June 14, 2015

Someone needs to tell Fox's George Will that "radical" is in the eye of the beholder. Apparently George Will's definition of a "radical" is someone who doesn't believe that millionaires and billionaires should be buying our elections, and that would like to have fair trade that protects American workers rather than a race to the bottom on wages and benefits.

I hate to break it to Will, but if he really believes that makes someone a "radical" he'd better stay indoors, because he's surrounded by them. A whole lot more people agree with Bernie Sanders on these issues than they do the likes of Will.

Here's his latest nonsense from this weekend's Fox News Sunday while discussing the trade deal going down in the House this week:

WALLACE: I want to turn to trade, which we've been discussing throughout the show, and the major defeat that House Democrats handed President Obama, not on the trade deal but on the ability to ever negotiate a trade deal, the fast-track authority so he could submit a deal that Congress would either have to vote up or down, but couldn't amend.

We're going to play for you Nancy Pelosi shocking a lot of people by announcing she was going to vote against the president, and then President Obama this weekend saying he's going to keep it. Here they are.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. NANCY PELOSI, D-CALIF., MINORITY LEADER: I'll be voting today to slow down the fast track to get a better deal. Whatever the deal is with other countries, we want a better deal for America's workers.

OBAMA: And if I did not think smart new trade deals were the right thing to do for working families, I wouldn't be fighting for it. This is the right thing to do.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WALLACE: George, what happened in the House this week, and what does it say about President Obama's clout in this town, and especially with members of his own party in the House?

WILL: He has on Capitol Hill all the friends he has earned and deserved, which means that that cohort is vanishingly small. It is reliably reported that when he went up for his 45-minute soliloquy I guess to the Democratic caucus--

WALLACE: Let me just say, on Friday he made -- and it's usually a big deal. The president gets in a motorcade, goes up from the White House up to Capitol Hill, and meets with the House Democratic caucus, all the Democratic members.

WILL: And he told them, he hoped they would play it straight. That's exactly the language he used speaking in Germany about the Supreme Court on the Obamacare, that he hopes the Supreme Court will play it straight. It's not just a verbal tick of his. It's his way of saying that if you don't agree with me, you're not straight, you're crooked. That is, you have bad motives. It's been his theme all along, to insult people by saying you cannot disagree with me honestly and intellectually.

So that's what we're left with. Democrats today are a very curious mixture of the radical and the reactionary. They are radical in the sense that the whole party wants to change the First Amendment, for example, to amend the Bill of Rights to make it less protective.

WALLACE: You're talking there about campaign finance.

WILL: Campaign finance. They want to empower the government to regulate speech about the composition and comportment of the government. That's what they want to do.

And reactionary -- they are now like the 19th century Republican Party, which got prosperous and fat by protectionism, by awarding benefits to various factions and constituents by using tariffs and resistance to free trade.

Can you help us out?

For nearly 20 years we have been exposing Washington lies and untangling media deceit, but now Facebook is drowning us in an ocean of right wing lies. Please give a one-time or recurring donation, or buy a year's subscription for an ad-free experience. Thank you.

Discussion

We welcome relevant, respectful comments. Any comments that are sexist or in any other way deemed hateful by our staff will be deleted and constitute grounds for a ban from posting on the site. Please refer to our Terms of Service for information on our posting policy.
Mastodon