I mentioned George in the last post. So, I went back to read his column. (Sorry the Post has a pay wall) It was worse than I imagined. Both rational and deluded.
I have some things to say about it and I feel like writing a letter to the Post where fans of Democracy are fleeing as their owner plys our grifting President with $40 million to write the movie equivalent of an “appendix” a biopic about Melania Trump. If you want to see her just look at the gloating News coverage in Russia of Trump’s victory in the November election where it all was broadcast on Russia’s major source of TV propaganda with blurred out pictures of Melania Trump’s heyday shooting nude photos.
George Will as an APPENDIX
My take on Will forty years ago was that he was a wannabe fifty cent word using William Buckley cozying up to the world of Reagan Republicanism. I have a modest 84 posts in this blog that mention Ronald Reagan. He was a towering figure in the merging of the worst of southern Democratic politics with milk toast Republican moderation.
Will belongs to a long line of Republican commentators back when the commentators partisanship still required some level of rational analysis as opposed to today’s phallus sucking by Fox News celebrities. In this Appendix piece Will takes a page from Republicans of the Reagan era who hated spending public money on a BBC like news service that gave reasonably accurate analysis which could be unflattering to Republicans. Back then PBS wasn’t far from the orbit of the three tv networks news or major American News paper editorial pages. But it was popular with well educated voters and the subsidy given to the service wasn’t worth pissing off the best informed voters.
However in the Bush years Presidential candidate Senator Bob Dole found a way to stifle the radio portion NPR by opening up lots of unused frequencies in rural areas and giving religious entities first dibs in acquiring them in the locations where PBS was typically found on the dial. This was when religious stations took more conservative stands but had not yet become a wing of an increasingly unhinged evangelical Trump humping cheering squad.
But I take Will’s point. To the extent that the college educated or addled reporters of NPR acted like the college educated or addled reporters on other national news outlets it was hard for Republicans being scrutinized for shorting public education and championing flat taxes to enrich the already rich to get sympathetic treatment. When Reagan with his eleventh commandment left the scene with his 11th Commandment “to find no fault in a fellow Republican” and began purging, through primaries, any of the old moderate Republicans who had been my heroes……like the ones that made sure Tricky Dick flew home in disgrace were kicked to kingdom come.
Today the NPR stories are often like those in local tv news markets of the past. Pretty much identical to the local newspaper coverage. But like in today’s Duluth, Minnesota with a shell of its old Duluth News Tribune there is little to report because a paper journalist isn’t out there covering the news. If you can write a news release you can get on the news but there are fewer and fewer reporters covering local news leading to a great forgetting or never learning by citizens in small towns across America. This is where NPR can shine by telling Americans what the hell is going on as President Trump lets Putin’s TASS news service take the place of the venerable Associated Press. The AP’s crime? Not calling the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of Trump’s armpit which the President demanded with one of his feckless Executive Actions.
Today’s NPR is what the old Voice of America was to nations behind the Iron Curtains news and truth blackout. A source of news. And now the VOA is being stifled as Russia’s Putin smothers his nation’s people with lies of the same caliber as Donald Trumps. The Invasion of Ukraine is a great success just as Tariffs is the most beautiful word. This is the world human appendix Will is doing his best to turn over to the honest free people at Fox and Trump News.
