Will Watch: The Adventure Begins

Blogging about the absurdities of right-wing rhetoric increasingly reminds me of my old movie-theatre job: picking up trash between showings. There's no challenge, just the backbreaking humdrum of stooping to clear thoughtlessly scattered dreck.

If I weren't paid to blog about it — hey, wait a minute....

Feeling like Alexander with no ragtime songs left to conquer, I turned to the Democratic Underground community for help finding a worthy antagonist from the Right.

The consensus was that the hardest nut to crack was George Will. I've never read much of his work, so I wasn't sure what I might find.

I took a look at a recent article. It was a retrospective about AIDS, and I found it wasn't really drenched with conservative bias.

My major quibble was his selective critique of the early political and media handling of AIDS. He blames those who were too politically correct to make the gay community the prime focus for safe-sex campaigns.

But he ignores the "Silence=Death" phase, when the Reagan administration and the press callously failed to rally concern about the disease (e.g., as a priority for research $$$, as well as for education), because its leading targets weren't June and Ward Cleaver.

I was pleased, though, to see him end with a positive statement about condom use as a preventer of AIDS. Other wingers dream of a world free from birth control, as well as from abortion, feminism, and homosexuals. If Will has any such agendas, it wasn't clear from this piece.

This past Thursday's column hypes the importance of Zarqawi, Bush's new prize trophy, while omitting mention of longstanding reports that the President had previously let him escape, lest he lose a rationale for war. I can't imagine if Clinton were President that such a backstory would be missing from Will's report, nor from most others from the MSM, which is gleefully trumpeting a "Bush bounce."

Again, though, Will ends on note that's outside the key of conservative. The last half focuses on the bad news and near hopelessness of the situation:

...it did not take three years of Zarqawi and terrorism and sectarian violence to turn Iraqis into difficult raw material for self-government. For that, give another devil his due: Saddam Hussein's truly atomizing tyranny and terror. On June 20, 2003, just 72 days after the fall of Baghdad, The Post reported this from Fallujah:

"Military engineers recently cleared garbage from a field in Fallujah, resurfaced it with dirt and put up goal posts to create an instant soccer field. A day later, the goal posts were stolen and all the dirt had been scraped from the field. Garbage began to pile up again."

An Army captain asked, "What kind of people loot dirt?" There are many answers to that question. Here is one: a kind of people who are hard to help.

If Will's Hussein comment is an additional defense of Bush's choices of enemies, the overall picture he paints of his war is far from flattering. Beginning with the observation "Even the good news often has a dark cast to it," Will stays far from the red-meat jingoism and irrationality I've come to expect while observing the Coulters, O'Reillys, and the Bush adminstration itself.

Further, a quick scan of Will's other recent WaPo columns shows him not as routinely doctrinaire as many of his colleagues.

So is this guy really the big, bad wolf of the Right?

My initial take is that Will is rather more independent and nuanced than most conservative pundits. If he hews hard right, he doesn't do it with robotic consistency.

My sampling thus far is small and far from conclusive. If Will watchers of longer standing have seen things these fresh eyes have not yet, I look forward to hearing from them.

One interesting clue from that scan will be worth following up on: Will's obvious distaste for John McCain, whom he apparently finds insufficiently conservative. Given McCain's ultra-high marks for right-wing voting, that is a tad intriguing.

I'll keep an eye on this other George W. and will let you know if he dares to play fast and loose while he's under the watchful eye of this mighty C-list blog.

Stay tuned....