George F%$#ing Will?

The man who briefed Ronald Reagan for the 1980 debates using Jimmy Carters' stolen briefing books, has just written an adulatory review of a Robert E. Lee biography that excoriates the general.

I am rather surprised that Will would do this for a book that calls Lee a dullard, a hypocrite, and a traitor:

In 1935, the year before Margaret Mitchell’s magnolia-scented novel “Gone With the Wind” began 21 months on bestseller lists, Douglas Southall Freeman, the son of a veteran of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s legions, published, to critical acclaim and commercial success, the final two volumes of his worshipful four-volume biography of Lee. Freeman called Lee “the Southern Arthur” who “accepted fame without vanity and defeat without repining.”

………

Lee was unambiguously a traitor, guilty of, in the Constitution’s language about treason, “levying war against” the United States. He also was a bore. His life coincided with extraordinarily complex controversies — about the nation’s nature, civic duty, the meaning of patriotism and the demands of honor. Remarkably, there is no record of his expressing a thought (here is a Lee sample: “Never exceed your means”) more interesting than Polonius’s bromides (“Neither a borrower nor a lender be”).

Princeton’s Allen C. Guelzo, an eminent Civil War historian, has now published exactly what the nation needs as it reappraises important historical figures who lived in challenging times with assumptions radically unlike today’s. “Robert E. Lee: A Life,” Guelzo’s scrupulously measured assessment, is mercifully free of the grandstanding by which many moralists nowadays celebrate themselves by indignantly deploring the shortcomings of those whose behavior offends current sensibilities. But by casting a cool eye on Lee, Guelzo allows facts to validate today’s removals of Lee’s name and statues from public buildings and places.

Contemporaries gushed about Lee’s gentility, dignity, probity, manners, presence, composure, etc. If mid-19th-century America had been a debutante ball, Lee, who graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at 22 without a single demerit, would have been a paragon. Life then was, however, a moral test. Lee flunked.

Lee, Guelzo writes, “raised his hand” against the nation that, as an Army officer, he had sworn to defend. He did so for an agenda that a much greater man, Ulysses S. Grant, called one of “the worst for which a people ever fought.” Lee thought slavery was a “greater evil” to White people than to Black people. He enveloped himself in what Guelzo calls a “cloud of pious wishes” and decided, as Guelzo tartly says, “it was up to the whites to decide when enough was enough.” Guelzo writes that to Lee, slavery’s victims were “invisible, despite their presence all around.” His indifference was “cruelty in self-disguised velvet.” Not well disguised, when he presided at the whipping of three recaptured runaways, ordering a constable to “lay it on well.”

George F. Will's gleeful take-down of Robert E. Lee is not something that I would have expected from one of the shock troops of the "Reagan Revolution."

It would be more readable if he didn't insist on using terms and references primarily chosen to impress upon the reader his "Staggering Genius."  

We use DuckDuckGo just as well as he can.