Archive for the 'George Will' Category

I've known for a long time that it's a waste of effort to read George Will, but every once in a while you like to remind yourself just how shameless even a fellow with Important Looking Glasses can be.

George Will knows well, and relishes, the role he plays in America's newspapers. And so it is, I am sure, with no shortage of delight that he uses the leverage he has as America's breakfast table pundit to announce The Bad News: After four years of George W. Bush getting everything he wants in Iraq, the Democrats are to blame for the failure of his plans.

Why? Because they've come to the realization that this incompetent boob of a president is never going to succeed, and the price of his continued grasping is the blood of American troops -- to say nothing (as Republicans do) of the lives of Iraqis we're "liberating" from the oppression of having a pulse. And it is the unfortunate curse of Congressional Democrats that they take that rather seriously.

Will kicks his column off with the charge that many in Congress, on both sides of the aisles, are engaging in "indiscriminate criticism" of the president -- Republicans of the Bush "administration's" nuclear deal with Pyongyang, and Democrats (and some Republicans who of late have come to take their jobs seriously) of Bush's having presided over the greatest foreign policy disaster in American history.

Frankly, that criticism doesn't sound all that indiscriminate to me, but then again, I'm not wearing a tie right now, so what do I know?

Will's treatment of the Pyongyang deal is a throwaway. Conservatives in Congress are disturbed essentially because they've bought the "administration's" rhetoric on North Korean to this point -- that is, that it's been a "serial liar" on this subject and ought not to be trusted. True or not, it's just another example of Bushista rhetoric making it impossible to actually pursue diplomatic solutions that are politically acceptable domestically. Having invested so much in framing the North Koreans as being both untrustworthy and led by a certifiable maniac (focus, people -- we're still talking about North Korea here), conservatives find it difficult to let go of that paradigm and accept a new one. Gosh, who would've believed that of conservatives? Well, besides the people over at Webster's, that is.

After Will's Asian jaunt, he gets to the meat (mostly gristle, really) of his accusations: Democrats are to blame for George Bush's spectacular failure of vision, leadership and just plain competence in Iraq, because they've peered down into the hole and suggested he stop digging. But here's how He of the Scholarly Spectacles puts it:

Regarding Iraq, the Democratic-controlled Congress could do what Democrats say a Democratic president would do: withdraw U.S. forces. A president could simply order that; Congress could defund military operations in Iraq. Congressional Democrats are, however, afraid to do that because they lack the courage of their (professed) conviction that Iraq would be made tranquil by withdrawal of U.S. forces.

As frequently as Will presumes to speak for Democrats, he's never gotten any better at it. And this column holds out no promise of improvement. Are Democrats "afraid" to defund military operations in Iraq? I'd have to let him have that one. They're certainly being incredibly cautious about it. But it's when we come to the why part -- you know, the analysis Will is presumably paid to provide -- that things begin to fall apart. To the extent that it's fair to say Democrats fear this undertaking, it's largely because they assume, quite rightly, that Republicans will demagogue the issue incessantly, and will characterize it as endangering the troops no matter how the funding withdrawal is structured, and how much explicit direction is given to maintaining their safety as they withdraw. In other words, it is not from a lack of courage of their convictions, but from an empirical certainty that their Republican colleagues will react entirely without convictions and opt instead to lie, pretending that the free flag that you get with your coffin amounts to supporting the troops. Will even flubs (intentionally) his guess at what Democratic convictions are. Democrats don't want to withdraw from Iraq because they think it will make that country tranquil. They want to withdraw because George W. Bush is using that theater to destroy the greatest military force in the world, and Democrats, like most Americans, would prefer he not do that.

Will goes on to complain that the funding restrictions proposed by Jack Murtha would "hamstring" the president (in much the same way taking away the allowance of a delinquent child "hamstrings" his ability to buy spray paint, I suppose), grousing as most Republicans do that requiring troops deployed to Iraq be fully rested, trained and armored is "disgusting" or "a plan for surrender." He then turns to the refusal of Senate Democrats to capitulate to GOP demands that they be permitted a vote on a resolution opposing such restrictions, and belittles it as "tiptoeing" toward... well, exactly what he began this section of his column by saying Democrats lacked the will to do.

He finally takes a turn toward the serious, though, in explaining the likely outcome of all this "tiptoeing":

Suppose Democrats write their restrictions on the use of forces into legislation that funds the war. And suppose the president signs the legislation but ignores the restrictions, calling them unconstitutional usurpations of his powers as commander in chief. What could Democrats do? Cross First Street NE and ask the Supreme Court to compel the president to acquiesce in congressional micromanagement of a war? The court probably would refuse to get involved on the grounds that this is a "political question."

Bang! Constitutional crisis. A conundrum with no easy exit. Either Congress caves and permits the war to continue to spiral out of control and destroy America's armed forces in this "cakewalk" gone awry, or it turns to the only remedy available to them in such a showdown: impeachment.

So, would you proceed with caution? Would you "tiptoe?" Not America's Bold Breakfast Table Pundit! He's for jumping in with both feet!

Yeah, right.

Will kindly ends his column by proving my earlier point: that Republicans will demagogue the issue to death. Which I suppose is appropriate, considering that they're already demagoguing the troops to death, in the most literal sense. Ending the war, he says, means Congress will "legislate decisive failure of the Iraq operation."

The failure of the Iraq operation, George, was written in the history books over the past four years and 3,000+ American deaths. Four years of blank checks from a Rubber Stamp Republican Congress Politburo, and four years of a virtual merry-go-round of Pentagon brass kept whirling as Commander Cuckoobananas fired anyone who wouldn't tell him that brazen carbombings of American bases, the now-weekly downing of billion dollar helicopters, and resort of the insurgency (in it's Last Throes^TM, mind you!) to the detonation of makeshift "dirty bombs" fueled with poison chlorine gas represents "progress."

The failure of the Iraq operation, Will would have us believe, becomes a legislative failure if Mommy and Daddy Congress are finally forced to ground Junior over four solid years of failing grades.

That's what George Will advises.

Today, raising the federal minimum wage is a bad idea whose time has come, for two reasons, the first of which is that some Democrats have an evidently incurable disease -- New Deal Nostalgia. Witness Nancy Pelosi's "100 hours" agenda, a genuflection to FDR's 100 Days. Perhaps this nostalgia resonates with the 5 percent of Americans who remember the 1930s....

[T]he minimum wage should be the same everywhere: $0. Labor is a commodity; governments make messes when they decree commodities' prices. Washington, which has its hands full delivering the mail and defending the shores, should let the market do well what Washington does poorly. But that is a good idea whose time will never come again.

Will's argument is made up of the usual bromides: the market should be allowed to set wage rates, a minimum wage increase will decrease employment, a minimum wage increase will slow down the economy, and my favorite: anyone making the minimum wage isn't truly poor.

Most of the working poor earn more than the minimum wage, and most of the 0.6 percent (479,000 in 2005) of America's wage workers earning the minimum wage are not poor.

Echidne, filling in for Atrios, finds the source for Will's information, and a little bit more:

Of those paid by the hour, 479,000 were reported as earning exactly $5.15, the prevailing Federal minimum wage. Another 1.4 million were reported as earning wages below the minimum. Together, these 1.9 million workers with wages at or below the minimum made up 2.5 percent of all hourly-paid workers.

Here are some more realities about the minimum wage, courtesy the Northwest Progressive Institute (pdf):

Economists look at the average wage nationally for workers who are not supervisors and calculate the minimum wage as a percentage of that. Just after 1997 when the federal minimum wage was raised to $5.15 per hour, it was worth 40% of the average wage.

Today, still at $5.15, it is worth only 31%. It has been at 50% or higher several times, most recently in 1968 (53%) (Economic Policy Institute). To reach that level today, the federal minimum wage would be over $8.00 per hour....

One way to grasp how low the federal minimum wage has fallen is to realize how little it provides a fulltime worker in a month
and in a year. At 40 hours per week, over 4.3 weeks, $5.15 means $885.80 per month.

Depending where in the country the worker lives, rent alone will eat up all or much of that. Over a full year, the worker will earn $10,712 – not enough for even a healthy single adult to live on. In 2005, 479,000 people earned this wage either full or parttime, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The policy paper has much more information to debunk the myths propogated by minimum wage opponents, those people like George Will who don't recognize what trying to live on $10,712 a year means. It's worth the read.