December 01, 2006

George Will, Not Just Pompous - Also Disingenuous and Manipulative

So Baltar and I have already whacked the George Will column that's seemingly a minor and petty swat at Senator-elect Webb's civility. But in doing so, we probably let Will off too easily, because we were likely too quick to support the impression of Will as nothing more than a Broder acolyte who lives in his own dull little fantasyland of a DC where civility is the be all and end all of DC politics.

Sadly, Will's a much more toxic presence in the DC political debates than that. Because while he might indeed be a too tightly wound prig - he's also got a nasty habit of engaging in partisan manipulation. And as Steve Benen notes here, Will's column engaged in some highly selective editing (and that's the nice way of putting it - it could also be accurate to say that Will's something of a liar, when it comes to his version of events) of the exchange between Webb and the president. And as the Benen link notes, it's not the first time Will has, uh, "selectively edited" a transcript to make a Democrat look bad. So it appears that the Will piece is indeed both of the things I mentioned before - 1) whiney pouting over a perceived breach of propriety/supplication before "The Decider", and 2) an aggressive and unfair hit piece against a brand new Democratic senator, who hasn't even been sworn in yet.

Posted by armand at December 1, 2006 04:46 PM | TrackBack | Posted to Media | Politics


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