Now THAT’s The George Will I Know And Love
It’s been a hard slog lately for the George Will fan, as he wrote a seemingly endless series of peaces on Japan (a country that, while no doubt fascinating to many, kind of makes my eyes gloss over – it’s just never been my beat). He’s back, though, with a vengeance, and taking on the ‘progressive’ campaign against business icons like Wal-Mart:
Liberals think their campaign against Wal-Mart is a way of introducing the subject of class into America’s political argument, and they are more correct than they understand. Their campaign is liberalism as condescension. It is a philosophic repugnance toward markets because consumer sovereignty results in the masses making messes. Liberals, aghast, see the choices Americans make with their dollars and their ballots, and announce — yes, announce — that Americans are sorely in need of more supervision by … liberals.
Before they went on their bender of indignation about Wal-Mart (customers per week: 127 million), liberals had drummed McDonald’s (customers per week: 175 million) out of civilized society because it is making us fat, or something. So, what next? Which preferences of ordinary Americans will liberals, in their role as national scolds, next disapprove? Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet?
No. The current issue of The American Prospect, an impeccably progressive magazine, carries a full-page advertisement denouncing something responsible for “lies, deception, immorality, corruption, and widespread labor, human rights and environmental abuses” and of having brought “great hardship and despair to people and communities throughout the world.”
What is this focus of evil in the modern world? North Korea? The Bush administration? Fox News Channel? No, it is Coca-Cola (number of servings to Americans of the company’s products each week: 2.5 billion).
When liberals’ presidential nominees consistently fail to carry Kansas, liberals do not rush to read a book titled “What’s the Matter With Liberals’ Nominees?” No, the book they turned into a best-seller is titled “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” Notice a pattern here?
Indeed I do, George. Indeed I do…
I used to rush to read george will. His work was, and probably still is, keen on ‘domestic’ conservative thought. I felt he was grappling with issues at the top of the poitical food chain.
His failure to focus his skill on terrorism/world politics, other than stating his reasoned oppositon to the war, has dropped him down several notches. He used to produce articles that mattered. They still do, but the gwot has pushed me away from following his field of expertise-domestic issues.
Funny how Will has been replaced by Krauthammer, at least for me…before 9/11 I enjoyed reading Krauthammer, but his topics were relegated to the lower levels of personal level of importance reagrding my life, now CK and GW have flipped.
Liberals are fighting Wal-Mart? Who knew?
Actually, the people who are fighting Wal-Mart are those whose interests are threatened by them. This includes unions, who see America’s largest private employer successfully fighting them for years. It includes banks, who do not want to see Wal-Mart open up quasi-banking facilities and are lobbying against them. It includes manufacturers, who are losing business to foreign (principally Chinese) competitors. This is hardly a liberal vs. conservative thing: it is a group of diverse groups each fighting for their own self-interest.
I was in the Wal-Mart headquarters in Bentonville about two weeks after 9/11. I was surprised at first by the rigorous security check I had to go through, until I realized that they are an American icon. I’m a big Wal-Mart fan: I think what they do is capitalism at its best. However, to suggest that somehow they are a David fighting a lot of liberal Goliaths just ain’t so.
Rassmussen has Bush at a 47%. It’s been a while.
Worth noting that he was at 51% when he was reelected in Nov 04.
“Liberals are fighting Wal-Mart? Who knew?”
“Democrats vs. Wal-Mart”
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/07/dems_or_walmart_who_hurts_mary.html
“Last week a federal judge in Baltimore struck down a Maryland law that would have required Wal-Mart to spend 8 percent of its payroll on employee health care or hand the difference over to the state. According to the Baltimore Sun, the legislation violated a federal law promoting uniform treatment of employers.”
bringing a suit against one company, without a broader application is considered waging war on walmart. IT would seem that the dems who, on paper, oppose disrcimination, tried their own. More telling is that the suit was dismissed.
“Liberals are fighting Wal-Mart? Who knew?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/14/pageoneplus/corrections.html?_r=4&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
Apparently the ‘unbiased’ NYT is trying to carry water for the ‘non-existant’ war, and issuing corrections as they go.
I don’t dispute that lots of liberals are fighting Wal-Mart — but so are lots of groups that are hardly liberal or Democratic, such as banks, manufacturers, and Chambers of Commerce — and I think they are all wrong, regardless of whether they are from the right or the left –
Comrades,
I gotta support Peter on this one. Yes, there are many liberals flailing away at WalMart, but primarily it’s the labour unions and other single-issue groups who want a piece of the action.
Unions want to wrest control of WalMart because they have flagging enrollments and see nothing but dollar signs from all those new member’s dues, not to mention padding their political clout.
Banks, too, are worried about WalMart slowly knicking them for a nickel here and a dime there. Banks are already at odds with Credit Unions and again, the bottom line is who gets the money.
WalMart is an easy target. It’s huge. it’s succesful, and it works. Therefore, it must be doing something illegal. Yeah, I don’t like how much business they do with China, but I do so like their prices. As a father of three, i REALLY like those prices. If I had to shop somewhere else, I don’t know that we’d be as well off as we are at present. Being able to shop there means we have more left over at the end of the month which goes into savings for retirement, college, etc.
I LIKE market forces, because I understand supply and demand. It’s the way that capitalism works, but some folks simply don’t get it.
FWIW, where I live, WalMart pays a wage that’s pretty good, but they aren’t looking for folks to make a career out of working there. They want retirees, folks who want a second job, part-time workers, etc. It’s a situation where everyone involved wins.
Respects,
Gwedd
Well, that’s why I, unlike Will, made a hard distinction by using the word ‘progressive’; if you know anything at all about THESE nutcakes (and I’ve got a front row seat in Austin), they are most assuredly against Wal-Mart – and the fact that they are a great capitalist success story is one of the reasons…
[...] Others blogging this: Blue Crab Boulevard loves it. I take it WILLisms agrees. Mark at Decison08 admits being a Will fan can be hard at times. It’s been a hard slog lately for the George Will fan, as he wrote a seemingly endless series of peaces on Japan (a country that, while no doubt fascinating to many, kind of makes my eyes gloss over – it’s just never been my beat). He’s back, though, with a vengeance, and taking on the ‘progressive’ campaign against business icons like Wal-Mart: [...]
Unlike you Mark I am no George Will fan. His real politik philosophy makes my stomach turn, but he has a great point in his piece today.
I hate Wal-Mart. I never shop there and do everything I can to convince other people not to as well. That is the free market at work and it’s my choice, but the government sticking their nose into the free market and taking that choice away from me? That’s another matter entirely.
Wal-Mart has every right to set their pay scales, and benefit packages as they wish, and their employees have every right to choose to unionize or not.
and yes I see a pattern. the people who give “Liberalism” a bad name continue to think they know what’s best for us, and Democrats like me keep voting for Republicans.
The Republican platform says that people with terminal illness cannot choose to end their lives, gay couples cannot have the same economic rights as married couples, cancer patients cannot choose to use medical marijuana, and parents of kids with life-threatening diseases cannot hope to see the government invest in finding cures if the research involves stem cells.
Does that mean that the GOP “knows what’s best for us” too?
Neither party is perfectly liberal, in the classical sense. But to paraphrase a Chinese dissident (unnamed in the Pentagon’s New Map): “Freedom is 90% economic and 10% political.” How many people do gay marriage, suicide, medical marijuana, and stem cell research affect? Compare that to the number of people who shop at Wal Mart. On a day-to-day basis, more people are affected by economic legislation than political.
And BTW, wouldn’t forcing people to contribute to stem cell research (via taxes) be “knowing what’s best for them” as well?
“Liberals are fighting Wal-Mart? Who knew?”
It may be true that not everyone who opposes Wal – Mart is a Liberal, but you’d be hard – pressed to find anyone else here in Chicago who actually supported their recently – vetoed “Living Wage” bill. Perhaps a more accurate term for their supporters was the hallowed “goo – goos,” first coined by Mike Royko to describe the progressive wing of the party that tended towards Limousine Liberalism. Mayor Daley vetoed this abusurdity on the grounds that it would only have helped the surrounding suburbs, and would have done absolutely nothing for the areas that Wal – Mart is planning on building in, which are poor urban areas primarily composed of African – Americans and Hispanics.
I don’t care for a lot of what Wal – Mart does in terms of their employee policies, but to deny the poor the chance to buy essential products and goods at the absolute lowest costs available comes quite close to the description of discrimination. Not to mention the jobs that come with such store openings – no, the wages aren’t good, but the areas in which they’re going to be located here don’t have many jobs to begin with.
1) ““Wouldn’t forcing people to contribute to stem cell research (via taxes) be ‘knowing what’s best for them’ as well?” In a sense it is, but I think it is also unavoidable. If the government is going to fund medical research, then it should be guided by scientific principles and not ideological ones. For example, a lot of research on medicine requires testing new drugs on animals. While this would drive the PETA types nuts, I think that most would agree that when you balance the needs of sick people versus the desires of animal rights advocates, there are overriding considerations to ignore their concerns and conduct the research. I think that the only instances when scientific research should be stopped are when the nature of the research is clearly antithetical to commonly held values (such as making Frankenstein in a lab). This is not the case with stem cell research, which a majority of Americans seems to support.”
2) “To deny the poor the chance to buy essential products and goods at the absolute lowest costs available comes quite close to the description of discrimination.” Couldn’t agree more.
Peter if your argument had any merit you wouldn’t have to take so many liberties with the truth.
Suicide is against the law for everyone. Gay couples have exactly the same economic rights as you and i do. they are allowed to marry anyone they choose of the opposite sex. Many Republicans would happily allow “civil unions” but that is not good enough for Liberals.
Marijuana use is against the law for everyone not just cancer patients. Personally I am not opposed to marijuana use by adults for medical reasons or otherwise but in the end it isn’t that big of a deal either way.
And the government should not be in the business of killing embryos and taking one persons life away in the hope of improving the life of another particularly when there are numerous other treatments available.
You see Peter I was adopted so I am particularly sensitive to the killing of embryos. thank god no one “used my stem cells” to do some research you think is more important than my life.
“The Republican platform says that people with terminal illness cannot choose to end their lives…”
It sounds cold but I understand the logic. I wouldn’t think that someone who has been diagnosed with a terminal illness could be considered to be in their right mind. I sat with my mother in the final week of her life, as she died from lung cancer(she was a non smoker). Likewatching a fish on a dock, slowly suffocating and delusional, and begging when she was lucid, to let her die.
Her treating physician came in loaded her ‘pain pump’-usually the nurse did it- which she could no longer use, and instructed me to give it if she requested it or needed it. 4 minutes after I pressed the button, she was dead.
Thre is no way you can write legistlation to cover this. If a person is lucid enough to argue for their own death in a court procedure, they should not be assited in dying. Their time will come, and all hospitals tend to deal with it based on their experience, the doctors and nurses mow when it is time, and I have little doubt that they accomodate. An unwritten system is in place, and to my knowledge, is mercifully being carried out.
If we write laws, we create law suits. To my knowledge I have not heard of a case where a doctor has been sued for assisting in ending a patients life. I have heard of no draconian board of examination for exploring the deaths of the terminally ill. The republican position, is consisted with the medical ethics of doing no harm. Asking lawmakers or doctors to write it into a legal system is obscene.
“kids with life-threatening diseases cannot hope to see the government invest in finding cures if the research involves stem cells.”
do you really know what the republican position on stem cell research is, or have you swallowed a belief based their unwillingness to fund research involving creating embyroes, they don’t fund any research?
and btw, legalize the weed.
And the government does fund some stem cell research. Granted, it only funds the kind of stem cell research that has produced results.
I am not taking liberties with facts.
1) From the 2004 Republican platform: “we oppose euthanasia and assisted suicide.” The fact that “suicide is against the law for everyone” is not relevant. The question is whether, under certain circumstances, euthanasia and assisted suicide ought to be legalized. Oregon passed an assisted suicide law, which John Ashcroft tried to stop by threatening prosecution of doctors took an active role. (So much for states’ rights — as with Bush v. Gore, we’ve learned by now that states rights are fine for conservatives until the states do things which they don’t like). Ashcroft was overruled by a Supreme Court decision earlier this year.
http://www.gop.com/media/2004platform.pdf#search=%22republican%20party%20platform%22
2) If gay couples married someone of the opposite sex, then they wouldn’t be gay couples.
3) Also from the party platform: we believe that “legal recognition and the accompanying benefits afforded couples should be preserved for that unique and special union of one man and one woman.” No talk of civil unions here.
4) Re “Marijuana use is against the law for everyone not just cancer patients:” this also is not relevant. The question is whether it ought to be legal for cancer sufferers. Although California legalized medical marijuana in 1996, the DEA is arresting people who distribute it. (Again, so much for states’ rights.) And while it may not be a big deal to you, I am sure that it is a very big deal to someone whose pain could be alleviated were it not for the administration’s insistence that it knows best.
5) The sentence “the government should not be in the business of killing embryos and taking one persons life away in the hope of improving the life of another particularly when there are numerous other treatments available” has two errors. First, an embryo is not a person. Secondly, there are not other treatments available. The reason for stem cell research is to find treatments for diseases which are currently not curable.
So now tell me what liberties I am taking with the truth?
and to mtl:
1) “To my knowledge I have not heard of a case where a doctor has been sued for assisting in ending a patients life.” Tell that to Jack Kevorkian.
2) The Republican position on stem cell research — or at least George Bush’s position — is that it is so abominable that he cast his first veto in his Presidency to impede it:
http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/07/19/stemcells.veto/index.html
“we oppose euthanasia and assisted suicide.”
there is no way you can legistlate or organize it. The dems want it like it is a plan and procedure. Can’t wait to see the lawsuits that come out of that. Guess what? most doctors oppose it as well…but it happens, without laws. This portrayal of republicans coming between families is so far from reality. I can assure you that if you have a loved one under decent medical care, the issue will be dealt with gingerly, but properly-in the current fashion.
did kevorkian even have his license? I don’t consider him a doctor, and I definitely don’t think he was acting as one. It is why he is in jail. Other doctors testified against him, and if you were on the jury, you would have found that he did not behave as a doctor.
http://bioethics.gov/reports/stemcell/chapter2.html
“The federal government makes significant public resources available to biomedical researchers each year—over $20 billion in fiscal year 2003 alone”
20 billion for all research. of which stem cell research receives funding. The problem is not getting stem cells, but making sure they become the tissue they are supposed to become. Even if the government were to move half of all funding into stem cells, it would impact the actual investment into the research by less than 1%.
“The question is whether it ought to be legal for cancer sufferers.”
Actually the question is whether it should be legal, period. The answer is yes, but I don’t see the dems any closer to it than the republicans. I see Kinky Friedman has it on his platform-it would pull 20% of the texas vote.
You can kill me with the ’states rights v. federal govt’ on the oregon issue-I deserve it, and have a hard time reconciling that the feds can play with state govt. I come to expect it from dems, but find it hard to digest from the gop.
one more small example of how legistlating end of life matters-
Suppose I want to die. My doctor says he won’t do it, either out of ethical standards or becuase he believes I’m not that far gone. Do I sue him for not upholding a law which supports my right to die? Do I have my family shop for a doctor who will do it? What is my insurance companies responsiblities?
Can you give an iron clad definiton that the law could be based around? And once you do establish the law-doesn’t that create an unnatural border-exceptions exist, but now a law is in place to prevent a doctor from treating me as he sees fit-if I don’t meet the ironclad definiton, does that mean I’m stuck?
Creating a law which addresses end of life, suggests it isn’t being addressed right now…it also has the potential to be twisted. Imagine an insurance company refusing to pay for long term coma patients, because euthansia is cheaper.
These are messy issues with no clear-cut answer, but I think the Oregon bill makes important strides towards a reasonable solution to this issue.
I can just the medical insurance business charging 2000 for the ‘end of life tx’. It is already being done, at no additional cost. Can’t wait to meet the death counselors-there is a new job. Somebody will have different rates from somebody else-will that make one excessive, or the other cold and indifferent?
George Will can be a great writer, and here he pulls off a verbal pirouette that makes him seem profound, even if he’s missing the mark a bit. For starters, it’s clear Will never read Thomas Frank’s “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” If he did, he’d know Frank’s title is actually a quotation, and that he blames liberals for not understanding voters enough to communicate effectively. Will’s point about the left’s descent into a culture nit-picking actually isn’t that far from Frank’s.