George Will just wants to watch a stealth-Marxist regime burn.

To mangle the John D. MacDonald quote: when it comes to the Commies* running Greece George Will is the iceman, and he’s going to make one delivery only.

This protracted dispute will result in desirable carnage if Greece defaults, thereby becoming a constructively frightening example to all democracies doling out unsustainable, growth-suppressing entitlements.

[snip a long passage in which you can almost hear George Will sharpening his knives on a grindstone]

It cannot be said too often: There cannot be too many socialist smashups. The best of these punish reckless creditors whose lending enables socialists to live, for a while, off other people’s money. The world, which owes much to ancient Athens’s legacy, including the idea of democracy, is indebted to today’s Athens for the reminder that reality does not respect a democracy’s delusions.

Continue reading George Will just wants to watch a stealth-Marxist regime burn.

#rsrh QotD, I Will Cheekily Change George Will’s Punctuation For Him edition.

He is perfectly welcome to yell at me for it, but it just looks better with the I capitalized and the semicolon grafted in.  Sorry about that. Anyway, Will in passing, while on the subject of Ted Cruz and James Madison:

In a republic, which is defined by the principle of representation, the people do not directly decide issues; they decide who will decide.

#rsrh George Will flenses Mitt Romney.

With a dull knife.

The Republican presidential dynamic — various candidates rise and recede; Mitt Romney remains at about 25 percent support — is peculiar because conservatives correctly believe that it is important to defeat Barack Obama but unimportant that Romney be president. This is not cognitive dissonance.

Much as Mitt Romney would like you to believe otherwise.  And note that this is not the nastiest thing that George Will* wrote about Romney; it is, in fact, probably the nicest.  Give you an idea: Will’s piece ends by bringing up Michael Dukakis – and this sentence: “Has conservatism come so far, surmounting so many obstacles, to settle, at a moment of economic crisis, for this?”

You know it’s bad when George Will feels the need to italicize.

Continue reading #rsrh George Will flenses Mitt Romney.

George Will and the Wisconsin Progressive Waterloo.

George Will visits the wreckage-strewn battlefield where Wisconsin progressives launched their desperate counter-attack against the forces of reform, and finds a certain grim satisfaction there.  To refresh people’s memories: Wisconsin progressives’ refusal to accept the widespread repudiation of the Democratic party in Wisconsin in 2010 (loss of the state legislature, two Congressional seats lost, progressive icon US Senator Russ Feingold handily if not contemptuously defeated by Ron Johnson, loss of the executive branch) led them to desperate attempts to retroactively rewrite reality to make The Bad Thing never happen.  While they (and their Big Labor manipulators) were able to force Wisconsin Democrats to go along with a hapless (and futile) fight over collective bargaining reform, attempts to create change via popular outrage failed, largely because Wisconsin progressives failed to create any actual permanent outrage outside of their rather narrow sub-demographics*.  Reform measures thus passed, much to the impotent rage of its enemies.

We’ll have George take it from here:

Having failed to prevent enactment of the Walker agenda voters had endorsed, unions and their progressive allies tried to recall six Republican senators. If three had been recalled, Democrats would have controlled the Senate, and other governors and state legislators would have been warned not to challenge unions. Fueled by many millions of dollars from national unions and sympathizers, progressives proved, redundantly, the limited utility of money when backing a bankrupt agenda: Only two Republicans were recalled — one was in a heavily Democratic district, the other is a married man playing house with a young girlfriend. Progressives also failed to defeat a Supreme Court justice.

An especially vociferous progressive group calls itself “We Are Wisconsin.” Evidently not.

Continue reading George Will and the Wisconsin Progressive Waterloo.