Tags
Border Crisis, CAFTA, Central America, immigrant children, Immigration, NAFTA, Trade, trade agreements, {What's Left of) Our Economy
However craven, at least the ministers and subjects whose emperor had no clothes in the Hans Christian Anderson story were smart enough to recognize their monarch’s unjustified pomposity. If only the same could be said for George Will’s fellow talking heads on Fox News Sunday.
Will, whose punditizing success owes largely to the popular equation of haughtiness with intellectuality, was at his condescending but specious best on the show’s July 27 edition, and his colleagues’ utter inability to hold him remotely accountable was at its most embarrassingly obvious.
Is there a “right way” to deal with the tens of thousands of Central American children and their parents flooding the U.S. border, anchor Chris Wallace asked Will. After briefly alluding to the refugee policy aspects of the problem, Will seized an opportunity to dazzle both viewers and the show’s other panelists with his reputation for historical expertise and general erudition.
“Long term,” he explained pedantically, “the most effective legislation passed concerning immigration wasn’t an immigration bill at all. It was Bill Clinton’s greatest act, passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement that put North Americans on the path to prosperity. We need to do something similar for the countries in which these children are fleeing, including the fact of trying to get Americans consuming so much of the drugs that are imported from these countries.”
The ignorance is as jaw-dropping as the arrogance. The United States, of course, has already “done something similar” to NAFTA for the countries of Central America. It was the Central America Free Trade Agreement, which has been in force since 2006. Eight years later, signatory countries El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala have turned into the home countries for most of the newest illegal immigrant wave.
Further, NAFTA itself was so effective at limiting the illegal immigrant flow that more than half of the illegal population in the United States nowadays comes from Mexico. This, of course, despite repeated promises from the treaty’s supporters that its passage would spur the export of “goods, not people.”
To his credit, Will knew his Fox News Sunday colleagues all too well. Neither Wallace nor Fox’s Brit Hume and Juan Williams, nor Kirsten Powers of USAToday, uttered a syllable of objection.
At least in the process, he made plain as day a leading reason for America’s deepening political dysfunction. How can any democratic political system perform adequately if so many of its designated watchdogs are such unmistakable know-nothings?
RealityChek 
George Will was one of the first, if not the first, American journalist to tap into corporations as a big source of income. Some of that may be a little shady:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2004/01/02/none-of-our-business/
‘None of Our Business?
We can argue about George Will’s political views. But there’s no need to debate his professional ethics.’
But a lot of it is just speeches to corporate groups, universities, etc. which seems relatively harmless, but I don’t think they want speakers who oppose the great establishment consensus of more globalization, immigration, etc.- makes it harder to digest the rubber chicken. So journalists and other establishment speakers grab every chance to advance that agenda, especially on TV.
The modern celebrity journalist doesn’t know as much as he should, but knows which side his bread is buttered on.
By contrast tonight on PBS Newshour, the person from the newsonomics web site told how tough it is for non-celebrity journalists:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/media-companies-ditching-newspaper-operations/
‘KEN DOCTOR: It has been thinning for almost a decade now.
So we have had 18,000 daily journalists lose their jobs. That’s 30 percent of all the journalists working at the about 1,400 daily newspapers. ‘
NY Times has a policy against most outside enrichment for their writers, but I believe that’s rare.
Really good info here, Bill, and thanks so much for sharing it. I do recall some of these sleazy Will episode. Although not directly related to his arrogance, they do reenforce the image in my post of a Washington-centered bipartisan chattering class so shallow, intellectually corrupt, and incestuous, that its top priority has become self-preservation and self-glorification.