Biography
George F. Will is a conservative syndicated columnist from the Washington Post. He writes about foreign and domestic politics and policy.
George F. Will
Obama Debases Trust In Government
May 17, 2013
Last week was amusing. There was the spectacle of advocates of an ever-larger regulatory government expressing shock about such government's large capacity for misbehavior.
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Judicial Activism Called For To Restrain Government
May 3, 2013
"The legislative department is everywhere extending the sphere of its activity, and drawing all power into its impetuous vortex."
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Republican Michigan Congressman One To Watch
April 21, 2013
America's most interesting development since November is the Republican Party becoming more interesting. Consider the congressman from Grand Rapids, Mich., who occupies the seat once held by Gerald Ford, embodiment of vanilla Republicanism. Justin Amash, 33, may seek the Senate seat being vacated by six-term Democrat Carl Levin, who was elected in 1978, two years before Amash was born.
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Failed Justice Argues Against Death Penalty
April 14, 2013
From Tom Paine's "Common Sense" to Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" to Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail," American history is replete with examples of printed words accelerating social justice. Still, from Mathew Brady's 1862 photo exhibit of "The Dead of Antietam" to the televised fire hoses and police dogs in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963 to the cameras that brought Vietnam into American living rooms, graphic journalism has exercised unique power to open minds and hence shape history. It may do so Tuesday evening when PBS broadcasts "The Central Park Five," a meticulous narrative of a gross miscarriage of justice.
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At Johns Hopkins, Abortion Foes Not Tolerated
April 7, 2013
We know Johns Hopkins University is devoted to diversity, because it says so. Its "Diversity and Inclusion Statement," a classic of the genre, says the university is "committed to sharing values of diversity and inclusion … by recruiting and retaining a diverse group of students." Hopkins has an Office of Institutional Equity and a "Diversity Leadership Council" that defines "inclusion" as "active, thoughtful and ongoing engagement with each other." Unless you are a member of Voice for Life, an anti-abortion group.
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Baseball's Back -- Take A Swing At These
April 1, 2013
As the unendurable monotony of the offseason ends, celebrate baseball's return with mental calisthenics. Everyone knows it was former Atlanta Manager Dave Bristol who said, "Only trouble I ever had with chewing tobacco was that the orthodontist said my daughter was going to have to give it up because of her braces." But do you know:
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Republicans Should Change The Way They Pick Candidates
March 24, 2013
Because of the grotesquely swollen place the presidency now occupies in the nation's governance and consciousness, we are never not preoccupied with presidential campaigning. The Constitution's Framers would be appalled.
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Gay Marriage Ruling Shouldn't Depend On Social Claims
March 17, 2013
When on March 26 the Supreme Court hears oral arguments about whether California's ban on same-sex marriages violates the constitutional right to "equal protection of the laws," these arguments will invoke the intersection of law and social science. The court should tread cautiously, if at all, on this dark and bloody ground.
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School Takes Down Pop-Tart Terrorist
March 11, 2013
Rodney Francis is insufficiently ambitious. The pastor of the Washington Tabernacle Baptist Church in St. Louis has entered the fray over guns, violence and humanity's fallen nature with a plan for a "buyback" of children's toy guns. And toy swords and other make-believe weapons. There is, however, a loophole in the pastor's panacea. He neglects the problem of ominously nibbled and menacingly brandished breakfast pastries.
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No Longer Need For Voting Rights Protection
March 3, 2013
Progressives are remarkably uninterested in progress. Social Security is 78 years old and myriad social improvements have added 17 years to life expectancy since 1935, yet progressives insist the program remain frozen, like a fly in amber. Medicare is 48 years old and the competence and role of medicine have been transformed since 1965, yet progressives cling to Medicare "as we know it."
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State Of The Union — A Night Of Nonsense
February 15, 2013
In the 12 months we have to steel ourselves for the next State of the Union spectacle, let us count the ways that this spawn of democratic Caesarism — presidency-worship — has become grotesque. It would be the most embarrassing ceremony in the nation's civic liturgy were the nation still capable of being embarrassed by its puerile faith in presidential magic.
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Time To Break Up Too-Big-To-Fail Banks
February 10, 2013
With his chronically gravelly voice and relentlessly liberal agenda, Sherrod Brown seems to have stepped out of "Les Miserables," hoarse from singing revolutionary anthems at the barricades. Today, Ohio's senior senator has a project worthy of Victor Hugo — and of conservatives' support. He wants to break up the biggest banks.
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Obama's Recipe For Conservative Revival
January 25, 2013
Happy days are not here again, but they are coming for conservatives. Barack Obama — with the lowest approval rating (according to Gallup, 50 percent, four points lower than that of the National Rifle Association) of any re-elected president when inaugurated since the Second World War — has a contradictory agenda certain to stimulate a conservative revival.
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Michigan Latest Sign Unions Losing Ground
December 14, 2012
Rick Snyder, who is hardly a human cactus, warned Michigan's labor leaders. The state's mild-mannered Republican governor, currently in his first term in his first public office, has rarely been accused of being, or praised for being, a fire-breathing conservative. When unions put on Michigan's November ballot two measures that would have entrenched collective bargaining rights in the state Constitution, Snyder told them they were picking a fight they might regret.
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Speech Limits Closing The American Mind
November 30, 2012
In 2007, Keith John Sampson, a middle-age student working his way through Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis as a janitor, was declared guilty of racial harassment. Without granting Sampson a hearing, the university administration — acting as prosecutor, judge and jury — convicted him of "openly reading a book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject."
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Unions, Boomers Digesting Twinkies' Lesson
November 23, 2012
"All Gods were immortal."
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Congress Should Dismantle Consumer Bureau
November 16, 2012
There can be unseemly exposure of the mind as well as of the body, as the progressive mind is exposed in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a creature of the labyrinthine Dodd-Frank legislation. Judicial dismantling of the CFPB would affirm the rule of law and Congress' constitutional role.
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Getting Ready To Take America's Pulse
November 4, 2012
PRESIDENT: The leading figure in a small group of men of whom — and of whom only — it is positively known that immense numbers of their countrymen did not want any of them for president.
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Human Nature Seeds Government Dysfunction
October 20, 2012
Elections supposedly prevent convulsions, serving as safety valves that vent social pressures and enable course corrections. November's election will either be a prelude to a convulsion or the beginning of a turn away from one.
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Romney Must Back Breakup Of Big Banks
October 14, 2012
If in four weeks a president-elect Mitt Romney is seeking a Treasury secretary, he should look here in Dallas, to Richard Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. Candidate Romney can enhance his chance of having this choice to make by embracing a simple proposition from Fisher: Systemically important financial institutions, meaning too-big-to-fail or TBTF banks, are "too dangerous to permit."
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Vibrancy Of Markets Vs. Suffocation Of Statism
October 5, 2012
The presidential campaign, hitherto a plod through a torrent of words tedious beyond words, began to dance in Denver. There a masterfully prepared Mitt Romney completed a trifecta of tasks and unveiled an issue that, because it illustrates contemporary liberalism's repellant essence, can constitute his campaign's closing argument.
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Tough Debate Questions For Romney, Obama
September 28, 2012
The spectacles we persist in dignifying as presidential "debates" — two-minute regurgitations of rehearsed responses — often subtract from the nation's understanding. But beginning this Wednesday, these less-than-Lincoln-Douglas episodes might be edifying if the candidates can be inveigled into plowing fresh ground.
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U Of H Graduate Seeks House Seat In Utah
September 21, 2012
A specter is haunting the Congressional Black Caucus, the specter of integration. It is discomforting enough that the now 43-member CBC has included a Republican since 2011, when Florida's Allen West became the first Republican to join the CBC since 1997. South Carolina's Tim Scott, an African American, also came to Congress in 2011 but declined to join.
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Same-Sex Couple Bullies Family Photography Business
September 14, 2012
Elaine Huguenin, who with her husband operates Elane Photography in New Mexico, asks only to be let alone. But instead of being allowed a reasonable zone of sovereignty in which to live her life in accordance with her beliefs, she is being bullied by people wielding government power.
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Obama Fails To Deliver On 'Investments'
August 31, 2012
With Americans, on average, worth less and earning less than when he was inaugurated, Barack Obama is requesting a second term by promising, or perhaps threatening, that prosperity is just around the corner if he can practice four more years of trickle-down government. This is dubious policy, scattering borrowed money in the hope that this will fill consumers and investors with confidence. But recently Obama revealed remarkable ambitions for it when speaking in Pueblo, Colo.
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Apocalypse Not: Ingenuity Thwarts Doomsday
August 17, 2012
Sometimes the news is that something was not newsworthy. The United Nation's Rio+20 conference — 50,000 participants from 188 nations — occurred in June, without consequences. A generation has passed since the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, which begat other conferences and protocols (e.g., Kyoto). And, by now, apocalypse fatigue — boredom from being repeatedly told the end is nigh.
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The Presidential 'Out Of Context'
August 10, 2012
Barack Obama claims only that his legislative and foreign policy achievements in his first two years matched those of "any president — with the possible exceptions of Johnson, FDR and Lincoln" in "modern history." Some Obama enthusiasts are less restrained.
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Football Dangers: An Increasingly Guilty Pleasure
August 3, 2012
Are you ready for some football? First, however, are you ready for some autopsies?
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Feds' Inept Fishing Expedition Sinks Scientist
July 30, 2012
The huge humpback whale whose friendliness precipitated a surreal seven-year — so far — federal hunt for criminality surely did not feel put upon. Nevertheless, our unhinged government, with an obsession like that of Melville's Ahab, has crippled Nancy Black's scientific career, cost her more than $100,000 in legal fees — so far — and might sentence her to 20 years in prison. This Kafkaesque burlesque of law enforcement began when someone whistled.
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Dubious Rules Threaten Navajo Power Plant
July 6, 2012
The federal government is a bull that has found yet another china shop, this time in Arizona. It seems determined to inflict, for angelic motives and progressive goals, economic damage on this state. And economic and social damage on American Indians, who over the years have experienced quite enough of that at Washington's hands.
