Thursday, May 14, 2009

George Will Has An Epiphany:
The Rule of Law...Matters!!!

It...it's all so clear to him now... We are a country of laws and not men! The power of the administration is rather strictly delimited!

Or, rather: the power of Democratic administrations is strictly delimited...

Ah, there we go: FIFM.

Needless to say, we really shouldn't focus on George Will here. Ad hominems are virtually irresistible, but we have bigger fish to fry. The real question is: is Will right about Obama here? I mean, not the idiocy about ukase, and not the paranoid nonsense about a "dependency agenda"...but about the covert or overt quid pro quo in the California SEIU/elder care case?

Does anybody have anything interesting to say about this? I'm clueless on the substance here.

So back to the irresistible ad hominem!

It's too bad that George Will squandered basically all of his credibility by defending the authoritarianism and executive overreach of the Cheney/Bush administration. Because it would be nice to have a sensible and prominent conservative voice helping to keep our relatively big-government tendencies in line. We could use a reliable nag. And it's too bad Will is neither sensible nor reliable. I don't see how anyone can take this guy seriously anymore without a fairly significant effort of will. Rabid, relentless lawlessness and insane expansion of power for most of eight years by a Republican administration warrants nary a peep from this fellow; four months of extraordinary measures seemingly called for by extraordinary problems, and suddenly Will is the scrupulous defender of limited government. Christ, give me a break.

No, no, no...must...not...focus...on...messenger...

(A messenger, after all, who was in on, in effect, rigging a presidential debate in order to help trick the voters into electing his preferred candidate. So: already a known slimeball.)


So: if anyone knows the straight dope about the California/elder-care/SEIU case I'd sure like to hear about it.

My view is: such corruption is extremely important. It's easy to think otherwise when we see it against the backdrop of the criminality of the last eight years. It's trivial by comparison. But we cannot allow ourselves to slip into that kind of thinking. Virtually any crimes will be trivial by comparison to those of the Bush administration. To use them as the standard of comparison is--as should be fairly obvious--to set the bar far, far too low, and it's a temptation we must (I assert!) resist.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Lewis Carroll said...

"Because it would be nice to have a sensible and prominent conservative voice helping to keep our relatively big-government tendencies in line."

Well, the sensible part is easy:

http://www.amconmag.com/larison/

http://mattwelch.com/index.html

Both of whom I probably disagree with most of the time, but who are intellectually honest.

As far as the prominent part goes, I've yet to figure out why the MSM gives a platform to idiots like Will, Krauthammer et al, rather than guys like those above. (Although I think Welch does occasionally get an op-ed in the LAT)

9:19 AM  

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