Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

If the epicene George Will is leaving a ship, that's almost enough to make me call my travel agent and book that special suite next to the Captain's. Or maybe the one next to the Chief Steward is vacant now.

Heaven forfend I should make a gay reference, but did anybody around this joint see dear George's column on Kerry's "manliness" a few days ago?

Lemme see now, what is the Log Cabin Republicans' position on Patrick Buchanan after all these years? Can we enter him in a primary or two and then draft him at the convention? A sure winner fer shure...

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/07/arts/07GAY.html

Love That Dare Not Squeak Its Name
By DINITIA SMITH

Roy and Silo, two chinstrap penguins at the Central Park Zoo in Manhattan, are completely devoted to each other. For nearly six years now, they have been inseparable. They exhibit what in penguin parlance is called "ecstatic behavior": that is, they entwine their necks, they vocalize to each other, they have sex. Silo and Roy are, to anthropomorphize a bit, gay penguins. When offered female companionship, they have adamantly refused it. And the females aren't interested in them, either.

At one time, the two seemed so desperate to incubate an egg together that they put a rock in their nest and sat on it, keeping it warm in the folds of their abdomens, said their chief keeper, Rob Gramzay. Finally, he gave them a fertile egg that needed care to hatch. Things went perfectly. Roy and Silo sat on it for the typical 34 days until a chick, Tango, was born. For the next two and a half months they raised Tango, keeping her warm and feeding her food from their beaks until she could go out into the world on her own. Mr. Gramzay is full of praise for them....

Ugh. What gets me the most about this editorial is Will's insistence that a post-election Bush will be able to make the "hard decisions" he;s been unable to do during his first term. Hello, George-- isn't this the same president who was handed a 90% approval rating and still actively chose to fritter it away on these enormously damaging policies? If he wasn't free to save the budget then, why should we expect better from him in 2005?

Besides, if Bush does win this year, his administration will simply move on to the important business of winning the '06 congressional races. Can't afford any hard decisions then.

Will used to savage Bush pere; given the famous Bush family tightness ("Saddam tried to kill my dad, that's enough for me") why isn't Will being marginalized by Bush fils? Is Will trying to suck up into his good graces? Anyway, Will is a pathetic partisan hack, so is it surprising that he has one foot on the ship?

George Will must be living in absolute denial.
The preppie cheerleader defending his fallen
preppie hero, tears streaming down his mascara,
sobbing as his ultra-conservative belief system
is being trashed by the president he champions.
What psycho-drama! You could write a book!

We're gifted a small boost by the Other George, telling Tim Russert, ala Nixon's now-fabled double-negative flub: "I'm not going to lose,"
signaling in negative he is a 'loser', unless
you buy the paranoia, 2004 elections are rigged.

What's interesting is the way the NYTime re-edited it's story on the Russert interview:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/08/politics/08CND-BUSH.html?ex=1077512400&en=1eb092ed30ad6bde&ei=5004&partner=UNTD

Clicking back on the article a couple of times this morning, it's been rewritten and reposted, now emphasizing more the interview related to Saddam, with Saddam's backstory as the Evil Empire, to justify war. There are some eight
new paragraphs on Saddam and the WMD added in.

NYT edited out McAuliffe's reference to 'AWOL',
spelling it out instead to eliminate the hot-
button acronym, and reducing Bush's period of aledged absence from a year to "months".

Is this their lawyers, or the editor in chief?

And they added these closing lines to the Bush interview piece, in a clumsy attempt to brush their fallen hero with Glitter of the Gipper:

Noting that Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar of Spain had told him that Ronald Reagan was an unpopular president abroad, he said, "So, first of all, I'm keeping pretty good company."

"When you do hard things," he added, "when you ask hard things of people, it can create tensions."

Who writes this s&*t?!

http://markschmitt.typepad.com/decembrist/

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities also points out another amazing thing that has not received much attention. The budget proposes to restore the "pay-as-you-go" rules that governed Congress when I worked on the Hill. They were frustrating, but essential to getting the deficit under control: Any money you propose to spend, through spending or tax cuts, has to be offset with a spending cut or tax increase. Except in the Bush version, tax cuts would not have to be offset. But refundable tax credits -- the kind of tax cut that helps poor working families -- would have to be offset. And increases in entitlement spending could only be offset with other spending cuts, not by closing tax loopholes. In other words, the rule says, you can't do anything, really, except cut taxes. Amazing.

When George Will is involved, the rat metaphor becomes especially vivid. I imagine him crawling odorifously out of a sewer pipe, for example, or taking little bites out of a helpless infant in its crib.

I, too, remain flummoxed at the speed with which the Clan Bush, with their famously and viciously long memories, have bestowed the mantle of forgiveness upon Senor Will. That geek penned some pretty nasty stuff about George H.W. Bush (and smack in the middle of Gulf War I, yet) and seemed almost relieved when Poppy and Bar slithered out of the White House for the last time.

However, we must recall the exceptional call-girl services he supplied to the Bush campaign after New Hampshire 2000. He abandoned his previously fawning tone toward McCain and denounced the Arizonan as a crass, rude bully, loathed by his colleagues and nothing less than an extreme threat to democracy. He also produced a few columns of pure pro-W puffery. That got him invited to a state dinner, I believe.

You can take the whore out of the brother, but you'll never take the brothel out of the whore.

I read Will's column. Why does he use these strange historical analogies that make no sense? The Democrats are prairie populists? Analogies with Bryan? That is truly strange. I think it was one of Bush's finance people who said that the US didn't have to worry about the deficit because we have the printing presses ready to go. Will likes to dress up his bigotry with historical references that don't make any sense at all to me. They just gestures that he hopes will replace arguments and make it look impressive?

Or am I wrong here. Can anyone explain these Noonan-like metaphors and analogies?

Here's hoping that in the next six months, traffic out the hawsehole of the USS Bush II will reach such proportions that the rats have to put in an HOV lane.

I think that last sentence is quite telling: Will is just another Republican hack loyal to his party at the expense of his country. Of course, those of us who torture ourselves by reading the Op-Ed of the Times have known that since the beginning of time.

Or am I wrong here. Can anyone explain these Noonan-like metaphors and analogies?

I can. The real life Brandon Sladder is your prototype pseudo-intellectual. (Noonan, on the other hand, is merely a lunatic.)

I would like to point out that Will's column was penned before Mr. Bush's utterly disastrous appearance on MTP. Mercy.

An accumulation of facts--those stubborn things--has successfully made George Will incoherent, and what is worse for a pundit, inconsequential.

Charles

"I think it was one of Bush's finance people who said that the US didn't have to worry about the deficit because we have the printing presses ready to go."

A bit different: deflation isn't a worry because "we have the keys to the printing press, and we aren't afraid to use them."

The result has been the expected: devaluation.

Only when we have nothing to say do we say anything at all.

He does not seem to me to be a free man who does not sometimes do nothing.

Be wiser than other people if you can; but do not tell them so.

During the Samuel Johnson days they had big men enjoying small talk; today we have small men enjoying big talk.

A little foolishness, enough to enjoy life and a little wisdom to avoid the errors, that will do

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