Sunday reading: Gore, Lizza, O'Rourke

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I mentioned Frank Rich's column earlier, but there was actually a lot of good stuff to read today -- and reading is what I'm doing as I'm trying to take my mind off the Steelers' loss to the Colts, a game they should have won but let slip away. I'm looking at you, Big Ben. Thanks for the interceptions, the first two at terrible times in the game. And thanks also to Bruce Ariens, offensive coordinator, for those predictable and uninspired play calls when the Steelers had the ball at Indy's one-yard line in the fourth quarter. This hasn't been a great year for you, but come on. A little creativity might have worked better than pounding Mewelde into a stacked D-line again and again. I'm bitter and deflated tonight.

Anyway... here are a couple of recommendations:

1) Al Gore: "The Climate for Change" (The New York Times), which includes "a five-part plan to repower America with a commitment to producing 100 percent of our electricity from carbon-free sources within 10 years. It is a plan that would simultaneously move us toward solutions to the climate crisis and the economic crisis — and create millions of new jobs that cannot be outsourced."

2) Ryan Lizza: "Battle Plans" (The New Yorker), a report on how "Obama’s strategy worked, with only minor alterations, throughout the campaign."

Need more? Have a hankering for some right-wing nonsense? Well, check out P.J. O'Rourke's "We Blew It" at The Weekly Standard. I thought O'Rourke was funny back when I was an Alex P. Keaton-esque adolescent in New Jersey. I grew out of it. He's so obviously full of shit, and his lame attempts at snark and humour are simply pathetic suck-ups to his right-wing readership -- you know, the sort of people who think Rush Limbaugh's race-baiting is funny.

Well, this piece is "[a] look back in remorse on the conservative opportunity that was squandered," but, as usual, he doesn't get it. Conservatism has failed because it's conservatism, the conservative movement because it's been reckess and extremist, because what it promotes is, at its core, brutality: theocratic moralism at home, imperialism abroad, and a deregulated free-market economy that would have made Adam Smith shudder in horror. America is a liberal nation, not an illiberal one, and in this respect the ideology people like O'Rourke propagandize about is deeply un-American.

O'Rourke is sort of right about some things, like how the "Southern Strategy" ultimately backfired by narrowing the GOP's appeal (thought it worked for a long time), and how the current financial crisis "that is hoisting us on our own petard is only the latest (if the last) of the petard hoistings that have issued from the hindquarters of our movement." His problem -- one of them -- is that his vision of conservatism isn't really conservatism at all, it's an idealized conservatism that is actually liberalism: freedom, opportunity, education (everything except the rampant gun ownership he desires). Meanwhile, what he calls liberalism is actually just a kind of debased socialism. Like so many on the right, all he can do is sneear at liberalism -- which last time I checked, given that I'm a liberal and all, is about liberty -- and resort to the sort of virulent labelism that characterized the right's smear attacks of the '80s and '90s. His piece reads like it's 20 years old. (Except for the snearing at Hyde Park, which is just more of the same from the Republican Smear Machine: "Those leafy precincts will be reserved for the micromanagers and macro-apparatchiks of liberalism -- for Secretary of the Department of Peace Bill Ayers and Secretary of the Department of Fairness Bernardine Dohrn." Oooh. Hilarious. His humour is so fresh, isn't it? I'm sure his WS colleagues, from Krazy Kristol on down, guffawed themselves out of breath when they read that one.)

Alright, enough. I've already given O'Rourke way too much of my time and way too much space here at a blog dedicated to the promulgation of liberalism. He may correctly identify some of conservatism's policy missteps of the past 20 or 30 years, but he doesn't seem to have much of a clue when it comes to much else.

So conservatives blew it. Boo-fucking-hoo. Now, P.J. et al., go back to your self-righteous navel-gazing and let the grown ups take over.