George Will: a pompous defender of wealth and privilege

[Hannah Bell]

Not to put too fine a point on it, Washington Post columnist George Will is a pompous windbag, one of the most obnoxious right-wing media figures in America, and that is saying a good deal. Will’s longtime specialty has been the pseudo-erudite defense of wealth and privilege...

Nearly every one of his pieces operates along these lines, but his May 16 column, “European Union: A coalition of irresponsibility,” is worthy of special note. It is the latest of his splenetic responses to the debt crisis in Greece and Europe...

He writes: “Greece represents a perverse aspiration—a society with (in the words of Wisconsin Republican Rep. Paul Ryan) ‘more takers than makers,’ more people taking benefits from government than there are people making goods and services that produce the social surplus that funds government...”

If one devoted some time to it, one could probably think of more useless parasites than Will and his fellow pundits, but it would take some doing...Nothing enrages the Post columnist more than popular opposition to austerity measures... he observed that “Athens’ ‘anti-government mobs’ have been composed mostly of government employees going berserk about threats to their entitlements.” Will takes low-paid Greek public service workers to task for defending their jobs and living standards, but never stops to wonder at his own boundless sense of “entitlement,” along with the rest of the American ruling elite and its mouthpieces...

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/may2010/will-m20.shtml