George Will

I've been a little hard on Will on this blog for being too representative of Washington Conventional Wisdom. I must confess that the man has superior erudition, has been a good voice for free markets for many years -- and knows a lot about baseball.

He takes some good whacks at Senator Obama's energy policy today (more to like) in a column delightfully titled Little Rhetoric Riding Hood.

Obama has also promised that "we will get 1 million 150-mile-per-gallon plug-in hybrids on our roads within six years." What a tranquilizing verb "get" is. This senator, who has never run so much as a Dairy Queen, is going to get a huge, complex industry to produce, and is going to get a million consumers to buy, these cars. How? Almost certainly by federal financial incentives for both -- billions of dollars of tax subsidies for automakers and billions more to bribe customers to buy cars they otherwise would spurn.

Great stuff. I'll suggest the whole thing but excerpt the last paragraph in case your mouse hand is sore:

In 1996, Bob Dole, citing the Clinton campaign's scabrous fundraising, exclaimed: "Where's the outrage?" In this year's campaign, soggy with environmental messianism, deranged self-importance and delusional economics, the question is: Where is the derisive laughter?

Hat-Tip: Hugh Hewitt

2008 Posted by John Kranz at August 24, 2008 6:11 PM