This week George Will uses the pages of the Washington Post, Townhall.com and other places where his column is syndicated to ask himself a silly question.

The fact that he’s two years late and a definition short doesn’t seem to bother his liberal fans at Americablog and the Huffington Post. They’re just thrilled to pieces that he’s attacking the religious right.

The term in question, “values voters,” finds its genesis in an exit poll of voters in the 2004 Presidential election. Voters were asked to describe “which ONE issue mattered most in deciding how [they] voted for president.” Twenty-two percent chose “moral values,” and of that number, 80% voted for President Bush.

Of course, this is the same exit poll that gave Sen. John Kerry a lead. For weeks after the election, the news media droned on and on about the significance of the “moral values” vote. The category came in first only by a plurality, while the other 78% of voters selected from six other categories (taxes, education, Iraq, terrorism, economy/jobs and health care). Bush did have an overwhelming advantage in the “moral values” category, but he took an even larger margin from “terrorism” voters, while Kerry convincingly won the categories of Iraq, education and health care.

Will begins this way:

An aggressively annoying new phrase in America’s political lexicon is “values voters.” It is used proudly by social conservatives, and carelessly by the media to denote such conservatives.

Is a two-year old phrase really that new? Perhaps in political terms, since it came from the last election. But you’d think Will could have gotten around to this topic before this week. Now, of course the media has used the term quite a bit, but as for its “proud” usage, I can’t report hearing it spoken all that frequently at the Shelby County Young Theocrats meetings, but I’ll be sure to listen harder for it next time.

This phrase diminishes our understanding of politics. It also is arrogant on the part of social conservatives and insulting to everyone else because it implies that only social conservatives vote to advance their values and everyone else votes to…

The big problem here is that Will seems to think social conservatives marched into the voting booth wearing “I’m a values voter” pins, rather than simply answering a certain way in an exit poll.

But to the contrary, “values voter” isn’t exactly the issue, is it? As you may recall from a few paragraphs above, the actual term happens to have been “moral values,” not just values. There’s nothing “arrogant” about social conservatives using the term to describe the way they vote. Social conservatives never said theirs were the only values, or that they were the only ones who voted based on any values. It’s just that they find a common bond in the fact that “moral values” was the key factor in their vote.

From there Will continues to attack “values voters” while insisting that all voters fit that category. He never does cite its true origin or reveal the fact that he changed its scope by dropping part of the term. In effect, it becomes his linguistic straw man.

What Will holds against the religious right is unclear, but he certainly seems to enjoy taking terms and comments out of context in order to beat them over the head, as he did about this time last year.

If Will wants to prove his own value as a columnist, perhaps he could start by injecting a little honesty into his own rhetoric. Or do social conservatives have a monopoly on that value as well?