The Expansionist

Thursday, November 17, 2005

Rare Agreement. George F. Will actually wrote something I agree with, albeit the manner of his expression remained objectionable. I sent the following emailed letter to the editor about it.

Tho "rent-seeking" may make some sense to George F. Will, it makes no sense to the rest of us. I suppose this is a term well understood in some internal conversation of the conservative movement that the rest of us have never heard and do not understand. But Will doesn't seem much interested in making himself understood. He insists on using a pretentious vocabulary designed, presumably, to make his observations seem more impressive by showing us he knows words we see no need for, like "anodyne" and "encomium", or terms we use only for special purposes: Will says "government waxes"; the rest of us say only that the moon waxes, and most people wouldn't even know what that means except that "wanes" usually follows.
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It's nice to be able to agree with Will on isolated occasions, as I do with his (apparent) hostility to "social conservatives" trying to Talibanize the U.S. Government into forcing a medieval version of religion onto the unwilling. But must it be such a chore to plow thru his ponderous prose?

(Responsive to ""Dover, PA and the GOP: Seeking Rent, God", column by George F. Will in the New York Post, November 17, 2005)
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,082.)

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:38 PM

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