The Bowtied Monster (George Will)

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

10 June 14

n 1977, while awarding him that year's prize in distinguished commentary, the Pulitzer committee said about George F. Will that he was "at home with a wide variety of topics, from international relations, campaigns, and urban problems to the history of machine guns and the vagaries of the press." This was before Will was recognized as the thoroughgoing disgrace to the craft of journalism that he is, before we knew that he was a working advisor to the Reagan campaign in 1980 while masquerading as an independent observer in his column and for ABC. It was before he proved himself to be a big old 'ho for the crooked Conrad Black. It was before he proved himself to be a smug, petulant dilettante who is willing to flirt with racism -- Go back and study his coverage of the Jesse Jackson campaign in 1988 -- and who is willing to throw himself whole hog into climate change denialism, and, now, today, at Hiatt's House Of Hacks, George Will is someone who has nothing better to do than mock the current movement on America's campuses to try and cope with the problems of rape and sexual assault, and trolling its victims while jacking it into his dogeared copy of Bartlett's. For laughs.

Colleges and universities are being educated by Washington and are finding the experience excruciating. They are learning that when they say campus victimizations are ubiquitous ("micro-aggressions," often not discernible to the untutored eye, are everywhere), and that when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate. And academia's progressivism has rendered it intellectually defenseless now that progressivism's achievement, the regulatory state, has decided it is academia's turn to be broken to government's saddle.

Hear that, college women? There's a "coveted status that confers privileges" to crying rape. (Hard to believe so many women choose not to embrace this important career move by reporting their assaults.) To paraphrase what the late Molly Ivins once said to Camille Paglia on a similar topic -- I've got some Texas football frat boys I'd like George to meet. I don't even want to get into why Will chose that breaking-academia-to-the-saddle metaphor, although he does look like the middle-school librarian whose tastes run to the sting of the whip. However, I would like to compliment him on his use of the word "progressivism" as a catch-all for anyone he doesn't like. He has set up a lovely little corner of Glennbeckistan for himself. This guy was once reckoned to be an American intellect. Now, he's writing like a sociopath, except about baseball, on which he writes like a foof. Not much soulcraft to trolling rape victims, George. Not much at all.