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I have a copy of a George Will column from 2002 in which he

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Bouncy Ball Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-09-05 05:38 PM
Original message
I have a copy of a George Will column from 2002 in which he
goes through and describes the process, post-WWI and pre-WWII of inspectors making sure Germany destroyed some of their war machinery and didn't create new weapons, etc. (Georgie loves to give history lessons.)

Well then he used the example of Hitler's rise to power and Germany's attack of other countries as a way of supporting the idea that Saddam Hussein SURELY had as many or more WMDs than bush et al were currently saying.

His "clever" little analogy didn't ring true to me then and now that I remembered the column, I'm wondering if I shouldn't shoot him a little email, reminding him of it and how he had a hand in convincing people SH had WMDs. Maybe I should ask him if he's sorry he said all that.

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underpants Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-09-05 05:40 PM
Response to Original message
1. Will and Gingrich love telling about history
usually they do it to mute whoever they are talking to and yes it is selective and revised.
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Bouncy Ball Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-09-05 05:48 PM
Response to Reply #1
3. Exactly.
I stopped reading George Will when I figured out this about him: he has ONE format, ONE kind of column only. He takes either a selective and/or revised slice of history OR a baseball story and uses it to forward his rightwing views.

That's it. You can never expect anything different or fresh from him, because he's a one-trick pony. And I have found the same thing in many other right wing columnists, so why bother reading them?

Still, I think I will goad him with that old article. Not that he gives much of a shit. But it'd be funny to tell him I agreed with him at the time (I did not) and now I am feeling really misled by him and others complicit in this war.
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underpants Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jan-10-05 08:43 AM
Response to Reply #3
15. I have heard two very funny things come out of his mouth
One was that he grew up a Cubs fan so he is uptight and angry-all his childhood friends (he had some) were Cardinals fans so they grew up liberal and happy.

Will is pretty funny when talking about football (He doesn't like football) he said that it combines the two worst parts of American society violence and committee meetings (the huddle).

He also said that it is the only sport where the coach on the sidelines watched something happen and then has three people in the skybox tell the coach what just happened.

Other than that he is a dweeb.
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Jesus H. Christ Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-09-05 05:48 PM
Response to Original message
2. I once read a George Will editorial...
where he brags about being an Oxford (?) alumnus, complains about how dumb students from innercity schools are, and then makes a simple and major mathematical error while talk about statistics. I'm talking about an error while converting fractions into percent. Elementary level math.
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McCamy Taylor Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-09-05 05:49 PM
Response to Original message
4. See my thread at Salon "George Will is Dumb Ass With a Pulizter Prize"
I stopped posting my analyses of his articles last spring when I developed vertigo and couldn't read for about 6 months. I guess I will have to start forcing myself to wade through the nearly incomprehensible word strings which he calls prose in order to mock him again. The thread is in the Politics Section.

You can usually tell what the administration wants us to think by checking out what George Will is writing for them. For instance, before they did the California governor recall, when the state of California was insisting that Enron and others had priced gouged them and needed to be investigated and Cheney and others were insisting that they had not and that the (then) Democratic controlled Senate not investigate Enron and others, Will did a series of pieces in which he portrayed Californians as all either 1) homosexuals or 2) pinkos or 3) sex crazed perverts.

Will is a GOP tool who lucked into a Pulizter prize years ago and has been milking it ever since. He should be indicted for crimes against the english language.



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T Town Jake Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-09-05 05:56 PM
Response to Original message
5. Perhaps you should e-mail him with this three-year old corrective...
...of yours to his stale horseshit. But I doubt he's going to notice, or even care...
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McCamy Taylor Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-09-05 06:11 PM
Response to Original message
6. I checked to see what he said about Ohio, man this guy is dumb...
Here is a whopper even for Will.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35440-2004Nov8.html

"On election night, news organizations were hesitant to call a winner in Ohio, where Bush led all night and won by 136,483 votes. They were less hesitant about calling Pennsylvania, where Kerry led all night and won by only 127,927 votes."

Huh? Why is 136,483 votes 136,483 votes, but 127,927 votes is ONLY 127,927 votes? And could the news media's hesistancy to call Ohio for Bush have something to do with the fact that he was ahead in the exit polls all day in both states before, inexplicably, the results turned around in Ohio? That might make journalists hesistate a bit to call a winner.

Dumb ass.


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Bouncy Ball Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-09-05 06:17 PM
Response to Reply #6
7. AND here's another one Will can choke on:
the night of the election, the networks called Utah for bush with ZERO PRECINCTS REPORTING, but they REFUSED to call Wisconsin for Kerry, even when 37% of precincts had reported and it was CLEAR Kerry had totally won Wisconsin.

Now, obviously Utah was a no-brainer, but WHY CALL IT FOR BUSH WITH NO PRECINCTS REPORTING and NOT call Wisconsin with 37% reporting for Kerry?

Ridiculous.

Will is an asshole. His stuff doesn't stand up to the light of day and I think he's getting more and more out of touch with reality all the time.
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McCamy Taylor Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-09-05 06:44 PM
Response to Original message
8. From mid November, Rove must have told him "Debunk the Statisticians"
Edited on Sun Jan-09-05 06:46 PM by McCamy Taylor
This George Will piece might seem pretty obvious. It is about the right wing dogma that college campuses are breeding grounds for commies. What GOPers might not know is that the lefties are not just teaching poetry and basket weaving. They are scientists and mathmeticians and political scientists too---like the ones who were calling into question the statistical probability of the exit poll vs. vote tally results of Election 2004 right about the time George Will wrote this.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A15606-2004Nov26.html

"Another study, of voter registration records, including those of professors in engineering and the hard sciences, found nine Democrats for every Republican at Berkeley and Stanford. Among younger professors, there were 183 Democrats, six Republicans."



In other words, hard scientists who deal in numbers and facts are all Democrats too, so dont trust anything they say.



One of Will's specialties is giving talking points to Freepers and other GOPers so that they can argue with Democrats.

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McCamy Taylor Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-09-05 07:01 PM
Response to Original message
9. OMG, Here is his "Why We Should Reform Social Security" essay
Edited on Sun Jan-09-05 07:02 PM by McCamy Taylor
from today. For anyone who wants to know more about George Will, this is a great place to start.

For those of you out there who think you know Will, take this quiz:

Why should we go along with the Bushies on Social Security?

1. Because only wussies are afraid of change.

2. Because JFK would have wanted us to.

3. Because SS was designed during the Great Depression and things will always be better than they were in the Great Depression.

4. All of the above.

If you answered 4. then you get a prize for knowing how George Will's mind works. My condolences.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57878-2005Jan7.html



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Bouncy Ball Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-09-05 08:39 PM
Response to Reply #9
13. Wow, I haven't read him in a while
it really sounds like he's getting to be even more of a delusionoid than usual.

HEY GET BACK ON THE MEDS, WILL
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EC Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-09-05 07:11 PM
Response to Original message
10. I don't quite remember what it was
Edited on Sun Jan-09-05 07:26 PM by EC
but George also had a bit of Payola scam a while back (last year maybe) maybe that was part of it...




On edit, here's a link :

http://www.fair.org/activism/will-disclosure.html



George F. Will, columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group, devoted his column on March 4, 2003 to the thoughts of press baron Conrad Black. After spending two paragraphs describing complaints about George W. Bush's preparations for the invasion of Iraq, Will wrote: "Into this welter of foolishness has waded Conrad Black, a British citizen and member of the House of Lords who is a proprietor of many newspapers, including the Telegraph of London and the Sun-Times of Chicago." Almost the entire remainder of the column is devoted to relating Black's views on U.S. foreign policy.

In the column, Will failed to mention that he has been a paid employee of Conrad Black, who named Will, along with several other mostly conservative luminaries, to the international advisory board of Black's Hollinger International. Each time he attended the board's annual meetings, the New York Times revealed (12/22/03), Will received compensation of $25,000. Queried by the Times, Will could not recall how many meetings he had attended, but fellow board member William F. Buckley estimated his own take at "perhaps $200,000 or more."

Asked whether he should have revealed that the mogul whose views he was promoting had paid him substantial sums of money, Will told the Times, "My business is my business," adding, "Got it?" Apparently he keeps his business to himself; the Washington Post Writers Group's editorial director and general manager, Alan Shearer, did not know about Black's payments to Will, according to the Times. "I think I would have liked to have known," the paper quoted Shearer as saying.

In a response to a letter from a reader criticizing Will's failure to disclose his conflict of interest, however, Shearer defended his columnist. "George's service on the Hollinger advisory board ended two years before Will quoted Black in a column. And the column was not about Black; it quoted a speech by Black in service of a point George was making about national sovereignty."

<snip>
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murielm99 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-09-05 07:15 PM
Response to Reply #10
11. He served on Conrad Black's board of directors
and got paid a humongous fee for each meeting.

When he as questioned about the ethics of it, he said, "My business is my business."

This is also the guy who stole Jimmy Carter's debate materials to help Reagan prep for the debates.
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Bouncy Ball Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-09-05 08:39 PM
Response to Reply #10
14. George Will is a lying little smarmy sack of shit
not worth the paper he's printed on, like most all of them.

This doesn't surprise me in the LEAST.
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KG Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-09-05 07:29 PM
Response to Original message
12. don't 'shoot him a little email'
just shoot him.
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KlatooBNikto Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jan-10-05 09:09 AM
Response to Original message
16. When Will's mendacity was revealed about his participation in coaching
Reagan with the stolen Jimmy Carter papers, Jimmy Breslin did an autopsy on this pompous ass. That was classic even by Jimmy's high standards.

Here are some things to chew on about this polysyllabic ignoramus.He was carryinmg on an affair with a secretary while married.His wife threw his ass out on the street with his furniture and possessions strewn on the sidewalk.He claimed he was a divinity student to avoid the draft.But never failed to berate black people who served honorably and could not for many reasons become wage earners. He has contempt for those who play by the rules always believing he is above those rules just like his idol GeeDubya.

Will is nothing but an asshole with a Thesaurus and Bartlett's.
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