The Talking George Will Is an Idiot Blues.

I'm not really sure how George Will came to prominence as a columnist, or how he got a reputation as an educated, reflective thinker. Perhaps it's because he does have a large and varied vocabulary, even if his uses of it often remind me of reading freshman comp papers: the sort where the poor student has labored most of the evening over a thesaurus trying to come up with the most obscure but learned words to describe common things.

Will's latest descent into idiocy is his attack on Senator-elect Jim Webb, because Webb refused to pursue a photo-op with a war criminal. Here's Will:

Webb's more gross offense was calculated rudeness toward another human being -- one who, disregarding many hard things Webb had said about him during the campaign, asked a civil and caring question, as one parent to another.

So Webb's big problem, according to Will, is that he refused to play the political game of chumming up with incompetent abusers of the United States Constitution. Here we have an absentee President who through gross negligence and foolish hubris has brought death to untold thousands of Iraqis and to 2,888+ U.S. troops, and Will is worried about "calculated rudeness."

How clueless must George Will be to even suggest that Bush's question was asked "as one parent to another," when the Post has recently been following the Bush's kids partying it up (and getting robbed) in Argentina? Bush's kids probably couldn't even find Iraq on a map, let alone ever end up there in combat fatigues (unless of course they were play-acting, like their father).

Apparently, in Will's world, you coddle the tyrant. After all, as a champion of conservative values and administrations, Will has had plenty of examples shown to him through the years: Kissinger and Pinochet, Rumsfeld and Hussein.