From E.J. Dionne, possibly the nicest guy in the whole world, telling George Will he’s a bounder and a cad for treating Elizabeth Warren badly:
This is a tour de force. My colleague has brought out his full rhetorical arsenal to beat back a statement that he grants upfront is so obviously true that it cannot be gainsaid. Will knows danger when he sees it.
Here’s the backstory. Elizabeth Warren gave a speech a few weeks ago making the unremarkable—almost banal—point that businesses depend on roads and schools and courts and police protection and lots of other products of our tax dollars. They don’t just spring out of Zeus’s forehead. George Will, obviously in a cold sweat over the possibility that the ragamuffins in Zuccotti Park might take this to heart, admitted that Warren was obviously right but then sprang for her throat, accusing her of not merely making a case for fair levels of taxation, but of wanting to convert the United States into some kind of Leninist collectivist hellhole. It went downhill from there.
I haven’t bothered blogging about any of this before, since Will long ago allowed his sense of nightmarish panic over creeping lefty totalitarianism to destroy whatever decent instincts he used to have. But Dionne’s column does give me an excuse to post Warren’s video, which I haven’t done before. So here you go. This is for my sister, who’s not especially political but finds Warren an inspiration nonetheless. Bankers beware.
