George F. Will has been a Republican Party operative since the days of his duel employment by President Reagan and ABC News. While that is old news, indeed, it was a flagrant breach of the public trust, the flouting of any real notion of conflict of interest: public integrity and its concomitant notion of a public morality exercised in historical time is passé in Mr. Will’s world view, it failed to fit the Free Market paradigm. Mr. Will has over time proclaimed his ethical superiority as a fact, while never demonstrating that bit of moral legerdemain. This is mere introduction to this hectoring, even overtly insulting, opinion piece in which President Obama is cast in the role of Devil opposed to the ‘ Virtuous 87’ elected Tea party Jacobins, this all taking place within the narrative bounds of American Political Theology. Mr. Will has cast his lot with the most radical wing, the No-Nothing fringe, of a Republican Party that has utterly discarded any notion of political rationality or the notion or practice of political compromise, while maintaining an unending narrative steeped in fomented hysteria. Here is a quotation:
‘It has, however, rescued the nation from Obama’s preference for a “clean” debt-ceiling increase that would ignore the onrushing debt tsunami. There are 87 reasons for Obama’s temporary conversion of convenience to the cause of spending restraint — the 87 House Republican freshmen. Their inflexibility astonishes and scandalizes Washington because it reflects the rarity of serene fidelity to campaign promises.’
Mr. Will’s ultimate rhetorical destination is the constitutional practice of separate but equal branches of government, which is the lynchpin of his whole column. But Mr. Will has been inconsistent in his advocacy of that idea, it has been a matter of political pragmatism, even political opportunism, that brought him to this position, after the defeat of the Republicans in 2008 and the political victory of The Socialist Obama.
But let me now present my argument as to the thrust of this latest propaganda piece: the Debt Ceiling Crisis is another one in a long line of fake crises, manufactured by an utterly desperate Republican Party to rescue it from its marginal political status, aided and abetted by President Obama, who is not a New Deal Democrat but a New Democrat, who unreflectively enunciated the new party line of the evils of deficits .This whole line of argument can serve the Republicans well by establishing in the public mind the lack of viability of any form of Neo-Keynesianism, as a way of addressing any economic problem, after a through demonization in the public debate. As Paul Krugman has pointed out on his blog, this is 1937 and the idea and practice of austerity will not work, except as a strategy to get a Republican elected in 2012, by putting an already struggling economy in further jeopardy.
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