George Will, Republagogue (Updated)

Levin: "The contempt for Palin does, in fact, remind me of the contempt some had for Reagan"
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A demagogue is defined as a person, especially an orator or political leader, who gains power and popularity by arousing people's emotions, passions, and prejudices. Which is exactly what George Will did this morning, as Doug Powers observes:

George Will seems to think American voters are concerned that our nuclear arsenal could fall into the hands of… Sarah Palin:

“The threshold question, not usually asked, but it’s in everyone’s mind in a presidential election. ‘Should we give this person nuclear weapons?’ And the answer [in Palin's case], answers itself.”

“You know how chicks are… she’ll probably get upset with a Real Housewives of Atlanta episode and hit ‘the button’…”

Doug recalls that Will's soft-spoken hysteria reminds him of how the elitists demagogued Ronald Reagan, either as “a doddering old fool” without sufficient mental capacity or as a warmongering Hitler salivating at the prospect of starting a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union. But Reagan, as it turned out, negotiated with Gorbochev and signed the INF Treaty, which was the first nuclear arms control agreement to actually reduce nuclear arms, rather than establish ceilings that could not be exceeded.

And speaking of George Will and Ronald Reagan, Mark Levin has pointed out in defense of Sarah Palin:

George Will missed the Reagan Revolution not only in 1976 but as late as 1980. In the 1979 Republican Presidential Primary, his first choice was Howard Baker, his second choice was George H. W. Bush, and his third choice was Reagan. Not until days before the 1980 general election did he write on November 3, 1980 that Reagan deserved election. For all his wonderful columns, the Republican electorate better understood the needs of the nation and the excellence of a potential Reagan presidency than Will. It is hard to believe he was so wrong about a matter of such great import, despite Reagan's presence on the national scene for many years.

Lest you think Levin was just posturing to promote Gov. Palin, he worked in the Reagan White House, served as advisor to several members of Ronald Reagan's cabinet, then as Associate Director of Presidential Personnel and finally as Attorney General Edwin Meese's Chief of Staff.

Dan Riehl has a screen cap of a George Will column in which Mr. Bowtie admits that he preferred the two country club Republicans, one after the other, over Reagan. Dan commented:

If we had taken George Will's advice in 1979 and 1980, there would have been no Reagan Revolution. I don't mean to attack him. But it's a fact.

I wonder, where is it Will gets his impressions of, say, a Sarah Palin, a Herman Cain, a Michelle Bachmann, or whomever today? Perhaps it's some of the same people and media outlets he was paying attention to in 1979?

Doug has the likely answer to that question:

George Will is a conservative (usually), but he’s an Ivy League conservative, and as such he might have a tendency to think that anybody who didn’t go to Princeton, Harvard or Yale shouldn’t be trusted with anything more powerful than a Bic lighter.

Did George Will mention a similar concern in 2008 when a community organizer from Chicago was about to be handed the launch codes and subsequently disclose the size of the US nuke arsenal? No, because Obama’s smart — he went to Columbia and all.

Will's demagoguery of Gov. Palin does indeed sound reminiscent of the attacks on Reagan from the political left back in the day. Victor Davis Hanson recalls:

Liberals once slurred Reagan on every occasion. They screamed that he was unhinged, a reactionary nut who would take us to nuclear war (remember the last days of Jimmy Carter's 1980 campaign?).

So Will, the conservative columnist, has a thing or two in common with his elitist counterparts over on the left. And he has demonstrated beyond any doubt that he is a demagogue. Since Will is a Republican, albeit one with his left foot planted firmly on the country club's grounds, and he frequently disses good conservative Republicans, can we call him a republagogue? Whatever we call him, Dan is right on target with his suggestion that when it comes to choosing presidential candidates, conservatives would be better served by trusting our own instincts than letting elitists like George Will pick our candidates for us.

Related: Whitney Pitcher has more on misogynist Will's "unsubstantiated and disparaging remarks" here.

- JP

Levin Rewind: George Will, Charles K arrogant to tell us how to vote

"From my perspective, Sarah Palin is the real deal..."
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h/t: @JedediahBila

- JP

George Will defends Sarah Palin... again.

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NewsBuster Noel Sheppard reports that George Will, who had been critical of Gov. Palin in the past, nevertheless defended her Sunday, refuting lefty Peter Beinart's claim that she is somehow the GOP's version of George McGovern:

Beinart appearing on ABC's "This Week" claimed the GOP today resembles the Democrat Party between 1968 and 1972 when McGovern took it over and moved it so far to the left that it no longer represented the views of average Americans.

This ended up harming the Democrats in the long run leading Beinart to conclude, "The Republicans will do great in 2010, but I think Sarah Palin is really the Republicans' George McGovern."

Will smartly responded...

"But eight months ago, the worry was the worst case analysis for Republicans was that the Tea Party energies would be diverted in a third party candidacy splitting the conservative vote in this country. Sarah Palin, think of her what you will, has brought them into the Republican Party, and they are one of the main reasons for what is going to be probably decisive in November and that is the enormous enthusiasm and intensity gap that favors the Republicans this year."

Indeed.

Will also came to the governor's defense in July when he pwned far left columnist Ruth Marcus for the latter's gratuitous and hypocritical smear of the 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate.

Careful, George, lest you succumb to Sarah's charms. Resistance is futile.

- JP

Surprise! George Will defends Sarah Palin

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Though he has been critical of her in the past, conservative pundit George Will came to Sarah Palin's defense Sunday morning when Alaska's first woman governor was attacked by a liberal columnist. NewsBusters Associate Editor Noel Sheppard has the story:

George Will on Sunday used a Barack Obama quote to smack down a predictable attack on Sarah Palin made by the Washington Post's Ruth Marcus.

As the Roundtable discussion of ABC's "This Week" moved to the former Alaska governor's "Mama Grizzlies" video, Marcus voiced her unsurprising displeasure.

"I think it's the same, old, vapid, platitudinous Sarah Palin," said Marcus. "There is not a shred, not a shred of substance in this ad."

When he got his turn, Will tore Marcus apart, "On the vapidness meter, that ranks nowhere near, 'We are the ones we have been waiting for,' which was Obama's way of flattering the self-esteem of his supporters."

For a transcript of the segment, plus Noel's commentary, read his full article at NewsBusters.org.

- JP

George Will caught way off base

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George Will has been a Sarah Palin critic from the moment she stepped onto the national stage. Just days after John McCain selected the then-governor of Alaska to be his running mate, Will dismissed her in the first of what would be a series of his anti-Palin screeds:

"So, Sarah Palin. The man who would be the oldest to embark on a first presidential term has chosen as his possible successor a person of negligible experience."

Only in the elitist mind are ten years of local government executive experience and three years of the same at the state level (including a year as chair of an oil and gas commission) somehow "negligible."

In his latest attack on Gov. Palin, Will declares that the 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate:

"...is not going to be president and will not be the Republican nominee unless the party wants to lose at least 44 states."

Will's evidence? He argues that a Palin run for the White House would be like Barry Goldwater's ill-fated 1964 presidential campaign. But by attempting to put Goldwater and Palin into the same box, Will's argument reveals itself to be constructed of pine needles. As M Joseph Sheppard points out, the electoral landscape of today doesn't even remotely resemble that of 46 years ago:

In 1964 Lyndon Johnson was basking in the glow of a martyred president, the country was prosperous, the Congress, with Johnson's deft handling based on years of experience in the Senate as Majority Leader, was instituting the large spending of the "Great Society" and America's prestige in the world was unquestioned, especially after Kennedy's handling of the Cuban missile crisis.

No Republican candidate-left, right or centrist, could have come anywhere near defeating Johnson. The fact that Goldwater won six states (5 from the deep south plus his own Arizona) is in fact a remarkable achievement. In similar races against a hugely popular incumbent McGovern and Mondale were slaughtered.

Where Will goes off the track is not only disregarding the historic context of presidential popularity but also the shifting forces of historic political identity in the south. The deep south was a democratic party stronghold from the reconstruction era to 1948 when the first cracks appeared. These initial movements were to States Rights candidates (Thurmond and Byrd) who won a majority of electoral votes in a number of states (four states for Thurmond in 1948 and two for Byrd in 1960). The shift of the south to the Republican party commenced in earnest with Goldwater in 1964 with his five state win (matched by Wallace as an independent in 1968)

Since Goldwater's run in 1964 the south has seen a majority of states go Republican in every subsequent election- not exempting Obama's huge electoral vote pile in 2008 (including southerner Clinton's two runs) except for Carter's sweep of the south in 1976,

Thus to think that a Palin (or any Republican candidate for that matter) would not do at least as well as McCain did in the south and border states in 2012 when every factor that Johnson had going for him is, to this date, not mirrored or applicable in respect of Obama's presidency, is utterly ridiculous and not worthy of someone of Mr. Will's experience.

Joshuapundit notes these same differences and says that George Will just doesn't get Sarah Palin:

Normally, one would have expected her to fade away like most losing ex-running mates into respectable anonymity and most people scarcely remember their names a year later.

Yet in Sarah Palin, we have someone who has shown the ninja political skills to transcend this and become arguably the most watched and famous political figure in the entire country. And she did it her way, outside of the GOP establishment.

That should give an astute observer a clue that we're not simply talking about some semi-literate chillbilly with a pretty face and a few nifty slogans.

Although when she does adopt a slogan, notice how well she uses the language - death panels for instance, a phrase that [perfectly] defined the contempt for human life and Orwellian nature of of ObamaCare and stuck to the debate like superglue.

And as for the bit about her seeking friendly audiences...Will remains trapped in the mindset of the Old Media he is so much a part of. After what she observed first hand on the campaign trail ( and even afterwards ) she was astute enough to realize that most of Will's Left-bent, Obama worshiping colleagues were never going to give her or any other conservative candidate anything like a fair hearing - so she's bypassed them entirely and is concentrating on solidifying her base and winning over the swing votes by going to them directly.

That's what her op-eds, FaceBook page,the appearance on Oprah and "Going Rogue" are all about. If I were her, I'd do it exactly the same way and let the polls take care of themselves. Two years is an eternity in politics.

As Joshuapundit points out, Sarah Palin has already had "the equivalent of a nuclear war launched against her and her family," yet she's not only still standing, but running at the front of the pack.

Will should stick to writing about baseball. In his latest political outing, he managed to get himself caught by two sharp bloggers in a rundown between the bases.

See also: Mike Potemra's post at NRO's The Corner:

"The gravamen of [Will's] substantive objection to Palin... is that while she has 'showed grit . . . she has also showed that grit is no substitute for seasoning.' The thing about seasoning, though, is that it can come with time. I have seen already that Palin is a political natural, so I have little doubt she has the raw political talents to win people’s affections: In this regard, she reminds me of no one so much as of Bill Clinton, who in the 1992 primaries managed to turn catastrophe into political gold. He, too, used every attack against him as an opportunity to make the central political story entirely about himself, and emerged as a result as a highly sympathetic person in the eyes of middle America — sympathetic enough to defeat an incumbent president who not long before had enjoyed a 91 percent approval rating."

- JP

Sarah Palin Was Right #20: George Will on Domestic Energy Reserves

In her 2008 debate with Joe Biden, Sarah Palin argued:

"When we talk about energy, we have to consider the need to do all that we can to allow this nation to become energy independent. It’s a nonsensical position that we are in when we have domestic supplies of energy all over this great land."

Just the month before, Gov. Palin had said in her RNC acceptance speech:

"The stakes for our nation could not be higher... we cannot leave ourselves at the mercy of foreign suppliers... And take it from a gal who knows the North Slope of Alaska: We’ve got lots of both."

She wasn't just bragging on Alaska's natural resources, her experience as governor of an energy-producing state, or the energy expertise she acquired as an oil and gas commissioner. The United States is rich in oil and natural gas reserves; rich beyond our wildest dreams. In his most recent Townhall.com column, George Will says claims that we are running out of oil have repeatedly been made for the past ninety-five years:

"In 1914, the Bureau of Mines said U.S. oil reserves would be exhausted by 1924. In 1939, the Interior Department said the world had 13 years worth of petroleum reserves. Then a global war was fought and the postwar boom was fueled, and in 1951 Interior reported that the world had ... 13 years of reserves. In 1970, the world's proven oil reserves were an estimated 612 billion barrels. By 2006, more than 767 billion barrels had been pumped and proven reserves were 1.2 trillion barrels. In 1977, Scold in Chief Jimmy Carter predicted that mankind "could use up all the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade." Since then the world has consumed three times more oil than was then in the world's proven reserves."

But in the bold new world of the 21st century, surely we can at long last wash our hands of those messy old fossil fuels, right? Wrong. As Sarah Palin pointed out last month in an NRO opinion piece:

"We rely on petroleum for much more than just powering our vehicles: It is essential in everything from jet fuel to petrochemicals, plastics to fertilizers, pesticides to pharmaceuticals. According to the Energy Information Administration, our total domestic petroleum consumption last year was 19.5 million barrels per day (bpd). Motor gasoline and diesel fuel accounted for less than 13 million bpd of that. Meanwhile, we produced only 4.95 million bpd of domestic crude. In other words, even if we ran all our vehicles on something else (which won’t happen anytime soon), we would still have to depend on imported oil. And we’ll continue that dependence until we develop our own oil resources to their fullest extent."

Will says the demand for oil and gas is simply growing at such a rapid pace that the world is not likely to outgrow it's need for the stuff anytime soon:

"Keith O. Rattie, CEO of Questar Corporation, a natural gas and pipeline company, says that by 2050 there may be 10 billion people demanding energy -- a daunting prospect, considering that of today's 6.2 billion people, nearly 2 billion "don't even have electricity -- never flipped a light switch." Rattie says energy demand will grow 30 percent to 50 percent in the next 20 years and there are no near-term alternatives to fossil fuels."

Wind and solar power combined account for only one-sixth of 1 percent of U.S. energy consumption. Even if we were to embark on a crash program to develop renewables, and even with nuclear added to the mix, we will still need petro. But despite the fact that we've been extracting oil and gas for over a century, there's plenty more of it to be had:

"Edward L. Morse, an energy official in Carter's State Department, writes in Foreign Affairs that the world's deep-water oil and gas reserves are significantly larger than was thought just a decade ago, and high prices have spurred development of technologies -- a drilling vessel can cost $1 billion -- for extracting them."

So just how much oil and gas is still under our feet?

"Rattie says U.S. known reserves of natural gas, which are sure to become larger, exceed 100 years of supply at the current rate of consumption. BP recently announced a 'giant' oil discovery beneath the Gulf of Mexico. Yergin, writing in Foreign Policy, says "careful examination of the world's resource base ... indicates that the resource endowment of the planet is sufficient to keep up with demand for decades to come."

Significant new discoveries have been made in Louisiana (Haynesville Shale) and the Ozarks (Fayetteville Shale). And of course in Sarah Palin's Alaska, plentiful oil and gas reserves are under the North Slope and off the 49th States's shores. They are mostly conventional deposits, so no expensive new technologies are required to extract them.

All that is standing between domestic oil and gas supplies and our need for them are the environmentalists. Will say the environmental lobby will continue to say that fossil fuels are scarce resources because they believe that scarcity demands that government put its jack booted foot down (on our necks and in the way of domestic energy security) and allocate those "scarce" resources. Statism is a way of thinking which demands constant manufactured self-justification because it is a false doctrine.

Sarah Palin's argument to the environmentalists is this:

"Many of the countries we’re forced to import from have few if any environmental-protection laws, and those that do exist often go unenforced. In effect, American environmentalists are preventing responsible development here at home while supporting irresponsible development overseas."

"My home state of Alaska shows how it’s possible to be both pro-environment and pro-resource-development. Alaskans would never support anything that endangered our pristine air, clean water, and abundant wildlife (which, among other things, provides many of us with our livelihood). "

If only they would remove their fingers from inside their ear canals, stop chanting "we can't hear you" and listen, for a change.

- JP