George F. Will Quotes
Like a snail crossing a sidewalk, the Clinton Administration leaves a lengthening trail of slime, this time on America's national honor.
Will, George F. "A Trail of Slime." The Washington Post, 25 Oct. 1996, p. A27.
At the time the some conservatives in America were on witch hunts claiming that all sorts of undesirables were “infiltrating” the Federal Government. As we know, in any large population of people, there will be some tall people, some gays, some leftists, some drug users, some creative people, some ultra patriots, etc. The Federal Government has millions of employees. The deduction that if a sex pervert is one of the millions, he is “infiltrating” the government is silly. 60 years later, a few others claimed that Muslims were having children in America to “infiltrate” the nation with terrorist “sleeper agents.” Politicians are a large group and some of them are bound to be fanciful and somewhat paranoid.
The House Majority Leader Tom Delay, with a history of ethics violations, got caught in some very serious ones and convinced the House majority leadership to change the rules of the Ethics Committee to prevent the minority from initiating any investigations or inquiries. The Ethics Committee was the only House committee that has an equal number of majority and minority members and before this change, either side would initiate an inquiry.
He was not referring to economic corruption but intellectual and moral corruption. Regan who appointed many excellent key officials picked a very unfortunate choice to lead the CIA. William J. Casey had many faults and weaknesses—See {637472}, {636743} and {637469}. But the worst of his damage was imposing his ideology on the agency and having the intelligence analysts shape their intellectual product to conform with a particular world, political, and religious view. See {634408}. This became acceptable and as future administrations took power their ideologies were considered by the CIA professionals and reports were edited and shaped accordingly. Reform was instituted by some of the future CIA directors but there were precedents from the Casey days for years. One particularly bad manifestation of this intellectual corruption occurred when Vice President Richard Cheney imposed a neocon world view on the agency with a pliant CIA director and the agency gave the President a totally inaccurate assessment of Iraq nuclear capability and intention which triggered the disastrous Iraq war, made all the worse when there were not only no nuclear weapons in Iraq as had been reported, but there was not even a single laboratory trying to develop nuclear weapons or even nuclear power.
George Frederick Will is an American libertarian-conservative political commentator and author. He writes regular columns for The Washington Post and provides commentary for NBC News and MSNBC. In 1986, The Wall Street Journal called him "perhaps the most powerful journalist in America," in a league with Walter Lippmann (1889–1974). He won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1977.
