Baseball in the era of George Will.
Today's installment of GOP projection comes courtesy of long-time conservative columnist, and noted baseball fan, George Will.
His piece apparently was in the Washington Post last Friday, 8/1, but it only hit one of our local papers this morning.
Decades ago Mr. Will was actually a columnist worth reading even if you rarely agreed with him. He was articulate and thoughtful. Even if you didn't reach the same conclusion he did, at the least he made you think. And more often than not he approached an issue from an angle that made you believe he was a decent and caring human being.
Unfortunately as he fights to remain relevant in the modern world of knee-jerk radical right wing punditry that has become the modern conservative movement, Mr. Will has descended to their level rather than attempting to elevate the discussion.
Case in point is the article noted above. Instead of thoughtful analysis we find just another conservative attempting to define and describe modern progressive politics. And in so doing we find them merely projecting their own partisan biases.
Will's main thesis is that Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, a champion for progressive causes in the U.S. Senate, should be a major contender being talked about for the 2016 Democratic Presidential nomination. The fact the he is not, and that the only two people prominently mentioned are Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren, can only mean one thing to the inquiring mind of George Will. It can only mean that Senator Brown is falling victim to that old bugaboo of the modern Left, identity politics.
He basically states the liberal wing of the Democratic party will never support a white male again for President. His version of "once you go black, you never go back" I suppose. No, in George's fevered imagination, you better be a woman, or black, or Latino, or a one-armed lesbian raised by same-sex, endangered wolves, or who knows what, if you want to be the Democratic Presidential candidate.
Of course as pointed out by saner types such as Dave Weigel in Slate, the more realistic explanation could be that Senator Brown has expressed zero interest in running for President, nor made any moves to even explore such as effort or put together an organization needed to take on such a challenge. Of course for that matter neither has Senator Warren who has steadfastly stated she will not run for President in 2016.
But why let pesky facts get in the way when instead you can repeat your prejudices about what progressives believe in and stand for?
And as Weigel also points out in his article, Will has been all too willing in recent columns over the last few months to play the identity politics card when it suits his purpose. He loves highlighting GOP candidates who are women or from more recent immigrant backgrounds. He then delights in dreaming about what impact their success might have on the Democrats claims that the Republicans are conducting a "war on women", or are somehow "anti-immgrant".
God only knows where Democrats get such crazy notions. George Will can't figure it out either. So he can only conclude it is their slavish devotion to identity politics.
Originally posted on Views on Brews.