April 27, 2010 / by emptywheel

 

George Will Goes Bipolar Over Brown

What can brown do for you? If you are George Will, apparently only mow the yard or fill the water glass at the local stick in your butt snob steakhouse. In the latest condescending pile of rancid, rambling garbage by Will, set for tomorrow’s Washington Post, Will defecates on about everybody he can find over the immigration law fiasco in Arizona:

“Misguided and irresponsible” is how Arizona’s new law pertaining to illegal immigration is characterized by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She represents San Francisco, which calls itself a “sanctuary city,” an exercise in exhibitionism that means it will be essentially uncooperative regarding enforcement of immigration laws. Yet as many states go to court to challenge the constitutionality of the federal mandate to buy health insurance, scandalized liberals invoke 19th-century specters of “nullification” and “interposition,” anarchy and disunion. Strange.

Uh, hey George, in the first place Pelosi is right, and your discreetly veiled misogynistic demeaning of her, and offensive put down of her hometown of San Francisco, are intellectually impertinent and scurrilous. The rest of the paragraph is such a non-sequitur you have to wonder about the stability of the mind authoring it.

Arizona’s law makes what is already a federal offense — being in the country illegally — a state offense. Some critics seem not to understand Arizona’s right to assert concurrent jurisdiction. The Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund attacks Gov. Jan Brewer’s character and motives, saying she “caved to the radical fringe.” This poses a semantic puzzle: Can the large majority of Arizonans who support the law be a “fringe” of their state?

“Some critics”, namely George Fucking Will (that is what the “F” stands for, right?) do not seem to understand the concept of Federal preemption. Maybe Will is one of those conservative headcases who consider the Tenth Amendment the most supreme law of the land; but it is not, and there is a reason serious minds term such morons “Tenthers” in the same vein as the nutjob Birthers. Clearly George Will would not know a proper legal argument of “concurrent jurisdiction” if it hit him in the ass. The rest of that paragraph is gibberish unworthy of a grade school response.

Popularity makes no law invulnerable to invalidation. Americans accept judicial supervision of their democracy — judicial review of popular but possibly unconstitutional statutes — because they know that if the Constitution is truly to constitute the nation, it must trump some majority preferences. The Constitution, the Supreme Court has said, puts certain things “beyond the reach of majorities.”

What? This paragraph makes Charles Cheswick and Billy Bibbit in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest look sane. You have got to be kidding me. The link is to the Cliff’s Notes, because it appears George Will Is not familiar with the great American novel.

But Arizona’s statute is not presumptively unconstitutional merely because it says that police officers are required to try to make “a reasonable attempt” to determine the status of a person “where reasonable suspicion exists” that the person is here illegally. The fact that the meaning of “reasonable” will not be obvious in many contexts does not make the law obviously too vague to stand. The Bill of Rights — the Fourth Amendment — proscribes “unreasonable searches and seizures.” What “reasonable” means in practice is still being refined by case law — as is that amendment’s stipulation that no warrants shall be issued “but upon probable cause.” There has also been careful case-by-case refinement of the familiar and indispensable concept of “reasonable suspicion.”

Brewer says, “We must enforce the law evenly, and without regard to skin color, accent or social status.” Because the nation thinks as Brewer does, airport passenger screeners wand Norwegian grandmothers. This is an acceptable, even admirable, homage to the virtue of “evenness” as we seek to deter violence by a few, mostly Middle Eastern, young men.

Some critics say Arizona’s law is unconstitutional because the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of “equal protection of the laws” prevents the government from taking action on the basis of race. Liberals, however, cannot comfortably make this argument because they support racial set-asides in government contracting, racial preferences in college admissions, racial gerrymandering of legislative districts and other aspects of a racial spoils system. Although liberals are appalled by racial profiling, some seem to think vocational profiling (police officers are insensitive incompetents) is merely intellectual efficiency, as is state profiling (Arizonans are xenophobic).

Aw jeebus. Little surprise Will is considered an intellectually big thinker in the party that selected Sarah Palin as its second choice to lead the United States through the perilous times extant in the current world. Well, yes George, the failure of the statute to define what is “reasonable” in pertinent circumstances, and the impossibility of defining such a concept in terms of suspect classes and equal protection concerns, does indeed make the statute presumptively unconstitutional; as does the fact that such status will “not be obvious in many contexts”. In fact, that is the exact context prohibited by a long and seminal thread of Supreme Court cases dating back to Terry v. Ohio and progeny like Dunaway v. New York. But, hey, facts and law are inconvenient things for George Will; even his own ombudsman at the Washington Post has confirmed. The attempt to falsely equate this law with “liberal” concepts of equality in education and government contracting is intellectually duplicitous and disgusting; and “racial gerrymandering” is a creature of conservative Republican bigots like Will, not “liberals”. Oh, and George, the highest law enforcement officer in the country thinks you are an idiot, as do the chiefs of police across the nation.

Will saves his lowest blow for last when he declares from his on high tuffet:

Arizonans should not be judged disdainfully and from a distance by people whose closest contacts with Hispanics are with fine men and women who trim their lawns and put plates in front of them at restaurants, not with illegal immigrants passing through their back yards at 3 a.m.

Hey George, you introspectively incompetent imbecile, that is you who thinks that way, not Arizonans. As both an Arizona native and current resident, I am shocked and livid the august Washington Post would print this tripe by George F. Will. Will is an embarrassment to the Washington Post (if the Post is capable of such anymore), ABC News and the nation; how some blue blooded pampered pimpernel like Will is allowed to issue screed like this is unfathomable.

George Will is long the wrong side of his “use by” date, if he was ever fit for the use intended to start with. The grass is growing long in the pundit meadow, time to put this racist jackass out to pasture.

(perfect graphic by latinopundit.com)

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Originally Posted @ https://www.emptywheel.net/2010/04/27/george-will-goes-bipolar-over-brown/