Iron Will?


Normally, whenever I’m in a position to listen to ABC’s George Will, I turn the television off or mute it.
For some unknown reason, yesterday, I listened as this cruel and arrogant White House shill ticked off three facile, ignorant and racist generalizations for why the poverty that doomed so many of the New Orleans hurricane victims was the fault of the victims themselves:

George Will--We’ve done anything but neglect poverty in this country. And, the funny thing is we know exactly how to cure it. Obey three rules: graduate from high school, don't have a child until you're married and don't get married until you're twenty.
In the cohort that obeys those three rules poverty is minimal. It’s simple, but it’s changing behavior.

In his heartfelt passive/aggressive race-baiting, the thankfully bow-tie-less Will, telegraphs what is sure to be the backed-into a-Katrina-soaked-corner Willie Hortonization of Karl Rove’s Republican campaign strategy for the 2006 mid-term elections.
How easily the pampered, fascist and, of course, Caucasian talking heads will cotton to this ego-glorifying and patently fraudulent racially blind idea that American success is based simply on merit and hard, boot-strapped work and that American poverty is the result of free choice and deserved by its selectees.
One boggles imagining how the diseased minds of the George Will types could view images of the New Orleans dead, most quite elderly and infirm, and conclude that these people chose their fate by dint of a late teenaged pregnancy conceived more than 40 years in the past or the equally distant lack of a high school diploma.
What motivates these harshly judgmental social Puritans and can a GED become a personal flotation device in times of deluge?
Was Mr. Will’s own flood-free life guided by his publicly espoused moral precepts?
Hardly.
Though computer-accessible information is sketchy for events from the Reagan era, Will’s seemingly precarious hold on upper-middle class status seems to have stabilized into dull high end Republican domesticity with a second marriage to a former Deputy Assistant to President Reagan and Dole presidential campaign staffer.
The freely chosen promiscuous zestiness that could have impoverished Will’s first marriage children and doomed them to death by hurricane came with the commentator and columnist’s steamy mid 1980’s flirtation with the daughter of Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham and a raucous divorce from betrayed wife #1.
So zesty was the breaking of Mr. Will’s first sacred marriage covenant that a January 1987 issue of Washingtonian magazine reported:

When Will moved out on his wife and children, he found his office furniture dumped on his front lawn with a note reading, "Take it somewhere else, buster".

Shocking, no?
Does the ABC pontificator escape his own personal condemnation because he was over 40 years of age, the correct skin color and a high school graduate at the time of his apparently infertile and unblessed coitus?
I can only imagine the florid high dudgeon of Will’s personal exculpation and its, no doubt, resultant social buoyancy.
If Will only possessed a small portion of the personal character he imagines as his own, this flawed elitist might, within the private darkness of his shriveled soul, see the grotesque injustice and distasteful prejudice of his half-baked righteousness.

Video of Will's comments via Crooks and Liars

Images: ABC, Los Angeles Times
- posted by Sean @ 1:53 PM