Recently a friend shared with me an email he sent to George Will, criticizing Will’s lack of empathy in pandering to the interests of the economic elite of this country to the detriment of its less privileged members. We both thought Will had ignored the email until his July 17 column, “Book explores foundation of housing crisis,” in which he perverts a well-intended effort on the part of his ever-excoriated “liberals” into the cause of the housing crisis, i.e., as the basis of an effort on the part of the government to be compassionate.
Apparently, if it ever occurred to Will that the true blame for the financial/housing crisis was the failure of regulation that permitted banks and other institutions to provide loans to those who didn’t qualify and then sell the loans under dubious (at best) pretenses to investors solely for their own financial aggrandizement, he lacked the honesty to admit it.
Perhaps the time is long overdue to compose a register of “intellectual predators,” with Will at its top, who intentionally and continually distort reality in order to further their own misguided ends. In their own way, such predators affect far more people than some other types of predators, insofar as their malevolence is spread to so many by well-meaning institutions.
Philip Alford
Vancouver
