Wednesday, May 05, 2004
Sliming The Slimers
Conservative scold and faux Brahmin George Will criticizes as "careless talk" George Bush's tsk-tsking of the "them" who don't believe "people whose skins...are a different color than white can self-govern."
Beyond the fact that no one has yet emerged who believes such a thing (at least up here where it occasionally snows), Will cuts through the malarkey and rejects Bush's attempt to "deflect doubts about policy by caricaturing and discrediting the doubters."
More bluntly, Will dismisses White House press secretary Scott McClellan's effort to redefine plain english to simultaneously defuse and intensify Bush's words:
So let's review: criticizing Bush's Crusade is racist, and criticizing the jerks who came up with it is anti-Semitic.
Of this much we're fairly certain: George Bush didn't think this strategy up. And as for David Brooks, well, frankly we've read enough of his work to doubt he's capable of an original thought more compelling than the "red state/blue state" drivel he copped from a Fox News graphic. (Wasn't it his wife who wrote the lovely assertion that women who marry after 30 are losers that marry losers? What do you suppose those two talk about at home and aren't you glad you aren't there to hear it?)
So who was it? Which slimeball came up with this one?
It has to be someone Will doesn't like.
Beyond the fact that no one has yet emerged who believes such a thing (at least up here where it occasionally snows), Will cuts through the malarkey and rejects Bush's attempt to "deflect doubts about policy by caricaturing and discrediting the doubters."
More bluntly, Will dismisses White House press secretary Scott McClellan's effort to redefine plain english to simultaneously defuse and intensify Bush's words:
...what he [Bush] suggested was: Some persons -- perhaps many persons; no names being named, the smear remained tantalizingly vague -- doubt his nation-building project because they are racists.Now who knows why Will has suddenly chosen the high road, but the first thing we thought of when we read this--and isn't it funny, by the way, that you can come to distrust this administration simply by having a memory that can reach a month or two back--was the scurrilous suggestion from the New York Times' punch-me-face preppie David Brooks that any criticism of the neocons in Bush's administration was covert anti-Semitism.
So let's review: criticizing Bush's Crusade is racist, and criticizing the jerks who came up with it is anti-Semitic.
Of this much we're fairly certain: George Bush didn't think this strategy up. And as for David Brooks, well, frankly we've read enough of his work to doubt he's capable of an original thought more compelling than the "red state/blue state" drivel he copped from a Fox News graphic. (Wasn't it his wife who wrote the lovely assertion that women who marry after 30 are losers that marry losers? What do you suppose those two talk about at home and aren't you glad you aren't there to hear it?)
So who was it? Which slimeball came up with this one?
It has to be someone Will doesn't like.
