Takedown

I find George Will to be one of the most obnoxious pundits in the business. His air of pompous intellectuality is annoying to the extreme, particularly as he uses it to camouflage the fact that most of his columns are cheaply, often meanly, partisan things. It doesn’t matter how many quotes by Edmund Burke or Lord Palmerston you sprinkle around, or how fluently you can use words like “recondite” or “vicissitude,” hackery is still hackery no matter what kind of clothes it wears. I wouldn’t go so far as to call him Sean Hannity with big words, but he’s not really much better. He is also somewhat ethically challenged. He was a full-throated, Rumsfeld worshiping supporter of the Iraq invasion, and then he famously changed his tune after it was obvious it wasn’t such a hot idea after all. He shouldn’t ever be able to live that down. People are dead as a result of their faulty judgment.

Then again, it’s not too hard to appear the resident intellectual on a discussion panel of This Week, which, last Sunday anyway, included Ann Coulter. And George Stephanopoulos is the emcee. That’s some pretty low-wattage company. Stephanopoulos probably has a brain, but his duties at ABC force him to conceal the fact and he seems to do so with genuine relish. He is a company man to the marrow of his bones. He hosts Good Morning America, the epitome of vacuous, celebrity worshipping junk news. It really is nauseating to see Stephanopoulous enthusiastically report the results of the previous evening’s episode of American Idol. The man is a skin cell with zero credibility. The word that springs naturally to mind is whore. But I confess to an unfair bias. Lots of things about the Clinton Administration gave me hives. But I digress.

Anyway, this is one of the more gratifying things you’ll see: the very sharp Barney Frank absolutely handing Will his ass in a debate over marijuana legalization. Methinks the pompous prick gets a little flustered. Added bonus: Frank nails Paul Ryan too. Watch the the slimy little worm try to dodge the subject and go running to the hostess, Christiane Amanpour, for protection. The word that naturally springs to mind is weasel, but that’s an insult to ferrets the world over. It’s from December, which in the blogosphere makes it ancient history already, but I thought you might enjoy it. Everyone likes to see an arrogant know-it-all get knocked down a peg.