George Will responds to senators on his sexual assault column

Submitted by Mastodon on Sun, 2014-06-15 21:22

Letter here. Excerpt:

'Editor’s note: On Thursday, U.S. Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.) and Robert Casey (D-Pa.) sent a letter to Post columnist George Will objecting to his column published online last Friday about sexual assault on college campuses. Today, Will sent the senators a response. Here is an excerpt:

Dear Senators Blumenthal, Feinstein, Baldwin and Casey:

I have received your letter of June 12, and I am puzzled. You say my statistics “fly in the face of everything we know about this issue.” You do not mention which statistics, but those I used come from the Obama administration, and from simple arithmetic involving publicly available reports on campus sexual assaults.

The administration asserts that only 12 percent of college sexual assaults are reported. Note well: I did not question this statistic. Rather, I used it.

I cited one of the calculations based on it that Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute has performed {link}. So, I think your complaint is with the conclusion that arithmetic dictates, based on the administration’s statistic. The inescapable conclusion is that another administration statistic that one in five women is sexually assaulted while in college is insupportable and might call for tempering your rhetoric about “the scourge of sexual assault.”'

Will's complete letter is here.

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Comments

If you take on Mr. Will, you better have done your homework and thought long and hard about what you're saying and whether or not it adds up. He can think faster on his feet than Muhammad Ali could dance like a butterfly, and like Ali, he stings less like a bee and more like a hornet.

Like Will, watching Christopher Hitchens chew up and spit out anyone who came less than loaded for bear was almost painful. And even if one did his or her homework, Hitchens was typically three steps ahead of any other person debating him. It's a terrible shame he had such poor personal habits that he took himself to an early grave.

But anyway, my advice to anyone seeking to outdo George Will in a match of wits is to think twice. Most important, make sure you're on the most reasonable side of the debate. But if you are, chances are pretty good you'll find it rather boring to debate him, since he'll probably be agreeing with you a lot.

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Submitted by Matt on Mon, 2014-06-16 00:28