Words of Will

Some gems from George Will commenting on the president's State of the Union speech.

He called for a third stimulus (the first was his predecessor's, in February 2008) although the s-word has been banished in favor of "jobs bill." It will inject into the economy money that government siphons from the economy, thereby somehow creating jobs. And you thought alchemy was strange.

If at first..er..second you don't succeed, keep ramming wasteful government spending down everyone's throat. Let us not forget that the second stimulus hasn't even been spent on all those "shovel ready" projects.

Acknowledging that the longer the public has looked at the legislation the less the public has liked it, he blamed himself for not "explaining it more clearly." But his faux contrition actually blames the public: The problem is not the legislation's substance but the presentation of it to slow learners.

I know, maybe another speech will do the trick. A speech to counter all the lies being spread by special interest groups; lies concerning trivialities such as:

• The Cornhusker Compromise


• The Louisana Purchase


• Everyone's equal unless you belong to a union


• Falsely claiming deficit neutrality because ten years of revenue is used to fund six years of expenses


• 500 billion in Medicare cuts that will materialize if we only pass this bill - but wait, we could do that WITHOUT passing the bill


• There's absolutely no reason to restrict health care purchases across state lines, but that's a non-starter because...actually no reason, our actual aim is to nationalize health care and we don't really want to try any other solutions


• No one has read the 2000 page bill


• <Add your own here>

Anyway, on to another gem:

Obama's leitmotif is: Washington is disappointing, Washington is annoying, Washington is dysfunctional, Washington is corrupt, verily Washington is toxic -- yet Washington should conscript a substantially larger share of GDP, and Washington should exercise vast new controls over health care, energy, K-12 education, etc. Talk about a divided brain.

As everyone knows, we want a lean, mean, responsive government which can surely be accomplished by being in charge of everything.