Conservative Litmus: George Will

Do you want to know if you're a genuine conservative? If you demand a conservative litmus test, personally, I'd leave the final verdict to George Will.

His verdict on Sarah Palin is not a good one. This editorial from him is outstanding reading.

My two favorite quotes from this are below and my commentary follows:

Did McCain, who seems to think that Palin's never having attended a "Georgetown cocktail party" is sufficient qualification for the vice presidency, lift an eyebrow when she said that vice presidents "are in charge of the United States Senate"?
-- George Will

Later in the article George Will attacks the scapegoat tactics, that have demonized Obama's fund raising:

Why is it virtuous to erect a dam of laws to impede the flow of contributions by which citizens exercise their First Amendment right to political expression? "We're now going to see," McCain warned, "huge amounts of money coming into political campaigns, and we know history tells us that always leads to scandal." The supposedly inevitable scandal, which supposedly justifies preemptive government restrictions on Americans' freedom to fund the dissemination of political ideas they favor, presumably is that Obama will be pressured to give favors to his September givers. The contributions by the new givers that month averaged $86.
-- George Will

MY COMMENT: Palin was a farcical pick, a "sugar rush" that provides instant momentum for McCain's campaign, but then crashed and burned when it was obvious that even the most basic question from the press (say a question like "what newspapers do you read?"), had her stumbling for words, and struggling to deliver a single coherent sentence.

On campaign financing, Will makes superb commentary, but missed why McCain is making noise on this issue. While we all agree, public financing of presidential campaigns, need to go the way of the dodo (public financing does far more harm than good), the reason why McCain is raising the issue isn't because he defends public financing, it is because it is setting the stage for the inevitable Republican response to this election.

That response will be: fraud, fraud, fraud.

Obama's campaign financing will receive massive scrutiny in the weeks ahead, and his use of e-Commerce to raise hundreds of millions, will be called into question, and there will be enough odd cases of fraud, that the cry that his entire victory was fraudulent will sadly gain traction in the press.

Still, Will's commentary is laser sharp in the above editorial, and ends on a "delicious" piece of trivia about potato chips. It's worthy reading, from a worthy voice in our political landscape.

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