George Will calls for the smelling salts
by digby
He liked to faint dead away:
Oh dear me. Fox News superstar George Will is very offended. He’s calling for the smelling salts over that rude young man Barack Obama’s “adolescent” rhetoric. (Obama used the word “stinkburger,” a word so vile that poor George practically collapsed onto his fainting couch.)
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) had recently released his budget, so Obama expressed his disapproval by calling it, for the benefit of his academic audience, a “meanwich” and a “stinkburger.”
Try to imagine Franklin Roosevelt or Dwight Eisenhower or John Kennedy or Ronald Reagan talking like that. It is unimaginable that those grown-ups would resort to japes that fourth-graders would not consider sufficiently clever for use on a playground.
Heavens to betsy! What will that childish miscreant do next? Tell a U.S. senator to go f**k himself? Oh no, sorry, that was Vice President Dick Cheney, whose return to the halls of power was widely celebrated among the denizens of the Beltway as a sign that the “grown-ups were back in town.” (And said “grown-up” was still snorting and high-fiving to his buddies about it years later.)
That's from my latest at Salon. Do read on. It's fun.
Will has a funny way of ignoring some of our recent Republican president's er... colloquialisms. And his memory of FDR, JFK and Reagan is a little spotty too. You might be surprised at just how juvenile they could be at times. Just like the rest of us. Well, except for Will, who yearns for the Victorian era which, if he actually lived in it, would have him taking to his bed for weeks at a time gulping down the laudenum like it was water. People were, shall we say, a bit on the coarse side. Especially in politics.
It should be also be noted that Will's prurient Victorianism was best displayed when he eagerly joined in the Lewinsky fun by superciliously sniffing about the "vulgarians" in the White House even as he drooled over every last lurid detail. Of course, he wasn't alone in that. He and Cokie Roberts had numerous breathless encounters together --- chests heaving, foreheads gleaming with perspiration, eyes bright with excitement --- in which they tut-tutted the president's immorality while they shared each dirty revelation with the national TV audience. On Sunday mornings no less. Lord have mercy!
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