Disdainful of Reagan supporters in 1974, Will suggested a third-party for “them” to cleanse the Republican party.
Here’s a guy whose “sell-by” date has expired some time ago
As reported in The Last Refuge by Sundance:
George Will Gives Middle Finger To Angry American Conservatives: “Get Over It” !!….
George Will and numerous other GOP Establishment pundits are virtually trampling over each to see who can be the most dismissive and insulting toward anyone who suggests that Donald Trump may be having a positive effect on the presidential campaign by raising the profile of major issues of concern to the American electorate.
Poor old George is hard pressed to probe deeply into his formidable vocabulary to come up with sufficiently nasty things to say about Trump and the ““vulgar, unwashed masses“” who want to see The Donald continue to shake things up in the Republican race for the nomination.
There is also a growing number of Trump’s competitors in the race who question whether he is “actually a Republican”. Carly Fiorina is one of the latest: “It’s not clear if Trump is a Republican”.
Like other candidates and Establishment Republicans, Ms. Fiorina is distressed that Mr. Trump has not indicated if he would support any old candidate the Party nominates.
That seems to be the popular definition of a “Republican” preferred by the establishment and big donors to the party who support JEB Bush or maybe John Kasich.
But then, these are the same folks who seem to have a problem accurately defining other popular and traditional terms. For example: What part of “illegal immigrant” do esn’t Sen. McConnell, Speaker John Boehner, the US Chamber of Commerce, and establishment darling, JEB Bush understand?
Or how about the term “campaign promises”. That seems to be a term that Mitch McConnell differentiates from “real promises”.
A “campaign promise” is something you make to the ignorant base of your political party to get their vote but which you have no intention of fulfilling.
A “real promise” is something you make to the RNC, like “Support me and I’ll crush those dimwit tea partiers”, or to the US Chamber of Commerce, like, “we’ll help Obama bring in as many low labor cost illegal immigrants as he wants to”. Now those are “promises” you keep, in Mitch McConnell’s world.
Then there’s the term “defund”. A lot of us “unsophisticated” conservatives concur with the standard dictionary definition: ” verb, prevent from continuing to receive funds “.
But it seems Sen. McConnell and Speaker Boehner understand the term as, “dat’s ‘de fund’ (taxpayer “contributions”) we use to gets da votes we needs to stay here in DC in our present gigs”.
Read the short Last Refuge post. This Jeffrey Lord article posted at Conservative Review (linked to by Last Refuge) is a take-down of Will’s Republican elitism.
It is worth recalling here that once upon a time George Will was as down on Ronald Reagan as he is now on Donald Trump – and has been in the past on Texas Senator Ted Cruz. In a November 12, 1974 column appearing in the Washington Post on a potential 1976 challenge by Reagan to incumbent Establishment GOP President Gerald Ford, (titled “Ronald Reagan, the GOP and ’76”), Will wrote of Reagan:
But Reagan is 63 and looks it. His hair is still remarkably free of gray. But around the mouth and neck he looks like an old man. He’s never demonstrated substantial national appeal, his hard-core support today consists primarily of the kamikaze conservatives who thought the 1964 Goldwater campaign was jolly fun. And there’s a reason to doubt that Reagan is well suited to appeal to the electorate that just produced a Democratic landslide. If a Reagan third-party would just lead the ‘Nixon was lynched’ crowd away from the Republican Party and into outer darkness where there is a wailing and gnashing of teeth, it might be at worst a mixed course for the Republican Party. It would cost the party some support, but it would make the party seem cleansed.
Four years later, Will’s first and second choices for the 1980 GOP nomination were Tennessee Senator Howard Baker and George H. W. Bush, neither seen by conservatives of the day as “devoted to the project William F. Buckley began six decades ago with the founding in 1955 of National Review — making conservatism intellectually respectable and politically palatable.”
There is much more in the Jeffrey Lord article and it is highly recommended.
DLH
