The Latest Economic Analysis From George Will

[Media] If we proles weren't so greedy, none of this ever would have happened. Ooh, plus a Sinclair Lewis quote! Well, lah-di-dah. Them newspaper-type folks read books!

Apparently, George Will's friends have decided that we think of ourselves as "Main Street" people--setting ourselves in resentful opposition to those "Wall Street" types. For my part, I consider myself a "university district" person--and I've learned that there are very good reasons not to hang out with stockbrokers. None of those reasons has anything to do with Will's fantasies of populist resentment. (Mainly, it's just that my spare time is limited, so I can't justify spending it with a crass asshole in a suit whose only topics of conversation are 1. crude comments about potential sexual targets, and 2. the amount of money he made last year.)

From there, Will constructs an elaborate fairy tale about the way we commoners look at ourselves and our finances. For instance, we have a nasty habit of trying to secure homes for our families. And, if that weren't bad enough, when we get cheated out of our equity and booted onto the street in droves, we have the audacity to blame the poor, misunderstood predatory lenders for mismanaging their investments. Simply because the government has been, for the past eight years, confiscating a third or so of our wages to prop up CEOs' lavish lifestyles is no reason for us to get all uppity. If we weren't prepared to sacrifice an additional five-eighths of our income on the altar of free-market consumer capitalism, we had no business attempting to sleep indoors in the first place.

Then, Will lauds some "rising generation of thoughtful Republicans" comprised, apparently, of the four remaining Americans who have failed to recognize the moral, intellectual and managerial bankruptcy of the GOP. Two of them voted for the bailout and two voted against it--but all four did so based on sound economic principals. Well, good for them. Sound economic principals are evidently flexible as far as the Republican Party is concerned, but thank goodness they're not so flexible as to encompass the dangerous and unsound principals which led Democrats to vote for and against the bailout.

Will finishes up by claiming the 2008 elections are "closely contested," and by characterizing the public's "principals" as "center-right." The Republican flak is whistling in the dark: The GOP is desperately trying to keep its losses in Congress down to a merely catastrophic level, while a McCain White House win will take either a miracle or a concerted felonious effort.

And, if it really were possible to ascertain the average left-to-right political position of "the public," how could that average, mathematically, be anything other than "center"? This is where Will's whole argument collapses: If the public--that public which Will has just spent 750 words belittling as self-serving and irresponsible--really has "center-right principals," then it must be those center-right Republican principals that have brought the economy to its knees. QED, asshole.

George Will, you can fuck right off. I am sick and tired of your intellectually lazy diatribes, and those of your corporate-media cohorts. Yeah, you're good at using dog-whistle words, and few readers will bother to rigorously analyze what you write--which is why you've been able to get away with such shoddy logic for so long. But don't you feel even a little guilty for profiting from this kind of calculated intellectual dishonesty?

If not, sir, then I'm afraid you have no soul.

(Brandon Burt)