One of America's most prominent conservative columnists wants Republicans to lose in 2020

[sheshe2]

While Will has harsh words for Trump -- "this low-rent Lear raging on his Twitter-heath has proven that the phrase malignant buffoon is not an oxymoron" -- he saves his true condemnation for the members of Congress who have enabled the President.

Writes Will:
"In life's unforgiving arithmetic, we are the sum of our choices. Congressional Republicans have made theirs for more than 1,200 days. We cannot know all the measures necessary to restore the nation's domestic health and international standing, but we know the first step: Senate Republicans must be routed, as condign punishment for their Vichyite collaboration, leaving the Republican remnant to wonder: Was it sensible to sacrifice dignity, such as it ever was, and to shed principles, if convictions so easily jettisoned could be dignified as principles, for ... what? Praying people should pray, and all others should hope: May I never crave anything as much as these people crave membership in the world's most risible deliberative body."

That is an absolutely stunning paragraph from anyone. That it is from one of the longtime leading minds of the conservative movement is all the more devastating.

CNN

[wryter2000]

1. Low rent Lear

Someone will have to explain that to the malignant buffoon.

[leftieNanner]

2. He'll think George was talking about a private jet.

[wryter2000]

4. Good one

[iluvtennis]

17. + 1. nt

[2naSalit]

30. It works either way!

[procon]

9. George F. Will always delivers a thoughtful and

deliberately intellectual essay. He is an old school Republican, like my pops, a figure from a bygone era when that party stood for academic rigor, probity and rectitude.

[wryter2000]

10. True

And he called the Republicans in Congress, “invertebrates.”

[leftieNanner]

3. I read this in the paper this morning

The entire column is worth reading. He absolutely SCORCHES the squatter in Our White House and his Congressional enablers.

May he be right and they all go down in flames.

[sheshe2]

7. It was an excellent read.

You are correct, he shreds them all with a very sharp scalpel.

[JHB]

6. I welcome George to the year 1998.

Everything he wrote about Republicans was true then, too.

[jimlup]

8. The nation truly is in a strange moment...

I honestly can not predict what happens from here.

I hope that somehow we make it to November 3rd and the Joe wins with such an overwhelming landslide that it can't possibly be contested. We also must take back the Senate.

November 3rd can't come soon enough and honestly, and I hate to say this. It may not be soon enough...

[totodeinhere]

21. What do you think might happen before the election?

The election is going to happen. Trump can't stop it. He knows that. Only Congress can change the date of the election.

[wnylib]

23. What could happen before Nov 3?

Civil war, perhaps. Military vehicles on the streets, with soldiers lobbing tear gas and other chemical weapons.

Hard to reach your polling place dodging bullets and tear gas.

[totodeinhere]

44. Actually that is my biggest fear that he will use either the pandemic or the protests or both

as cover to try to steal the election again. And with Moscow Mitch in charge of the Senate it will be hard to get any legislation through that might prevent that.

[wnylib]

45. If it comes to that, Congress will be

irrelevant. The only relevancy at that point will be who has the best fighting strategy and the most weapons. Our military forces would split and it would be down to Magat militias and whoever among us can fight.

As far fetched as it all sounds, it could happen. That stunt in front of St. John's was a rallying cry. He is feeling folks out to see how far he can go and who will stand with him. He has no intention of ever leaving office.

It only remains to be seen how he tries to stay in and how we get him out.

[jimlup]

41. I honestly don't know that the nation will survive ... and I don't say that lightly.

We are in a modern version of a civil war. And it has now moved into the hot phase. I don't know how it will end. I could speculate but I think Trump now becomes a Wild Card. He could fucking do anything. It isn't clear how he will react.

I hope that we can all calm down a bit but I'm not sure that is possible. It is summer and the streets are as hot as I've ever seen in my life. I'm 62 years old. This is all new. Where it ends, I hope it ends in an overwhelming democratic majority but I don't that it will. I fear worse.

Again, Trump is a wild card. He is unpredictable. He is insane, and, he is a narcissist, so as far as that allows prediction, maybe we can see. He has done the very worst thing he could do which is escalate the situation by invoking the military in civilian policing. That is the road to full open civil war. What that really looks like and how that ends, I have no fucking clue.

Just to game this out. And this is total speculation - what if something big suddenly happened? Like one of the anarchist organizations or right wing terrorists bombed a major government building. What then? We've already seen ignition of a fire. What if a bomb now goes off?

[totodeinhere]

43. You lay out some very scary scenarios. Thanks for your reply. n/t

[wnylib]

46. I'm only 8 years older than you. Don't you

remember talk of a revolution in the 60's? And there was plenty of open violence at the time. The Beatles even did a song on it -- Revolution.

Some of us feared what Nixon would do when he was cornered during Watergate. But there were rational Republicans then who talked him into resignation.

Today, Republican leaders in power are as much a part of the problem as Trump himself.

Your assessment and speculation on the situation are the same as mine. Trump knows he is losing the vote. Right now he is feeling out the amount of backing vs. opposition he would get from an overt military move.

Hunkering down in the WH was a stunt to create alarm among the faithful. He was never in any danger and he knew it. The Bible waving stunt was a call out to the faithful. Just because they haven't responded yet does not mean they are not organizing for it.

He wants some sort of event to justify drastic (probably military) action. He is setting the stage for it. If nrcessary he will create it.

The best thing we can do now is to make people aware of what he is doing in order to cut support for him and increase opposition to him. Biden is doing a good job of demonstrating a calm, rational alternative.

[jimlup]

48. Yes

I remember the '60's quite well. From my perspective, those who were protesting were the cool older kids. I only wanted to be just like them.

Now that I am a mature adult, I think differently about that time. While there are parallels we can relate to those younger than us, there are also grave differences.

I also think that in most ways this is worse. We are in the midst of a pandemic and recession that is bordering on a depression with massive unemployment. It also appears that Trump is significantly more unhinged that Nixon and Nixon was pretty far out there!

[czarjak]

11. He'd still go back to The Fifties if he could.

[erronis]

28. Ahhh yes. The days of armchair clotted-speech pundits like Wm F. Buckley.

I think Atlas Shrugged was still being debated as a work of literature and people were arguing about the Media vs. the Message.

[FM123]

12. Kind of stunning, really.

This is the kind of thing one expects from a Democrat, not a repub....

[DrToast]

13. Will is a man without an audience

Anyone that would listen to him has likely already left the Republican party.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

15. As one 'never trumper' put it, ...

"There are enough of us [never trump Republicans] for a dinner party, but not a political party."

[patphil]

18. That's true, but this election will be won in the middle.

Moderate Republicans, moderate Democrats, and all those Independents.
They are the ones that will pick the next President, and decide if the Democrats should control the Senate.

Will still has some audience there.

[erronis]

29. Those that will vote, or be allowed to vote, or have their votes counted.

Moderates aren't ones to get out and brave antagonizing forces arrayed along the voting path.

[get the red out]

14. I have spent a lot of years disagreeing with him

But he doesn't want democracy to go down in flames any more than we do. He knows the cancer in the R party needs to be destroyed, even if it kills the patient, so it won't destroy the country.

[patphil]

39. I fully agree with you.

[maxsolomon]

16. The GOP is no longer George Fwill's party.

They are the MSSA and QAnon Party now, not the Bow-Tie Party.

[wnylib]

24. MSSA?

[progressoid]

26. Methicillin-sensitive Staphylococcus aureus

No, that can't be right.

[maxsolomon]

27. Military-Style Semi-Automatic

which is the proper term you have to use when debating a Gunner or 2nd Amendment Absolutist (as opposed to "Assault Weapon" ) if you don't want to be dismissed out of hand.

[Botany]

31. MSSA

Mucus sucking sleazy assholes

[robbob]

38. You win...

(So far...)😁

[hatrack]

49. Meryl Streep Stands Apart?

Just wondering . . .

[wnylib]

50. Stands above. She is a superior actor.

[Jopin Klobe]

19. "...one of the longtime leading minds of the conservative movement ..." ...

... faint praise indeed ...

[erronis]

32. "A back-handed compliment"

There are so many ways to convey scorn while seemingly praising kaiser.

[totodeinhere]

20. Whatever he says now, I do not trust Will.

George Will has gone along with most of the crime that has been committed by the Republican Party until just recently.

[erronis]

33. I trust him as much as any other (r).

Too many years of spouting gibberish in order to enrich themselves.

Now that he has is and is seeing the end-days approaching, time for a few mea culpas. (Is he also a roman catholic, a opus-dei, a jesuit?) Just an aside.

[Red Pest]

22. Have read Will's columns over the years, but generally disagreed with him

However, I always found that he we wrote well and I really enjoyed his pieces on baseball. Sure George Will is a conservative, but I am more than willing to have him and other conservatives join with us to form a broad coalition to run Trump and his sycophants out of office (and into prison for their corruption and crimes).

For whatever it is worth, my father (of blessed memory), who was always a very strong progressive, had me read Will and other conservative writers to make sure that I understood the differences between progressives and conservatives.

[McCamy Taylor]

25. George Will writes very well when he has something

Worth writing about. His piece on why W. ‘s personal attorney Harriet Myers was not fit for the SCOTUS is one of my favorites.

[Soph0571]

34. Oh boom.

Ouch but right, and hopefully!!!!

[BannonsLiver]

35. Aldo Raine says

?w=400&c=1

[DFW]

36. George Will is one of the few who could actually talk a square peg into a round hole

And, if it were gullible enough, the square peg would believe it fit.

George can write complete nonsense, conceal it in his erudite prose, and fool Trumpanzees into thinking he HAS to be right, because, well, anyone that uses big words THAT easily, HAS to know everything, right?

But when his sense of pride or honor is wounded, he can sharpen his prose to samurai sword sharpness, and if there is one thing that offends him worse than a naïve left, it's an oafish right. An oafish right offends him to the core because he is from the right, and he is, whatever else you might think of him, not an oaf. He is mortified by being associated with them, much less being thought of as one of them. His conversion from right wing ideologue to disillusioned conservative didn't take much, at long last. All that was needed was for the oafish wing of the Republican Party to assert its ham-fisted dominance. He always wanted them to vote, he just never wanted them to run things. Oops.

I have no idea if he knows any German, but I'd sent him a wall plaque with the words, "Die ich rief, die Geister...." That's from the Sorcerer's Apprentice by Goethe. "The spirits that I have summoned....(I can now no longer be rid of them)." George would very much like to be rid of them. So would we, but HE is partly responsible for summoning them in the first place. I don't think he has yet figured out that when he is pointing his finger, part of the time, it needs to be pointed into his mirror.

[johnthewoodworker]

37. The republican conversion to rational thought is too little too late. I don't know what will

happen next, but I bet every month, from now to January, will be more bizarre and unpredictable than the one before. Oh, and cat grabber is not leaving.

[wnylib]

47. Not without a very literal fight.

He will not leave the WH unless physically dragged out.

But, by whom? And how?

[GeorgiaPeanut]

42. Even though I have mostly disagreed with Georege Will

I love his writing. He has a gift. "Malignant buffoon" is not an oxymoron made me laugh.

He is right about senate republicans to be routed "as condign punishment for their Vichyite collaboration" - hits the nail right on the head.

I wonder if Collins, McSally, Burr and Gardner are not doing an "I could have had a V8" facepalm when they could have removed the corrupt orange hemorrhoid.