THE GREEN NEW DEAL — IT WAS FUN WHILE IT LASTED: Aaaaand AOC’s “Green New Deal” FAQ Page Got Taken Down.
AOC’s Green New Deal is even better than we thought.
And by better, I mean LAUGHABLY TERRIBLE.
For one, it’s ACTUALLY funny. I mean like LOL-at-you-not-with-you funny. She talks about cow farts.
She also wants to provide for people who are “unwilling” to work. Because you know. Sometimes work just sucks and you shouldn’t have to work if you don’t WANNA.
AAANYWAY. We’re all equally amused and horrified right now. …but it looks like the Dems might be horrified, too.
The FAQ page got pulled.
At least for now:
But it really was fun while it lasted; at the Federalist, David Harsanyi rounds up “The 10 Most Insane Requirements Of The Green New Deal.” Here are just a few “highlights:”
● Ban cars. To be fair, under the GND, everyone will need to retrofit their cars with Flintstones-style foot holes or pedals for cycling. The authors state that the GND would like to replace every “combustion-engine vehicle” — trucks, airplanes, boats, and 99 percent of cars — within ten years. Charging stations for electric vehicles will be built “everywhere,” though how power plants will provide the energy needed to charge them is a mystery.
● Gut and rebuild every building in America. Markey and Cortez want to “retrofit every building in America” with “state of the art energy efficiency.” I repeat, “every building in America.” That includes every home, factory, and apartment building, which will all need, for starters, to have their entire working heating and cooling systems ripped out and replaced with…well, with whatever technology Democrats are going invent in their committee hearings, I guess.
● Eliminate air travel. GND calls for building out “highspeed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary.” Good luck Hawaii! California’s high-speed boondoggle is already in $100 billion dollars of debt, and looks to be one of the state’s biggest fiscal disasters ever. Amtrak runs billions of dollars in the red (though, as we’ll see, trains will also be phased out). Imagine growing that business model out to every state in America?
Speaking of Hawaii, that last item was too much for America’s tireless foe of the Knights of Columbus, Sen. Mazie Hirono:
As Twitchy told you earlier, Nancy Pelosi kicked a liberal hornet’s nest when she mocked Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal as “the green dream or whatever they call it.” But we’ve got good news for her: It looks like she won’t have to shoulder all the backlash herself.
Because Democratic Sen. Mazie Hirono doesn’t seem super-impressed by the Green New Deal, either:
That’s a polite way of saying, “No way in hell would I be caught dead endorsing this stupid proposal now.”
In 2013, Hirono issued a statement on her Website with all the usual leftie green platitudes: “Hirono warned that climate change is already having a significant impact on Hawaii and without coordinated government action will greatly harm the state’s well-being in the future during a hearing held by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee…‘Climate change is the great challenge of our time.’”
But she’s not quite ready to ban the 767, wreck her state’s tourism industry, and let her constituents wait for a high speed transpacific rail tunnel to be dug, just yet.
As Robert Conquest’s First Law of Politics states, “Everyone is conservative about what he [or she] knows best.”
So why did AOC (temporarily?) 404 her “Green New Deal” faqs page? There are a combination of possible reasons. Perhaps she needs to study first if the moon landings were real or not:
Additionally, AOC’s 404 may be driven by a fit of pique — as The Hill noted today, “Pelosi names Dems to new climate panel — but not AOC.”
Why the snub? At Hot Air, Allahpundit kicks around some ideas and writes:
I prefer the second theory, though, not because it’s more plausible but because it’s more Machiavellian. In this theory, Pelosi does have the power to block AOC and her co-sponsors from going public, or at least from going public with the particular document they published — but she chooses to stand aside. She reads the part about “unwilling to work,” feels her eyes rolling nearly out of her head, but lets it proceed because she knows the only way the party’s going to be able to rein in Ocasio-Cortez is by letting her embarrass herself publicly for awhile. Pelosi might even relish having a far-left foil for the party’s eventual nominee next year: When Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or whoever is inevitably asked whether we need “economic security” for people “unwilling to work,” they can smirk and reply, “Er, no,” and then cite that fact as evidence of how moderate they are. That’s tricky business for a Democratic candidate since it risks alienating progressives by creating distance from AOC but it’s basic good politics in a general election.
Or it may be that some hoary old reruns are simply too old even for Pelosi. As Jonah Goldberg writes, “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortex & William James — Statism and One-Nation Politics Are Linked:”
Some might object that the U.S. effort to rev up domestic industrial capacity to produce more guns, tanks, and ships in the late 1930s and early 1940s, as impressive as it was, didn’t leave behind a lot of off-the-shelf blueprints for how we might eradicate the fossil-fuel industry in just over a decade. But that’s a discussion for another day. The true significance of her argument is how perfectly it conforms to the central organizing principle of American liberalism, going back a century.
As I have argued at length elsewhere, such as in my book Liberal Fascism, ever since the philosopher William James gave his lecture “The Moral Equivalent of War” in 1906, the agenda of 20th-century liberalism has been an exercise in trying to decouple the benefits of war from the bloody bits.
And then free ride off the moral equivalence of those who actually fought and died. 2006 was arguably the peak of Al Gore’s influence as “The Goracle.” Gore transitioned from his ‘80s persona as a Reagan-esque Blue Dog Democrat to “Ozone Man,” as George H.W. Bush dubbed him, via a 1989 New York Times editorial headlined, “An Ecological Kristallnacht. Listen.” As Julia Goren wrote in a 2006 Christian Science Monitor article, “It’s a peculiar thing that as the threat of global terrorism reaches a crescendo, so apparently does the threat of global warming – at least that’s what some would have us believe…Freud called it displacement.”
