It is now official: George Will has gone off the deep end. In his escalating efforts to be the most noticed voice in the right-wing echo chamber, he throws off the few tattered shreds of objectivity, and even decency, that he had left and declared rape a career move for women.
There was a time when doing something this awful would have had consequences. The offending writer would have been publicly denounced, by public officials and their supporters on both sides of the political divide. The world of published and broadcast journalism would have, without exceptions worth mentioning, demanded that the offending writer be sanctioned--specifically, that the writer's employer should serve notice that the writer's services are no longer needed. And, on top of that, the writer's employer should apologize, loudly and clearly, for having published the writer's offense piece in the first place.
Have we had any of that here?
Sadly, no. With the notable and laudable exception of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, not one single newspaper has taken any action to condemn Will's contemptible view of women, and the contemptible manner in which he expressed it. Will's work continues to be published across the county, without comment or objection by any of his peers or their employers. Least of all, Will's immediate employer, the Washington Post, whose editorial page editor not only came to his defense, but specifically stated that Will's drivel was "well within the bounds of legitimate debate."
Well within the bounds of legitimate debate? If that means that we are all free as the wind to characterize a violent crime as a gold mine for the victim, one is force to wonder what, if anything, is outside of it. Oh, I know: putting "Doonesbury" on the editorial page rather than the comics page, because we can't afford to offend conservatives while they busy reading "Shoe," or "Mallard Fillmore." Offending liberals? Now, THAT'S the order of the day. After all, in post-Reagan America, freedom of speech is the right to speak like a conservative and be assured that you'll never have to listen to someone who disagrees with you.
We should be so lucky as to still have a mainstream media that could be characterized as "liberal" to any extent. There was a time when the Fourth Estate in this country truly acted like it, when they exercised their power to fight corruption in government, and fought it successfully and nobly. Anyone who recalls the Pentagon Papers and Watergate knows what I'm talking about. But, in corporate America, there is only one estate: Wall Street, to whom the journalists deferentially bow. Only in such a country could the authors of a disastrous plan for war be sought out for their "expert" opinion on the disaster they created. Only in such a country could the Sunday talk shows be dominated by a single political party. And only in such a country can a minority party effectively shut down the government--and watch the press cover the event not as an attack on self-government itself, but as a who's-up-who's-down partisan ball game.
In this country, in which we sadly all now live, we cannot possibly expect the press to do the right thing. It appears that help will come only from an unlikely source. Paging Ms. Hughes, Ms. Karen Hughes ... .
And Karen, if I were you, when I went after George, I wouldn't stop with his tongue.
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