The Geezer IS Stupid! Now, He's Asking Dutch's BIG Question From 1980!

Georgie Porgie (Will) takes The Geezer to task (kinda) for his brazen attempt to distance himself from the mess the Geezer himself voted to create with his support of The Dubster's bat guano legislation 90% of the time. So, The Geezer — in his brain-dead, out-of-touch manner — asks if we are better off today than we were four years ago. After all, Dutch stumped Mr. Peanut with that zinger in 1980. So, The Geezer and his brain trust of Turd Blossom wannabes attempt to sell The Geezer channeling Dutch. The answer to The Geezer is simple: Hell, NO! We are not better off today than we were four years ago! We have wasted this nation's most precious assets: life, treasure, and international standing for N-O-T-H-I-N-G. We have squandered eight years, not four. The Geezer should be ashamed. He should apologize to every man, woman, and child in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. He doesn't deserve our vote, he deserves our censure and our contempt. Georgie Porgie couldn't bring himself to say it, but The Geezer is babbling nonsense. If this is (fair & balanced) outrage, so be it.

[x Washington (DC) Fishwrap]
In Americans' Quest To Measure Happiness, They Dole Out Life In Coffee Spoons
By George F. Will

John McCain, who is in what Macbeth called "the sear, the yellow leaf" of life, has revived an oldie from seven elections ago with a campaign commercial asserting: "We're worse off than we were four years ago." This, of course, derives from Ronald Reagan's question, addressed to the nation with devastating effect on his opponent, during Reagan's debate with President Carter in 1980.

The nation considered the answer obvious. Reeling from oil shocks, with 52 U.S. hostages in Tehran and with the Soviet Union rampant in Afghanistan, voters resoundingly said "no." Today we know that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan hastened the collapse of the Evil Empire, so some things that seem to make us worse off are not unmixed curses.

Imitation is the sincerest form of politics and in 1996 President Clinton, seeking re-election, urged voters to ask themselves whether they were better off than they were four years earlier. Today we know that the nation's affirmative answer reflected the beguiling beginning of what turned out to be the tech stock bubble, so some things that seem to make us better off are not unmixed blessings.

McCain recast Reagan's question as an assertion to pander to the public's dyspepsia and distance himself from President Bush. Enough.

In contemporary politics, nothing succeeds like excess, so permutations of Reagan's trope will recur. So consider its deficiencies, which are symptomatic of a desiccated mentality.

Unfortunately, the phrase "better off" is generally understood as a reference to your salary, your bank balance and the like. Are you better off being four years older? That depends.

If you are young, since 2004 you might have found romance, had children, learned to fly-fish and become a Tampa Bay Rays fan. In which case you emphatically are better off, even if since 2004 there has been only a 0.6 percent increase — yes, increase — in the median value of single-family homes.

If you are near "the sear, the yellow leaf" of life, in the last four years your expected remaining years of life have declined. But that does not mean you cannot be better off.

Suppose you've read Middlemarch, rediscovered Fred Astaire's movies, took up fly-fishing, saw Chartres and acquired grandchildren. Even if the value of your stock portfolio is down since 2004, are you not better off?

Economist Herb Stein criticized the "are you better off" question" by noting that "everyone has a certain asset, which is the present value of his expected future life." But "all years are not alike." Years that come later in life can have special richness because one has learned things that enable one to appreciate each year more.

Stein noted that the question about being "better off" is thought to be about facts rather than feelings. But feelings are facts. Facts such as delight, serenity and gratitude have values not easily priced in cash.

The people asking and those answering the "better off" question seem to assume that the only facts that matter are those that can be expressed as economic statistics. Statistics are fine as far as they go, but they do not go very far in measuring life as actually lived.

We do, unfortunately, live, as Edmund Burke lamented, in an age of "economists and calculators" who are eager to reduce all things to the dust of numeracy, neglecting what Burke called "the decent drapery of life." A thirst for simple metrics seduces people into a preoccupation with things that lend themselves to quantification.

Self-consciously "modern" people have an urge to reduce assessments of their lives to things that can be presented in tables, charts and graphs — personal and national economic statistics. This sharpens their minds by narrowing them. Such people might as well measure out their lives in coffee spoons.

In 1934, long before mankind strode jauntily into what it contentedly calls "the information age," T.S. Eliot asked:

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

So are you better off than you were four years ago? That depends. On what? That, too, depends.

[George F. Will is a twice-weekly columnist for The Post, writing about foreign and domestic politics and policy. His column appears on Thursdays and Sundays. Will attended Trinity College in Connecticut, Oxford University in England, and received a Ph.D. from Princeton University in political science in 1967.

Will began his syndicated column with The Post in 1974. Two years later he started his back-page Newsweek column. Will serves as a contributing analyst with ABC News and has been a regular member of ABC's "This Week" on Sunday mornings since the show began in 1981. His books include Restoration: Congress, Term Limits and the Recovery of Deliberative Democracy (1992), Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball (1989), and Statecraft as Soulcraft (1983).

Will was the recipient of a 1978 National Headliners Award for his "consistently outstanding special features columns" appearing in Newsweek. A column on New York City's finances earned him a 1980 Silurian Award for Editorial Writing. In 1985, The Washington Journalism Review named Will "Best Writer, Any Subject." He won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary in 1977.]

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