't read the Bible. Slavery is endorsed by God. God personally, in his own voice, gives his people at least one hundred laws pertaining to slavery. God micromanaged the institution of slavery.

Earlier in this column, Will mentions that Californians (with a push from a biblical flood of cash from Mormons who don't live there) "voted to define marriage as between a man and a woman."

George: Get the Bible on tape. Have an intern read it to you. Get a vague sense for your religion.

Religion is between one man and as many wives as he can afford. California's law is an abomination.
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