I love George Will

[bill_schubert]

My first (and only... the other two were not around) father-in-law was a National Review subscriber and I used to read it avidly when I visited.  Didn't agree with much but the level of discourse, like listening to Justice Scalia and RBG talk, was thrilling to me.

One of the last remaining vestiges of that level of writing is George Will.  He is firmly a conservative and rightfully incensed at what has happened in the last 3 and a half years.  And anyone who can quote T.S. Eliot without referring to the way the world ends has my immediate attention.  There is hope when men of such stature and conviction are on the side of progressive hope.

And so, today, Mr. Will wrote in his WaPo opinion piece:

A political party’s primary function is to bestow its imprimatur on candidates, thereby proclaiming: This is who we are. In 2016, the Republican Party gave its principal nomination to a vulgarian and then toiled to elect him. And to stock Congress with invertebrates whose unswerving abjectness has enabled his institutional vandalism, who have voiced no serious objections to his Niagara of lies, and whom T.S. Eliot anticipated:

We are the hollow men . . .

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

or rats’ feet over broken glass . . .

Those who think our unhinged president’s recent mania about a murder two decades ago that never happened represents his moral nadir have missed the lesson of his life: There is no such thing as rock bottom. So, assume that the worst is yet to come. Which implicates national security: Abroad, anti-Americanism sleeps lightly when it sleeps at all, and it is wide-awake as decent people judge our nation’s health by the character of those to whom power is entrusted. Watching, too, are indecent people in Beijing and Moscow.

Of course, should the unthinkable happen and the 'vulgarian' is reelected, the last three stanzas of "The Hollow Men" will become our country's new motto.