Opinion

George Will is on drugs?

Tom O'Connor Contributor
Font Size:

There’s no doubt that George Will is on drugs. Yes, I know the thought of America’s leading conservative columnist indulging on a regular basis in powerful, mind-altering substances is rather hard to believe. But once you consider the evidence I have no doubt you’ll agree that there is no other explanation for his bizarre behavior in his weekly appearances on ABC’s This Week.

For example, a few Sundays ago I watched as Paul Krugman (winner of the Nobel Prize for his work in the Economics of Persistent Peevishness), gave voice to notion that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was making the “most dishonest argument in the history of politics” for contending that giving certain large financial institutions the assurance of a government rescue might lead, at some future date, to a government rescue. This from a man who sat silent and smiled serenely as the democratic leadership sold their heath care bill with the assertion that adding tens of millions to the health care rolls would in fact reduce the cost of health care. Did Mr. Will leap to his feet, his face contorted in righteous indignation and employ his extensive vocabulary to upbraid Mr. Krugman as a knave and a hypocrite? He did not. He sat there with an unnatural calm. An eerie, and highly suspicious equanimity.

If this weren’t evidence enough, later in the show, Cynthia Tucker of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution offered her considered opinion that a new law, which actually makes it illegal to be an illegal immigrant in Arizona, “harkens back to apartheid”. In other words, Ms. Tucker‘s view is that permitting Arizona police to determine whether a suspect they have already detained for an unrelated crime is actually a citizen of this country is akin to the policy of an avowedly racist government, which oppressed, imprisoned, and even turned a blind eye to the murder its own citizens. Were Mr. Will not under the influence of potent mood-altering drugs this would have necessarily induced him to do a spit-take into his This Week logoed coffee mug. But, please note, he barely raised an eyebrow.

If these were the only instances of this far too laid-back behavior, perhaps the evidence could be dismissed. But, alas, they are not. Not by a long shot. I’ve watched with my own eyes, as, over the years, Mr. Will has remained unnaturally calm, unnervingly cool and impossibly collected despite the wildest of pronouncements from the entire population of the Left Wing fever swamp.

Now, you may say in Mr. Will’s defense, that perhaps, unknown to us, he is a long practitioner of Buddhist meditation and that after years of disciplined breathing he has achieved absolute mastery over his emotions. There’s only one problem with this theory, I hear the Dalai Lama himself has declined invitations to This Week for fear he’d be unable to stop himself from lunging across the table, grabbing one of these characters by the throat, and trying to shake some sense into them.

I suspect that Mr. Will’s drug use began years ago when, as one of the founding panel members on This Week, he was required to listen to Sam ‘The Human Bullhorn” Donaldson’s weekly assaults on logic and common sense. It was then, no doubt, that he first began his reliance on “the sane man’s little helper.”

Mr. Will, being the consummately rational man that his is, has obviously weighed the benefits and the risks of his drug use. On the one hand, the long-term use of such powerful chemicals must eventually take a toll on his health. On the other hand, his drug use has no doubt saved his sanity, if not his life, on many occasions. The latest being a recent Sunday when he was confronted with a perfect storm of left wing blather: Katrina vanden Heuvel, Bill Maher and the Reverend Al Sharpton –ALL AT THE SAME TIME! Were not Mr. Will under the anodyne influence of powerful chemical agents, there could have been only one outcome: his head would have exploded. And that would have been a sad loss indeed.

Tom O’Connor is a devoted fan of Mr. Will and sympathizes with his dependence on potent mood-altering drugs.