George Will's got nothin'

If you google "George Will Elizabeth Warren Wall Street," your top results will yield abundant links to the battling George Will and Elizabeth Warren, but next to nothing about Wall Street. Upon your searching eyes there shall be dumped a stream of articles concerning Will and Warren and "diversity," but no "Wall Street."

With reference to Will, this seems odd, does it not, considering that Warren's nearly exclusive professional target has been, yep, the mercenaries and cowboys and criminals and mountebanks of Wall Street--and not, rather logically, her non-existent Harvard Law classes and her non-existent professional endeavors in cultural studies. Yet it's the latter--cultural studies; diversity--on which Will concentrates today.

The last time (that I'm aware of) that Will obsessed about Warren--but, again, not Wall Street--was when Warren had uttered this Teddy Rooseveltesque paradigm:

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there — good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for.... You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea — God bless, keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

This, Will labeled the stuff of "a collectivist political agenda," just before reassuring us that what he amusingly persists in calling "conservatism," on the other hand, "urges government humility in the face of society’s creative complexity." In a more lucid and far less ideologically intoxicated moment, Will might have specified his conservatism of "government complacency" or "inattention" or "sloth" or "irresponsibility" or just downright "indifference" to all but the already, preposterously rich. Will prefers, however, an altogether imaginary version of conservatism.

Just as he prefers an imaginary version of Elizabeth Warren, an imaginary version of contemporary liberalism, and an imaginary version of what the Massachusetts U.S. Senate race is all about. Why? For the same reason the "distraction" campaign against Barack Obama is being conducted: "conservatives" got nothin' else.

Comments

[Susan Zoon]

Warren and Brown are in a virtual dead heat? REALLY?
Walker may not be ousted? REALLY? Obama in Romney neck and neck? REALLY?

Who are these pollsters talking to? No one I know.
Are they still only polling land-lines? Just sayin'.

[Jay Casey]

I'm not sure why George Will is so obsessed by Elizabeth Warren but I just dismissed his ranting - until last week's column attempting to call her a liar for claiming some Native American heritage. As an Oklahoman I was offended by his mocking and misleading column. He obviously doesn't realize (or care) that most of us Oklahomans have mxed heritage and at least a bit of Native American blood. Even the Chief of the Cherokee Nation is only 1/32nd Cherokee. I'm all for Ms. Warren.