America's Next Top Curmudgeon

by Chris Bodenner

Chris Orr calls it:

The peculiar, and rather disappointing, Andy Roonification of George Will seems ongoing. There was, course, his extended climate-change crankery, and then his curmudgeonly and wildly ill-informed diatribe against denim. Now, in Newsweek, Will takes aim at Portland, Oregon, and efforts to reduce auto traffic generally. After tossing off a bit of increasingly characteristic faux populist posturing--is Will, the American male perhaps least likely ever to have operated a piece of heavy machinery, really the right person to rhapsodize Peoria, Illinois as the home of Caterpillar Inc.?--he suggests that no conceivable changes in public policy could ever persuade "0.01 percent of Americans [to] bike to work."

Yglesias tears apart that last prediction with, um, facts.