Will's attack on Clinton clouds the issue PI Tuesday, June 1, 1999

Will's attack on Clinton clouds the issue
Tuesday, June 1, 1999

George Will continues to lead the pathetic partisan attack on Bill Clinton, no matter what the moral consequences to himself. In his latest effort (Thursday), Will reads to the word "in" in a sentence the president began (in his recent New York Times piece), "We are in Kosovo . . . " before he erupts in righteous outrage. Will elucidates that we are not "in" Kosovo at all, because our planes only fly over it. Clinton, he says, "traduces" the truth voraciously.

I am not even going to look up the word "traduces" because Will has very little affection for the truth in its meanings of "correct," "accurate" or "morally right." Just look at the next sentence, in which he begins to castigate the president for not using the term "war." Apparently not to traduce the truth, one must come up with contorted phraseology that allows us to be in a war but not in the country where the war is going on, a logical and geographic absurdity.

While one would like to debate Will on the merits of NATO's course of action, I suspect that the issue is neither Kosovo nor Serbia nor the future of Europe nor Milosevic but, at least for George Will, the issue is Bill Clinton. One hopes that this tired partisan attack will sooner or later die out so we can get to the issues.

Alan Harvey
Seattle