For being so 'smart' why is George Will so stupid?

I rarely listen to the Sunday morning talk shows because they usually have the same cast of clowns every week and the moderators almost never correct blatant lies told by their guests. The only people invited on those shows are the same Washington insiders, most of whom had no clue what average Americans care about.

George Will spews out the identical ramblings week after week. He could be replaced with a 2 minute recording from 10-20 years ago and simply replayed each Sunday. He believes government should do absolutely nothing and nothing should ever get done to move our country forward. If dummies like George Will had their way our country would still be living in the 19th century.

I'd rather have regular people off the street as part of the Sunday morning panels than the usual cast of cronies spewing the same rhetoric over and over again.

What do you think about George Will? Do you believe he is 'smart' or do you believe he is living in an insulated bubble with absolutely zero understanding of what is going on in our country or what regular Americans believe?

a brilliant woman who often displayed flawless logic. Her problem was that her basic premises were all faulty and any logic based upon them came up with faulty conclusions.

So it is with Will.

Intelligence doesn't equate to being correct.

Hell, if I'm not wrong about at least 3 things before lunch, it means I've slept in.

her first published work was about an actress.

when she left russia her major aim was to become famous.

there was a reason she hung around the film industry.

are mutually exclusive, despite being perceived similarly.

He is s knee-jerk defender of the status quo, and rails against whatever he is told to by his benefactors.

I don't believe the man has an opinion on anything not given to him.

respected by most. He has taken a position of being
against the Wars, but this does not mean the Republican
Party is going to listen to him or even agree with him.
Who knows there may be room for a Left-Right Coalition
against the war, once we see who is elected.

On other matters, George is Republican and therefore
his framing of issues will be from a Republican Perspective.

We have lots of Intellectuals on the Left. We need to
advocate to the Networks for them to be given a seat
at the table also.

And no, baseball doesn't count.

I remember watching him what? Twenty-five years ago? and he has always come across as an idiot. I think most Americans still make the erroneous assumption that people get their jobs, or positions, because of superior intelligence or superior work ethic. Obviously George Will got his job because he is rethuglican partisan hack willing to push the corporate propaganda. He got his start on ABC when he surreptitiously helped prep Reagan for his debate against Carter, and then pretended to be a "journalist" being objective about the debate outcome. Obviously he has subsequently been rewarded handsomely, and you could make the argument that he is the grandfather of the "fake" journalist movement which spawned O'Reilly, Hannity, Beck, etc.

seriously ...

He is a lightweight who simply gets his thesaurus, picks a few big fancy words out and puts them into a column or to his preprepared remarks lives while not really saying much of anything ...

He created an image and has honed that image well ...

He was associated with Conrad Black who is nothing more than a gangster who was convicted of fraud and sentenced to 6 1/2 years in prison. His attorneys are attempting to get him a new trial. Black inherited his fortune that he used to raid companies and dismantle them.

In short, he's a narcissist and mean.

With his defense of partisanship. "It's what the parties do, this is what the process was designed to do." Bullshit. Not to the extreme Boehner and McConnell and the Tea Partiers are taking it.

It's one thing to say the sky is blue and then debate about what shade of blue it is. It is quite another to say the sky is blue, but have the other side argue that it is pink polka dots on a yellow background, and that's where the discussion ends. This is what the GOP is doing -- it does not want to reach any kind of consensus on anything, and will take the outrageous opposite side of the argument. That is being obstructionist. Not partisan. But Will (like the good conservative stooge he is) refuses to see it.

And you're right -- Will is a man simply living in the wrong century. He has a very limited, aristocratic view and if it doesn't fit his perception of reality then it doesn't exist or it isn't true. Look at his comments on global warming, as a quick example.

and cal me in the morning.

but it was at Cokey Roberts, what a rude bitch. She never let Ariana finish a sentence. And Dick would never shut up.

I've been reading his columns for almost 30 years. I don't always agree with him but at least he does his research. Around election time, he is more selective in WHAT research he selects for inclusion in his columns, but that's his self-proclaimed bias coming through. Once in a while I completely agree with his points. Most of the time I don't. Sometimes I'm simply entertained. The one thing he is NOT is "stupid". Now that I think about it, he might just be the ONLY Republican columnist who isn't stupid.

1) If you listen to Will, on a regular basis, he refers to some event that occurred more than 50 years ago. When he does, he spins that event to the FAR RIGHT. He does this to help (a) rewrite history, and (b) to ensure that the event he speaks of is one YOU have not studied lately, and so you can't argue with him about how he changed it.

2) If you listened to him over the last year, Will has been one of the right wing liars claiming that the Tea Party is NOT part of the GOP. That is, until the last 2-3 weeks or so ... NOW, he's calling the sheep home. The Tea party candidates are helping the Republicans find the message they "lost".

The guy is a right wing hack of the worst order.

He does get rather silly about things as an election approaches. On the other hand, if his article is on something like economic or social policies and how Congress is handling them, some of that shit from 50 years ago is quite relevant.

points. He sounds stupid to us but it pays his bills, and then some. My theory, anyway.

He's of no value to me.

Hopefully the OP will be reading tonight and post the link. The OP was about smart and ignorant conservatives and the article was about Will.

To sum it up Will has always had the Gov't hands off approach, he was on record about being against seat belt laws. He always wrote his articles from his home office which was situated at the corner of his house. One day someone ran a stop sign and hit a car. The lady in the car flew out the front window and was decapitated, with Will seeing the entire event. The next week Will wrote a column promoting seat belt laws. The author of the article summed it up that people like will can only comprehend something when they actually witness an event. They may be highly intelligent but have sub standard ability to comprehend cause and effect unless they are an eye witness.

a totally out of touch flunky for the PTB. nothing he says ever strikes me as particularly 'smart'.

He does a good job of towing the "party line" which is why he is popular in the mainstream media. He is not smart enough to say anything controversial so they like him a lot.

:puke:

But I will say maybe a touch stronger intellectually than Stein. Stein is a total drip, he's a partial drip.

Will is the quintessential psuedo-intellectual who, like Brooks, simply plays a dramatic role for the money.

Bleeeech. :puke:

that intelligence is not a barometer of sanity

Some are always going to be stupid no matter what

gets something right but much more wrong. Like Hawkowl upthread, I wrote him off years ago after learning how he had been present at the Reagan debate briefings using Carter's stolen briefing book. He had no journalistic scruples whatsoever about his own participation and didn't think of it as what it was - cheating.
I don't waste time thinking about whether he is intelligent or not. That is beside the point. He is an unethical journalist who consistently spins the Republican viewpoint and that's all that I need to know.

That's when you're so clear-eyed, tuned in to and aware of The Way Things Really Work that you lose sight of the fact that they didn't always work that way, and that someday they'll need to change again.

If you suffer from Crackpot Realism, it eventually becomes impossible for you to even imagine that another way of doing things is even remotely, theoretically possible.

Your whole life then becomes a long, slow walk backwards as you seek to deny the existence of the passage of time.

See also: "Because We've Always Done It That Way"; Roberts, Cokie.

George Will is precisely the same as all other Republican intellectuals, insofar as they are not intentionally intellectually dishonest in finding their erroneous conclusions. In fact, they quite figuratively drown their ideas in a bathtub filled to the overflowing with intellectual honesty. An incomplete honesty incapable of understanding the very real human equations of politics and governance.

Their issue is that they can't get away from their own reliance on logical empiricism, and political realities and human costs of governance are so much a greater part of the equation. In other words, the philosophical components of an ideology dealing with the proper execution of the responsibility of a governing state are incomplete without addressing the human cost of policy. It is why Ayn Rand never saw the end of her own positions as anything but logical in the abstract, in the concrete it has been well proven that they are as equally wrongheaded, calamitous, and catastrophic as they are logical. If anything, Rand should serve as the cautionary tale that a political viewpoint must at many points and various angles intersect the realities of the human condition, and the cost/benefit analysis must include this gooey human factor, which not coincidentally is the factor that most Republican intellectuals can't quantify easily. It offends them with its messiness. It repudiates dispassion and logic. It does not fit will with the stark Boolean algebra and sanitized syllogisms that mark their arguments. They got an A in logic and a C in philosophy and can't for the life of them figure out why.

George is really just another burgeoning Kwisatz Haderach studying at feet of the supreme economic fatalist's Bene Gesserit order. But when he attempts to transmute the water of life... well... it ain't pretty.

George gets it right sometimes when he doesn't have to address the issue of those unwieldy human factors. Give him something sanitary, free of great incursions of human considerations and he's fine. But he just doesn't understand the big issues... big issues are big precisely because there is a human factor of great consequence which goes along with them. Give him that and he arrives at the only logical conclusions he can, and they are, invariably, wrong. Not because there are flaws in the logic he used to arrive at his answers, but because he just did not, or perhaps cannot, understand the full breadth and depth of the question.

That tends to make a person stupid.

which was completely at odds with 100 % of all independent economic analysis of the game. That's the kind of intelligence George Will represents. He sounds smart, but is just another parrot of information someone else told him is true.

as if in case you don't know it, his opinion carries much more weight than yours

i don't take time for him