George Will: Navy with a mission in mind
Russia’s ongoing dismemberment of Ukraine and the Islamic State’s erasing of Middle Eastern borders have distracted attention from the harassment of U.S. Navy aircraft by Chinese fighter jets over the South China Sea.
George Will: What’s behind the funding of the welfare state
The regulatory, administrative state, which progressives champion, is generally a servant of the strong, for two reasons.
George Will: Margaret Thatcher’s vigorous virtues
She had the eyes of Caligula and the lips of Marilyn Monroe. So said Francois Mitterrand, the last serious socialist to lead a major European nation, speaking of Margaret Thatcher, who helped bury socialism as a doctrine of governance.
George Will: Schools push a curriculum of propaganda
The real vocation of some people entrusted with delivering primary and secondary education is to validate this proposition: The three R’s — formerly reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic — now are racism, reproduction and recycling. Especially racism.
George Will: William Zinsser and the art of good writing
When asked to explain the brisk pace of his novels, Elmore Leonard said, “I leave out the parts that people skip.” You will not want to skip anything in William Zinsser’s short essays written for the American Scholar magazine’s Web site and now collected in “The Writer Who Stayed,” a book that begins with him wondering why “every year student writing is a little more disheveled.”
George Will: DOMA is an abuse of federalism
The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is an exception to the rule that a law’s title is as uninformative about the law’s purpose as the titles of Marx Brothers movies (“Duck Soup,” “Horse Feathers,” “Animal Crackers”) are about those movies’ contents.
George Will: When solitude is torture
“Zero Dark Thirty,” a nominee for Sunday’s Oscar for Best Picture, reignited debate about whether the waterboarding of terrorism suspects was torture. This practice, which ended in 2003, was used on only three suspects.
George Will: Facing up to what we did in interrogations
“You,” said Jack Nicholson’s Jessep to Tom Cruise’s Kaffee, “have the luxury of not knowing what I know.” Viewers of the movie “Zero Dark Thirty ” will, according to some informed persons, lose the luxury of not knowing about hard but morally defensible things done on their behalf.
George Will: Calvin Coolidge, commander in brief
Before Ronald Reagan traveled the 16 blocks to the White House after his first inaugural address, the White House curator had, at the new president’s instruction, hung in the Cabinet room a portrait of Calvin Coolidge. The Great Communicator knew that “Silent Cal” could use words powerfully — 15 of them made him a national figure — because he was economical in their use, as in all things.
George Will: Recipe for conservative revival
Happy days are not here again, but they are coming for conservatives. Barack Obama — with the lowest approval rating (according to Gallup, 50 percent, four points lower than that of the National Rifle Association) of any reelected president when inaugurated since World War II — has a contradictory agenda certain to stimulate a conservative revival.
George Will: Some questions for Hagel
Senate hearings on the nomination of Chuck Hagel to be defense secretary will be a distinctive Washington entertainment, a donnybrook without drama. He should be confirmed: Presidents are due substantial deference in selecting Cabinet members because they administer presidential policies and, unlike judicial appointments, they leave when their nominators do.
George Will: Our decadent democracy
Connoisseurs of democratic decadence can savor a variety of contemporary dystopias. Because familiarity breeds banality, Greece has become a boring horror. Japan, however, in its second generation of stagnation is fascinating. Once, Japan bestrode the world, jauntily buying Rockefeller Center and Pebble Beach. Now Japanese buy more adult diapers than those for infants.
George Will: Fixing the tax code at the cliff’s edge
If you have worked hard for five decades, made pots of money and now want to squander it all in Las Vegas on wine, women and baccarat, go ahead.
George Will: Bewitched by Obama
Even Jonathan Swift, who said that promises and pie crusts are made to be broken, might have marveled at the limited shelf life of Barack Obama’s promise of a balanced deficit-reduction plan, substantial spending cuts to accompany revenue increases.
George Will: A cliff of their own choosing
With a chip on his shoulder larger than his margin of victory, Barack Obama is approaching his second term by replicating the mistake of his first.
George Will: Digesting the lessons of Twinkies
Earthquakes may strike, dynasties may fall and locusts may devour the crops, but Oldsmobile and Pan Am are forever. Never mind.
George Will: For these things, we give thanks
Among the things for which Americans can be thankful on this weekend devoted to such is Washington’s resolve to temper severity with mercy: It will seriously — this time we really mean business; we are not going to be Greece, or worse, Illinois — restrain spending but will not balance the budget on the backs of popcorn eaters.
George Will: Answerable to no one
There can be unseemly exposure of the mind as well as of the body, as the progressive mind is exposed in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), a creature of the labyrinthine Dodd-Frank legislation. Judicial dismantling of the CFPB would affirm the rule of law and Congress’s constitutional role.
George Will: A reformed Republican party
Conservatives should jauntily sing as Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers did in a year when the country’s chin was on the ground. Conservatives are hardly starting from scratch in their continuing courtship of the electorate, half of which embraced their message more warmly than it did this year’s messenger.
George Will: Obama’s campaign goes empty and strident
Energetic in body but indolent in mind, Barack Obama in his frenetic campaigning for a second term is promising to replicate his first term, although simply apologizing would be appropriate.