I spent a few months last summer and fall blogging about the Washington Post op-ed page, which forced me to actually read the damned thing more thoroughly than I had in years.
At least during that stretch of time, Will was not smart, not honest, and didn’t even write particularly well. He is frequently prone to inventing his own facts, making abysmally bad arguments, and constructing columns that resembled random mental walks.
You may have noticed the surge of paranoia about Fairness Doctrine reinstatement on the right, these past few months. Guess who got the ball rolling on that, in his columns last August 17 and September 18? In the latter column, Will said, "Unless McCain is president, the government will reinstate the equally misnamed fairness doctrine.’ " In the former, he more or less assumed Congress would try to do so, saying that McCain should promise to veto it if elected.
He wrote a column on September 18, weeks after the extent of Palin’s willingness to repeat false ‘facts’ after they’d repeatedly been proven wrong was out there for all to see, saying: “Palin is as bracing as an Arctic breeze and delightfully elicits the condescension of liberals whose enthusiasm for everyday middle-class Americans cannot survive an encounter with one.”
As I said at the time: "I guess Will has missed her habitual lying, her running a small town like a martinet, her refusal to cooperate with a governmental investigation, her firing of officials who refused to participate in her personal vendettas against members of her family, and her seeking of hundreds of millions of dollars of Federal handouts for genuinely worthless and idiotic projects.
Or maybe those are the sort of small-town American values that Will finds so refreshing. Hard to tell." (Snarky, but true.)
In August, Will had a column about a marvelous little (only 200 students) inner-city charter school, being run by a Native American who made a fortune in real estate, then decided to do Good Works. The teachers, Will tells us, come from “come from places such as Harvard, Dartmouth, Oberlin, Columbia, Berkeley, Brown and Wesleyan.” The school was excellent. The problem with the column was the implication that this was some sort of possible solution to what ails America’s schools (that, of course, Democrats, unions, and liberals were trying to prevent): it doesn’t take but a minute’s thought to realize that there’s a replicability problem here. Will, of course, not only didn’t give the question that particular minute’s thought, but went back to the same well for another column in September. Nothing dishonest, just not too bright. A whole bunch of his columns during this period basically devolved into attempts to snark at Democrats, liberals, etc. on intellectually weak grounds.
Anyone who regards George F. Will as currently smart and honest is, IMHO, just not paying close attention. It’s quite possible that that’s the case with Nate Silver; he’s got a different beat, and he’s very good at it, but I doubt he’s given a whole bunch of Will columns a close reading anytime lately. And since Will has this reputation of intelligence and erudition, it isn’t surprising that Silver would give him the benefit of the doubt. Seven months ago, I would have.