Friends of Padre Steve’s World,
While many progressives and liberals may disagree with many of his political positions, there is no doubt that George Will is one of the most erudite writers when it comes to the use of literary prose and metaphors among all the political and baseball commentators of the last three decades.
Will is unusual for a conservative commentator. He is a genuine intellectual, he has been married twice, has an adult son with Down’s syndrome, is exceptionally knowledgeable about baseball; his book Men at Work: the Craft of Baseball is a classic, and even so he is a diehard and lifelong Chicago Cub’s fan. He was a commentator for Ken Burns’ masterpiece documentary Baseball and was parodied for his use of high flying literary metaphors about baseball by Dana Carvey on Saturday Night Live. http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/george-f-wills-sports-machine/n9910?snl=1
Last year Will, a lifelong Republican left the GOP due to the implosion of that party’s moral center after the nomination of Donald Trump. Since then he has been one of the most fearsome conservative commentators when it comes to criticizing President Trump, his policies, and his supporters, especially the block of Trump supporters known as Conservative Evangelicals.
Today in the wake of Roy Moore’s defeat in Alabama the master of conservative prose sliced and diced Moore, Trump, and the Conservative Evangelical supporters like a pathologist slicing up the rotted brain of a football player with CTE during an autopsy. In an op-Ed in the Washington Post which you can read at the link https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trumps-moore-endorsement-sunk-the-presidency-to-unplumbed-depths/2017/12/13/3c245482-e036-11e7-bbd0-9dfb2e37492a_story.html Will used his unmatched prose to expose the moral, ethical, and political bankruptcy of Trump, Moore, and their ardent Conservative Evangelical supporters.
Of Moore Will wrote:
Moore was such a comprehensive caricature — Sinclair Lewis could not have imagined this Elmer Gantry — that the acid rain of reports about his sexual predations, and his dissembling about them, almost benefited him by distracting attention from: the remunerative use he made of a “charitable” foundation. And his actions as a public official that by themselves sufficed to disqualify him from any public office. He is an anti-constitutional recidivist, twice removed from Alabama’s highest court for his theocratic insistence that his religious convictions take precedence over U.S. Supreme Court decisions, so he could not have sincerely sworn to “support and defend the Constitution” and to “bear true faith and allegiance to the same.”
Of Moore and Trump’s supporters in the Conservative Evangelical circles Will wrote:
Moore has been useful as a scythe slicing through some tall stalks of pretentiousness: The self-described “values voters” and “evangelicals” of pious vanity who have embraced Trump and his Alabama echo have some repenting to do before trying to reclaim their role as arbiters of Republican, and American, righteousness. We have, alas, not heard the last from them, but henceforth the first reaction to their “witness” should be resounding guffaws.
I totally agree, these Christian theocrats should be scorned and opposed for their anti-American and un-Constitutional positions, but also if you actually believe the faith of the early American Christians like Virginia Baptist leader John Leland who spearheaded the movement for the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment protections of freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and freedom of association. Leland wrote:
“The notion of a Christian commonwealth should be exploded forever. … Government should protect every man in thinking and speaking freely, and see that one does not abuse another. The liberty I contend for is more than toleration. The very idea of toleration is despicable; it supposes that some have a pre-eminence above the rest to grant indulgence, whereas all should be equally free, Jews, Turks, Pagans and Christians.”
I’m sure that the atheist Will would agree with the Baptist Leland. The frightening thing is that Moore, a Southern Baptist would so oppose the faith and beliefs of men like Leland who fought for the rights of everyone, and the 80% of Evangelicals who support Trump in his election, and the more than 80% of white Alabama Evangelicals support political and social positions that are more in tune with the Taliban and ISIS than Leland.
But will did not just single out the Evangelicals, he excoriated national Republicans who put their money to support Moore despite the evidence of Moore’s total unsuitability for office. Will wrote:
When reports of Sen. Al Franken’s misbehaviors against adult women surfaced, the National Republican Congressional Committee pounced: “Democrats who took Senator Franken’s campaign money need to . . . return his donations.” (Combined, they totaled $15,500.) When, 18 days later, Trump endorsed Moore, the Republican National Committee immediately sent $170,000 to Alabama. If the RNC, which accurately represents the president’s portion of the party, did not have situational ethics, it would have none.
Of the President’s support for Moore Will wrote:
Although the president is not invariably a stickler for precision when bandying factoids, he said the Everest of evidence against Moore did not rise to his standards of persuasiveness. This fleeting swerve into fastidiousness about facts came hard on the heels of his retweeting of a video of a Muslim immigrant in the Netherlands beating a young man holding crutches. Except the villain was born and raised in the Netherlands. Undaunted, Trump’s remarkably pliant spokesperson, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, defended her employer from the nitpickers: What matters, she said, is not that the video is unreal but that “the threat” (of turbulent Dutchmen?) is real.
He added:
By basking in the president’s approval, Moore became a clarifier. Henry Adams, great-grandson of the second president and grandson of the sixth, was unfair to the 18th when he wrote, “The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant, was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin.” By joining Stephen K. Bannon’s buffoonery on Moore’s behalf, the 45th president planted an exclamation point punctuating a year of hitherto unplumbed presidential depths. He completed his remarkably swift — it has taken less than 11 months — rescue of the 17th, Andrew Johnson, from the ignominy of ranking as the nation’s worst president.
Of course other conservatives with a conscience including Jennifer Rubin, Ed Rogers, Ross Douthat, and Joe Scarborough, not to mention Senators Richard Shelby and Jeff Flake have added their voices to the cacophony to expose the fraud that is the Trump Presidency and the hollow soul of what used to be the party of Lincoln. As a former Republican I can only say let this zombie party die and maybe from the ashes something will arise that resembles men like Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. grant, Theodore Roosevelt, and Dwight D. Eisenhower.
I am now a Democrat and I am certainly a liberal and progressive, but I am also a realist. I will not be like the German left in 1932 that in the face of an existential crisis refused to come together to stop the rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party. That insistence on ideological purity and refusal to work with other opponents of the Nazis didn’t work out so well for them. Because of that I will herald anyone who opposes the un-Constitutional words and fascist like actions of men like Trump, Moore, Bannon, and their Taliban like supporters.
Politics in a democracy is always a matter of cooperation and compromise without sacrificing who we are. It is what the best Presidents and legislators of all parties understood in years past. I am sure that my words today will infuriate some of my readers who are conservative Evangelicals, and my lack of insistence on ideological purity will disappoint some of my liberal and progressive readers. But the words and actions of the President and his most loyal supporters are an existential threat to our Republic. George Will understands this, and people of goodwill can work through their differences to benefit the country and support and defend the Constitution.
That my friends is what I am about. I am a progressive realist in wonderland and George Will did all of us a favor today.
Until tomorrow,
Peace,
Padre Steve+
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