The Worst American shares his pain with us.

I'll begin this final, pre-inauguration political post by revisiting a fellow whose current agony is supremely well-deserved. The monstrous supreme liar of the right, and treasonous worst man in America, is not some screeching troll or white supremacist, or richly-paid Murdochian TV-shill, nor even one of the conniving oligarchs who - obeying dullard, gene-programmed reflex - scheme (against their true self-interest) to restore 6000 years of insipid feudalism. Obeying unsapient, inherited drives, they at least have the excuse of delusion.

No, the worst American is a genteel-sounding intellectual who takes pains to come across as smooth and well-reasoned. One who can see, clear-eyed, the choice between either helping or wrecking the Great Enlightenment Experiment that has been led by our republic and that gave humanity its first real hope. A man who chose - like Plato - to use his erudition against our Periclean revolution.

Let's be clear, George F. Will tried hard to prevent Donald Trump from becoming the Republican nominee - or president - not for the sake of the nation, but in fear of the train wreck that now looms before American conservatism. No longer the party of Goldwater or Buckley, its plummeting average levels of education and IQ would cause any honest intellect deep misgivings. But then, Mr. Will was key to helping turn the GOP into the New Know Nothings, waging war not only upon science, but every fact-grounded profession in American life. Well, all but four, and shots have already been fired at two of the last-standing.
Case in point, this travesty of sophistry, condemning U.S. foreign policy, under Barack Obama: "Two seemingly unimpressed nations are Russia, which is dismembering a European nation (Ukraine), and China, which is shredding international law by turning the world’s most important waterway, the South China Sea, into militarized Chinese territory."

Standard GOP catechism, sure, Except, not even liberal journalists or pundits seem willing to ask: "how did Ukraine become a 'European nation'?"  

One of the charmingly obdurate traits of nearly all Americans is their inability to scan history. But not George Will. He knows that Ukraine was a reliable Russian satrapy or obedient client state until 2014, when popular uprisings and then free elections ousted Moscow's puppet, Yanukovich, in the worst disaster to Russian hegemonism since the fall of the Berlin Wall. That was the year Ukraine -- vast Ukraine -- became European.

Moreover, whom did Vladimir Putin and the Russian press openly blame for this calamity, bringing Europe within a few hundred kilometers of Moscow? Why, those machiavellian chessmaster-manipulators and insidious cold war fighters, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton! Just look at a map and view the last few years as V. Putin sees them. Read his actual (yes, actual) statements on the matter and vows of vengeance. His nibble-backs in Crimea and the Donbas, for which the U.S. rightwing kvells in admiration, are trifles, by comparison. 

Mr. Putin's only counter-move of equivalent magnitude was... getting Donald Trump. And yes, I admit that America is a bigger prize than the Donbas. Likewise, the U.S. Navy patrols the South China Sea with regularity, making clear that a 12-mile radius is all that China has won around each of its stunningly vulnerable, sitting-duck outposts, gained - temporarily - at incredible cost in both money and goodwill. This is something that symbolism obsessed conservatives never get. What matters is what's actual! No wonder they abolished the Office of Technology Assessment from Congress, banishing facts, as they recently tried to banish ethics. But George Will knows all this. I never called him a confederate dunce. He is one of the manipulators. Like the main character in Vonnegut's Mother Night, he is a Svengali in the cause of an oligarchic putsch whose aim is the permanent replacement of truth with truthiness. The confederacy has taken Washington. And though Mr. Will would have preferred other generals, he will now do his duty by his new caudillo and help to keep it. Oh, read Will's essay and notice the technique! Proclaim the absurd as a given! For example: "The fact that the world is more disorderly and less lawful than when Obama became president..." The staggering gall of such proclamations is the power of their counterfactual madness! One small example: when Obama entered office, not a single major U.S. Army or Marine unit was rated "fully combat ready" (FCR). Our reserve units had virtually been destroyed and America's reputation was around our ankles. Allies had dropped away from us like peeling skin.

Today? 100% of major U.S. active duty military units are FCR. The National Guard and reserves - devastated and ruined under Bush - are now repaired. Oh,but do show me any major, foreign-organized terror attacks on our homeland, during the "disorderly" Obama years. Show me one.
There are almost no major, attributable metrics of U.S. national health that did not improve (most of them a lot) across spans of the last two Democratic presidencies. And almost none that did not decline or plummet across both Bush Administrations, including even conservative desiderata like military readiness, stock valuations, entrepreneurship and yes, federal fiscal responsibility. A sane, fact-grounded person might be expected to notice this, which is why all fact-grounded professions have left the GOP, in droves. 

This is why the central obsession on today's right is not racism, or misogyny, or any of the other distractions. It is hatred of fact-grounded professions. Including especially journalism, the craft and high calling that Mr. Will betrays, daily. Am I the only observer who noticed that just one of the major GOP figures of the last 20 years was even mentioned at the recent Republican National Convention? Neither Bush Senior nor Junior, nor Cheney, nor the convicted felons Hastert and DeLay, nor Boehner, McConnell, McCain or Romney was referred-to, even in passing! Only the censured serial polygamist (though fascinating sci fi author) Newt Gingrich, whose revenge on the others was (I admit) delicious. 

Oh, such pride in your party's track record! Such validation for trusting this cult, again, with even a burnt match.

== Skewer the lies ==

Did you notice that the whole basis for Donald Trump's recent rejection of the Intelligence Community -- for citing Russian interference in US elections -- has been "these are the same folks who saw WMDs in Iraq!" Neglecting to mention that the WMD episode featured bullying of the IC by one outrageously immature Republican president, exactly as Trump himself is loudly threatening to do.

Elsewhere I show how one can compare GOP and Democratic presidents not by whether they wage war -- (all of them do, sometimes in error, though the mostly-beneficent American Pax has been worth fighting for) -- but how they wage it. I show how time and again, Democratic doctrine has been to listen to the generals and apply force as surgically as possible. That approach doesn't always go well! In Somalia, the scalpel was too small and thin, for example. But the bludgeon approach preferred by Republican presidents is a proved failure.

(Watch as the three generals DT has appointed provide surface cover for a wave of firings and forced retirements that will 'cleanse' - Erdogan-syle - both the Intelligence Community and the U.S. Military Officer Corps. Let us pray that the best of the three -- James Mattis -- will dig in his heels.)

Mr. Will can see all of this with utter clarity, and crafts his philippics accordingly. Oh, there are times when I almost sympathize with this devil. He is a gifted polemicist, as when he concludes: 

"Soon, foreign policy will be conducted by a man who, although in 2010 he said WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange deserves the death penalty, now seems to trust Assange on the subject of Russian hacking more than he trusts the consensus of the nation’s $53 billion civilian intelligence institutions. Time passes and, we are told, brings progress." All of it spot on. But then, that is how top level savanarolas operate. Every time Mr. Will criticizes Donald Trump, it will be accompanied by a "but..." that helps to staunch hemorrhages of sane conservatives to the other side. Oh, it's clear Mr. Will is currently in pain. Pain that he so richly deserves, for his endless, clever, deceitful treasons. He knows this will not go well for the Confederacy that he strove so hard to revive. And I nurse no guilt over the schaedenfreude I feel, for this evil man's agony.

== The Worst Man redux ==

Oh, but since I wrote the preceding passages -- setting them aside for other matters -- America's worst person continued his deliberate sabotage of reason. 

In this latest bit, George Will cites the "Sokal Hoax" to prove that the entire opposition to U.S. conservatism is just as crazy as (he now admits) conservatism has become. That is the narrative of today's right, hand crafted by Mr. George Will, along with Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly and every other shill for returning us to feudalism.

"Yes, it's clear my side has gone insane... but... but... but democrats are just as bad!   
"Yeah, that's the ticket. Liberals are worse!"

Yes, the Sokal Hoax was and remains a delightfully on-target, hilarious entrapment and evisceration of the postmodernist fad pushed by far-left, science-hating, faux-intellectuals. In 1996, Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University, submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies -- "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" -- proposing that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. "At that time, the journal did not practice academic peer review and it did not submit the article for outside expert review by a physicist." 

The avid acceptance by far-lefty postmodernists of deliberately concocted drivel helped to severely discredit that noxious movement, whose emphasis on incantation, magical thinking, masturbatory indignation and hostility to science shares voluptuous commonalities with similar cults on the right. Except that George Will fails to note crucial facts:

1) The Sokal Affair revealed that science is ready and able to defend itself, quite capably. 

2) For all their many faults, the editors of Social Text owned up to their mistakes and instituted reforms, something that similar liars on the right never do, always doubling down on their incantations.

3) The far-left may contain some bilious haters of science (see Science Left Behind: Feel-good fallacies and the rise of the anti-scientific left by Alex Berezow and Hank Campbell), but the entire American right today consists of science haters, waging war - indeed - on every knowledge profession in American life, from journalism, teaching, civil service, medicine, economics, diplomacy, law, etc. all the way to - recently - the United States military and intelligence officer corps.  

There is a world of difference between "far" and "entire"... as there is between "contains" and "consists." 

Mr. Will knows all of this. That fact -- his open-eyed and conscious choice to lie in service of monstrous treason -- has helped to bring America to this state, while driving both education and IQ levels in the deliberately-lobotomized Republican Party to historic lows. This has paid off well for Mr. Will and his neo-feudalist masters. Indeed, if we continue, and somehow survive, then the world of Idiocracy will erect statues to this horrid little man.