This is astonishing — but we live in astonishing times.
George Will has been one of the conservative movement’s most consistent voices over the past several decades, and he just wrote a column for the Washington Post that exhorts voters to pull the lever for Democrats this year:
The principle: The congressional Republican caucuses must be substantially reduced. So substantially that their remnants, reduced to minorities, will be stripped of the Constitution’s Article I powers that they have been too invertebrate to use against the current wielder of Article II powers. They will then have leisure time to wonder why they worked so hard to achieve membership in a legislature whose unexercised muscles have atrophied because of people like them.
Consider the melancholy example of House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.), who wagered his dignity on the patently false proposition that it is possible to have sustained transactions with today’s president, this Vesuvius of mendacities, without being degraded. In Robert Bolt’s play “A Man for All Seasons,” Thomas More, having angered Henry VIII, is on trial for his life. When Richard Rich, whom More had once mentored, commits perjury against More in exchange for the office of attorney general for Wales, More says: “Why, Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world . . . But for Wales!” Ryan traded his political soul for . . . a tax cut.
I’ve been a Democrat for more than 30 years, but I have to think that if my party had chosen, say, Charlie Sheen as its presidential nominee — and he behaved predictably Sheenishly — I’d have had the backbone to oppose him.
I rarely agree with George Will, but I give him credit for this. He joins a growing chorus of conservative patriots who are putting country before party. Now if he’d only see Trump for what he really is — the natural result of years of dog-whistling and racially divisive politics on the part of the Grand Old Party.
***
Yo! Dear F*cking Lunatic: 101 Obscenely Rude Letters to Donald Trump by Aldous J. Pennyfarthing is now available at Amazon! Buy there (or at one of the other fine online retailers carrying it), or be square.