George Will wrote an Opinion piece today for The Washington Post that is clearly calculated to rasp the cognoscenti. In it the 81-year old former Republican argues that President Biden, whom he voted for in 2020, is “past his prime,” and Vice President Kamala Harris is “unqualified to be considered as his successor.”
Charmed, I’m sure.
One could argue, perhaps even more robustly, that it is George Frederick Will that is past his prime, or at the very least, well past his relevance to the gladiatorial fundament.
Will appears to be obsessed about Biden’s gaffe about student loan forgiveness, which the President made through the HEROES ACT over and above Congressional authorization. A President with a lot of geopolitical and economic issues on his plate can be excused such a gaffe. But Will is having none of it:
After repeated unilateral extensions of the moratorium on loan repayments until election season, Biden unilaterally implemented the windfall for millions of voters. Congress was not involved in this cataract of money from the Treasury, in violation of the Constitution’s appropriations clause.
It is frightening that Biden does not know, or remember, what he recently did regarding an immensely important policy. He must be presumed susceptible to future episodes of similar bewilderment. He should leave the public stage on Jan. 20, 2025.
And, one presumes, Will himself would like to give Biden the ‘ole heave-ho. It is all very small and sour, far beneath the man who was once a Pulitzer Prize winner, who now spends his time enraged — enraged! — about college loan forgiveness. Will seems to be particularly obsessed with the goings on at college campuses (“the Middlebury mob”), despite the fact that — how does one put this kindly? — he graduated many, many eons ago. But one man’s progress on the issue of dealing with the issue of, say, sexual assault is another man’s “supposed campus epidemic of rape.”
In all fairness to the man, George Will was a never-Trumper, having left the Republican Party in 2016. However, Will’s exit was, in retrospect, probably for all the wrong reasons. Trump’s short-fingered New York vulgarianism could never, ever mesh simpatico with Will’s own Little Lord Fauntleroyish brand of rightliness. Like his friend, the pompous pseudoscientist Charles Murray, George Will opposes Trump largely on cultural grounds. They find Trump louche, sub-literate, a Big Mac eater —not at all the type of person either prissy thinker would want to sit next to at a Georgetown dinner party. Will does not seem to ever have had a reckoning as to how he -- and his beloved conservative movement -- actually helped create the conditions for which a Trump could arise.
So take what he says with a grain of salt.
My favorite, Christina Oxenberg, talks about the competitive friendship of King Juan Carlos and King Hussein of Jordan. “They started to compare assassination attempts … and they were laughing!” (Christina Oxenberg)
Eugene Hernandez says goodbye to Lincoln Center after a 12-year run. He’s now Director of the Sundance Film Festival & Public Programming at Sundance Institute. (FB/Eugene Hernandez)
“We emit vowel sounds when we are in pleasure or pain,” writes Rosa Shipley for Dirt. “If commercial wellness is an attempt to negotiate the latter in order to attain the former, the two o’s are linked by a tension.” (Dirt)
Less than a week before the midterms. Here’s how you know it is white-knuckle time *clutches pearls* — The Democrats are going on Fox News! (SEMAFOR)
Gael Greene, who recently passed away, invented the modern restaurant critic. (NYmag)