George Will - Irony's Sycophant a Swell Contrast to St. Augustine

Unlike the radicals on the right who want to upend American traditions, Will seeks to conserve them. Despite his habitual caution, however, even Will seems to have made at least one concession to modernity that may leave some of his admirers reeling. The bow tie has vanished. For the cover photograph of “One Man’s America,” he’s donned a necktie. New York Times Review of Books by Jacob Heilbrunn

Heck George, Tucker Carlson did that years ago!

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/books/review/Heilbrunn-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=2&oref=slogin

George Will is Irony's Sycophant - wordy parser posing as an authentic voice. Shoot Will required research assistants, from what I hear, to scoop up baseball facts and figures in an attempt to become 'a real fan.' Now that's ironic. Today George Will worms his words through the loam of the new Washington, D.C.- the New Athens built from the Spartan helots of Daley's Chicago. Will wants in.

The door might be open to a parser. Thus, Will explains conservative America rotting like the corpse of a Marine gunned down in the surf off Tarawa in 1943:

More irony: September's financial storm probably sealed Obama's victory by raising the electorate's anxieties while lowering its confidence in Obama's opponent. John McCain's responses -- suspending, sort of, his campaign; ratcheting up his rhetoric about Wall Street "greed and corruption" -- suggested a line spoken solemnly by the Capitol Steps' George W. Bush impersonator: "Uncertain times call for uncertain leadership." But the storm's aftermath -- $1 trillion or so of government resources siphoned away -- will severely constrain Obama's presidency. So, this year the conditions conducive to the election of liberals, with their baroque plans and rococo dreams, have put a polar frost on most such ambitions.

Indeed, Obama's first problem will be drawing lines to circumscribe bailout promiscuity. The Bush administration, having executed a swan dive, or perhaps a belly-flop, into the financial sector, now seems to be flinching from extending the interventions into the industrial sector. Democrats in Congress, feeling their oats and hearing clamors from local corporations, will be Obama's first affliction.

Some of the Republicans' afflictions are self-inflicted. Some conservatives who are gluttons for punishment are getting a head start on ensuring a 2012 drubbing by prescribing peculiar medication for a misdiagnosed illness. They are monomaniacal about media bias, which is real but rarely decisive, and unhinged by their anger about the loathing of Sarah Palin by similarly deranged liberals. These conservatives, confusing pugnacity with a political philosophy, are hot to anoint Palin, an emblem of rural and small-town sensibilities, as the party's presumptive 2012 nominee.

These conservatives preen as especially respectful of regular -- or as Palin says, "real" -- Americans, whose tribune Palin purports to be. But note the argument that the manipulation of Americans by "the mainstream media" explains the fact that the more Palin campaigned, the less Americans thought of her qualifications. This argument portrays Americans as a bovine herd -- or as inert clay in the hands of wily media, which only Palin's conservative celebrators can decipher and resist.

Which George Will offers to. . . to offset, with milquetoast oil, and usher in a backdoor to principle! The Lap Dog's Return! George Will is seaching for a warm lap and a comfy chair. What a jerk!

George, the bovine herd? Well, Will there are herds and hoards. Hoards sweepin change. Herds remain static until herded, or is it lead? Ironic, that.

In Roman Hippo, a suburb of Carthage, the Bishop worried about Change and Hope as the Vandals and the Goths swept out the corruption of Old Rome. Augustine was no George Will. Augustine, was rooted in conservative principles that outlasted the Vandals and the Goths and took a hard look at political change as merely a vanity.

George Will is all about vanity. Augustine wrote:

CHAP. XVII. -- NEVERTHELESS THERE IS TIME PAST AND FUTURE.

22. I ask, Father, I do not affirm. O my God, rule and guide me. "Who is there who can say to me that there are not three times (as we learned when boys, and as we have taught boys), the past, present, and future, but only present, because these two are not? Or are they also; but when from future it becometh present, cometh it forth from some secret place, and when from the present it becometh past, doth it retire into anything secret? For where have they, who have foretold future things, seen these things, if as yet they are not? For that which is not cannot be seen. And they who relate things past could not relate them as true, did they not perceive them in their mind. Which things, if they were not, they could in no wise be discerned. There are therefore things both future and past.

George Will denies these points. The Irony being - that is a very good thing.

Keep yapping Georgie, someone will pick you up!

N.B. - Speaking of Principles and parsing for wiggle room: Nancy Pelosi, one of the Goths in Congress tried to parse St. Augustine over Abortion and received a clip on the snout from Bishop Chaput.

In the summer of 2008, this aspect ( condemnation of abortion) of Augustine's thoughtt (i.e., the gravity of abortion vis-a-vis the ensoulment of the fetus) was used by the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, in defence of her pro-choice political stance. She quoted one of his works, in which he wrote:

"The law does not provide that the act [abortion] pertains to homicide, for there cannot yet be said to be a live soul in a body that lacks sensation.'[64]

In the week following her comments, she was corrected by numerous American bishops, such as Archbishop Charles J. Chaput of Denver, who wrote: "In the absence of modern medical knowledge, some of the Early Fathers held that abortion was homicide; others that it was tantamount to homicide; and various scholars theorized about when and how the unborn child might be animated or "ensouled." But none diminished the unique evil of abortion as an attack on life itself..."[65]

Now, That's Ironic!