THE WORST THING WE READ™
George Will Gets Lost in the Desert
ACCORDING TO THE dateline on the Washington Post column he published yesterday, George Will wrote about the Republican presidential primary from "KIAWAH ISLAND, S.C."—a golf resort on land scooped out from under the Gullah Geechee people, and also the place where the former South Carolina governor and temporary presidential candidate Nikki Haley has her house. The sesquipedalian octogenarian apparently went to Kiawah Island to commune with the spirit of Haley, "who lives here, 27 miles from the Charleston harbor fort at which the Civil War’s first shots were fired."
That mileage figure was the only certain connection between Will's report and material reality. If he talked to Haley for the column, the lone possible reference to it would have been an unanchored description of her "[c]alling herself a 'happy warrior,' looking inexplicably rested and exuding an exuberant pugnacity." If he talked to anyone else in South Carolina, it didn't make the column at all.
Instead, Will offered a tour of bleak psychological terrain—the blasted wasteland where he and the last of his fellow anti-Trump Republicans have been left to wander, staking out their claims on a party that hasn't existed for at least eight years. In this shadow South Carolina, as described by Will, Republican primary voters "can put the nation on a path away from today’s political vitriol" by following Haley and her "exuberant pugnacity" in service of a campaign to "Make America Normal Again."
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