'4D chess!' Politico writer puts impressive spin on AOC's Green New Deal nightmare

Sarah D | 11:22 AM on February 08, 2019

The rollout of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal yesterday was, for all intents and purposes, a spectacular disaster. In addition to reading as if it had been cobbled together by a group of stoned high school kids, it was full of nonsensical and completely unrealistic policy proposals. It’s essentially an impossible dream, if you will.

And Politico Magazine staff writer Michael Grunwald thinks that’s what makes it so special:

Analysis: There’s nothing wrong with dreaming impossible dreams. That’s how radical change happens. But it’s generally best to focus on one impossible dream at a time. https://t.co/q9d8s6bDUW

— POLITICO (@politico) February 8, 2019

This is one hell of an analysis:

Ohhh she’s actually a secret genius for that proposal she immediately memoryholed pic.twitter.com/apDLZgsHbv

— Alex Griswold (@HashtagGriswold) February 8, 2019

Let’s hear him out:

The official rollout of the Green New Deal on Thursday was met with a barrage of skepticism fromwell-intentioned fact-checkers, badly intentioned climate trolls, and desperate-to-look-savvy pundits, allfocusing on the logistical and political impossibilities of transforming the economy as rapidly as the Green New Deal envisions. And they’re right: Its goals really do seem impossible to achieve.

But they’re all missing the point. If anything,they’re helping the Green New Deal’s backers to make their point, which is that climate change is an unprecedented emergency that requires unprecedented action, so America needs to try to do seemingly impossible things. Ocasio-Cortez likes to call it the modern moon mission—and in a radio interview, she compared it to another effective feat of political imagination, the wall that Donald Trump has used to focus public attention on immigration: “Here’s this hugely impossible thing that seems ridiculous, but I’m going to seriously push for it.”

Those all might be serious problems, but they are separate from the problem of the carbon emissions our power plants and vehicles and factories are pumping into the atmosphere. That’s the problem that threatens to render the earth uninhabitable. And the suggestion that Green New Deal legislation will need to include provisions for universal health care, paid vacations, stronger collective bargaining rights and “universal access to healthy food” is really a suggestion that the Green New Deal is pure symbolism. It’s going to be hard enough to pass legislation addressing the climate crisis without trying to solve every other social and economic problem that Democrats have ever dreamed of solving in the fine print.

So at least he’s not completely up AOC’s butt. Just enough to get comfortable. If he’s lucky, maybe she’ll wave at him from her plane.