The Nutrooters Newest Hope for Hope-n-Change
by Warner Todd Huston (12/30/08)
Eli Pariser, the delusional Nutroot kingpin of MoveOn.org, has been allowed a few column inches of space in the Washington Post to reveal his hope for some Obama hope-n-change, and his op ed is a doosie, for sure. Headlined “Will He Bring Change.gov We Can Believe In?(1),” Pariser gives voice to his most hopiest of hopeiness that Obama is the True One that they all hope he is. All joking aside, this is a pretty revealing op ed for its utter inability at introspection or, on the other hand, its complete lack of honesty—I’m not sure which.
In fact, Pariser’s very first paragraph reveals his own extremism, an extremism that he pretends doesn’t exist (that being the lack of introspection, or the cynical attempt at covering the truth to which I was alluding).
So, how’s the Obama administration doing so far?
It’s a trick question: We’re still about minus-23 days in. But already, folks on the left and the right are furiously reading tea leaves, worrying about whether he’s as progressive as promised or trying to turn lemons into lemonade ("Hillary Clinton at State: a victory for conservative foreign policy values"). Through all this, there’s been surprisingly little focus on what may be the most important question Obama faces.
As Pariser mentions, Obama hasn’t taken office and so far all he has are appointments and a lot of vacation time, so no administration exists. This isn’t Obama’s fault, nor something to hold against him, but Pariser’s fevered imagination is running amuck, here.
It is the absurd claim, too, that Hillary Clinton’s pick as Secretary of State is a victory for “conservative foreign policy values.” Sure Hillary is more to the right of the communist worker’s party, but to imagine she is “conservative” only reveals Pariser’s own extremism. She may have campaigned as a moderate Democrat on foreign policy, but this is no reason to expect she is “conservative.”
Pariser then goes on to praise Obama for all his “reinvention” of campaigning via the Internet. But, let’s be honest, shall we? Thus far, all Obama’s extensive use of the Internet—the most extensive yet of any candidate, even above the groundbreaking work by Screamin’ Howard Dean—all the Internet success led to only one thing: victory at the ballot box. While that is nothing to scoff at, it is not proof that there has been any reinvention of government or governing at this point. There is potential, but no proof that it will become anything other than a singularly flashy, yet impressive, campaign parlor trick.
Pariser is doing a lot of hope-n-changie chicken counting before the hatching has fairly begun.
There is another revealing moment in Pariser’s op ed. Pariser reveals that Obama didn’t “invent” his own campaign but merely played by the game plans written up in the offices of MoveOn.org and Pariser imagines that now is the time to “up the ante.”
Pariser discusses the many net based meetings that MoveOn.org had over the campaign from which they derived their agenda of action. He also says that their agenda tracked closely with Obama’s. That is an understatement. It tracked exactly, nearly word-for-word, with Obama’s. Naturally, Pariser tries to pretend that this is but a mere coincidence.
...the reason Obama’s benchmarks track so closely with ours isn’t because he was pandering to MoveOn. It’s because both the Obama campaign and our process were tapped into what Americans want. And as our Founding Fathers guessed, real people who actually understand what’s happening out in America are pretty smart.
Me thinks he doth protest too much, as the saying goes.
Then we get the same ol’ hate for corporations we expect from these anti-capitalist, wannabe Stalinistas.
Because although Obama’s election is a big step, the world hasn’t completely changed yet. America’s oil and coal and pharmaceutical lobbyists aren’t quitting their jobs to become community organizers. And if millions of people rallied this fall under banners of hope and change, these industry groups are rallying hundreds of millions of dollars to promote fear and the status quo.
Damn those eeevil lobbyists for thwarting hope-n-change. Yes, I mean those lobbyists… just like the many thousands streaming to Washington as we speak because Obama has back tracked on his claim to hate them and has thrown wide the door for them to “help” him institute all the hope-n-change they can afford. It’s almost as if The One realizes all of a sudden that the nutrooters can’t be counted on to fund his avarice indefinitely, eh?
Pariser goes on to complain that this darned world hasn’t changed fast enough for him to be able to expect a socialist state to be instituted in one fell swoop and he hopes that Obama will use the Internet to bring the hope-n-change to the American political process that would facilitate bypassing all that messy American way stuff for his benefit.
Gone should be the days, Pariser imagines, of electing representatives, crafting legislation, gaining compromise, adhering to the Constitution and in will be the days where the Obammessiah just puts up a marching order on the hope-n-change.gov webpages (all nicely written by the staff at MoveOn.org, of course) and all the little nutrooters will email back their hopey, hopeful, and hearty acceptance.
But, can Pariser really be that naive? Can he think it will be that simple? Well, he says that it won’t. And here is another place where captain hope-n-change revels his own extremism.
Nor will the right wing be silent in the fights to come. Moderate Republicans have gone extinct, but that just means Obama must confront a more concentrated and virulent strain of Republicanism.
No more moderate Republicans? Obviously, Pariser has no clue what sort of struggle is going on in the GOP at this very moment between the moderate, country clubbers and conservatives. Nor is he at all aware that the moderates have been running the party into the ground for the better part of the last 15 years. The man is blinded by his own extremism. Worse, he imagines himself to be mainstream! He is so far left he falls off the continent and into the Pacific, yet he imagines himself to be qualified to detect “moderates”? To Pariser, Karl Marx is a moderate. Pariser’s no judge. Pariser also hopes to destroy anyone in his own party that exhibits any moderate ideology, so his bemoaning that the GOP has become a “virulent strain” is a hypocritical as it gets.
No, what Pariser wants is a tyranny of the minority, one he personally controls through the electronic strings of MoeOn.org. He couldn’t care less about our system or laws. He wants to rule by eternal Internet plebiscite. This is precisely what the Founders wanted to avoid… and they were 100% right to so wish.
The nutrooters want their payback and they will accept nothing less than control of team Obama. Let’s work to step between them and our government, loudly yelling STOP.
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