Recently, I’ve slackened off making fun of George F. “the ‘F’ stands for ‘Frabjous’, son” Will, first because George has largely been a good boy, leaving the Republican Party in disgust with its abandonment of free market policies, doubling down on that disgust at the nomination of Donald Trump, and going the extra mile by urging the defeat of any Republican who supports him, even at the cost of turning over full control of the federal establishment to the damn Democrats, and second because the guy really is getting kind of old, even older than me, which is (frankly) really getting up there. But recently George has both excelled and disappointed, so I figure he deserves a shout out both ways.
The “good” shout out is to his recent column, longly titled “One of humanity’s remarkable achievements is the absence of the use of a third nuclear weapon”, whose uncommon good sense was unfortunately undermined by an earlier one, “The thugocracy of Vladimir Putin’, which was, in fact, full of good sense as well until a last gratuitous swerve.
The more recent piece was naturally occasioned by the 65th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, Georgie taking a lot of his good sense from a recent, and, again, largely excellent book by another of my long-time sparring partners (entirely one-sided, of course), Fred Kaplan, The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War.1 As George notes, and Fred documented, the U.S. military would say just about any damn thing about nuclear weapons in order to swell the Pentagon’s budget. George explains the kind of “mission creep” the Air Force resorted to when it seemed like the U.S. might actually have to stop buying new bombs, missiles, and bombers:
The Air Force, exuberantly multiplying potential Soviet targets to match the expanding U.S. nuclear arsenal, assigned 17 nuclear weapons to a Soviet base inside the Arctic Circle, where Soviet planes would land after bombing U.S. sites. U.S. nuclear weapons were allocated not just to Soviet tanks but also to the factory that produced them, the steel mill that supplied the factory, the ore-processing facility that supplied the mill, and the ore mine.
In light of such unrestrained gluttony for overkill, George says, humanity desperately needs to go on a diet:
The human capacity for such lunacy suggests that people are too optimistic when they say that the vast majority of human beings who will ever live have not yet lived. If true, this will require an endless supply of the skill, leavened by luck, that has gotten humanity through its most recent 27,394 days.
So well said, George! So well said! So how come, a few weeks earlier, reviewing the brutal career of Vladimir Putin, which is indeed repulsive in the last degree, Georgie insisted on using the occasion, in his concluding paragraph, to take a wild poke at Barack Obama? To wit:
President Barack Obama in 2014 dismissed Russia as merely a “regional power.” Some region: The Eurasian landmass is dominated by, and Europe is menaced by, a thugocracy whose president is pleased with the U.S. president.
May I reply with a hearty “huh”? The Eurasian landmass is not dominated by Russia. If you’re counting people rather than, you know, reindeer, Russia has a population of about 150 million, almost 10 times smaller than China or India, which share the same landmass. As for trembling Europe, the European Union has a population close to 450 million, three times that of Russia, with an economy far more massive and sophisticated. Ever buy a Russian car, George? A Russian computer? A Russian smart phone? As for military spending, Russia spends an all but pitiable $65 billion a year, less than one tenth the U.S. budget, while Germany, France, Great Britain, and Italy spend a collective $175 billion a year. China spends $260 billion a year; India $71 billion; Japan $47 billion; South Korea $44 billion. Sure, Putin has been awful; is awful; will be awful. But Vladimir’s awfulness should not be an excuse for the Pentagon to spend another $1 trillion to blow up Russian steel mills and iron mines, which it will oh so gladly do if given half a chance. In the future, George, try to not let your rhetoric outrun your facts.
Afterwords
Back in the day—June 24, 2014, to be precise—I noted, or rather snarled, in a little piece titled “George F. Will, finding that elusive middle ground for right-wing hypocrisy”
In a column largely, and justly, devoted to pointing out that President Obama’s excellent Libyan adventure, like his predecessor’s Iraqi incursion, was based on false pretenses and has resulted more in chaos than democracy, Georgie F then launches as remarkable a series of non sequitur, false assumption, and disingenuous innuendo as I’ve seen since, well, since the last George F. Will column
Throughout Obama’s eight years, George consistently snickered at the president’s “flaccid” foreign policy—flaccid! flaccid! Oh, Georgie, you bitch!—while consistently, and correctly, faulting the president, when it came to, you know, substance, for his compulsive interventionism, which, as George noted, invariably resulted in disaster. Apparently, there is something about President Obama that triggers the “cheap shot” response in Georgie’s medulla oblongata. Georgie’s just so used to sucking up to the right that, even when he’s abandoned it, his ganglia betrays him.
Olá e obrigado por este blog é uma verdadeira inspiração .. Karolina Elliot Beaston