Back and Rested

Well, I'm back from vacation in beautiful South Cackalacky. Not much to say at this point, but I did make note of some items and I am going to chalk them up in the "You Heard It Here First (all 25 of you)" column. First, I've been cold showering the conventional wisdom on Obama's reelection for some time and, of course, I have predicted the path of his presidency right from the starting gates. Well, this piece from Eric Alterman (hardly a crazed right wing nutter) reads almost exactly like what I've been saying.

Second item that I saw was the moaning of prominent environmentalists about the failure of their grand project, of which this piece is an example. I won't tackle too much here, but I will be a tad cheeky and wonder if the environmentalists did indeed fail. Did they fail? As Mark Perry notes, the air is a helluva lot cleaner. Ditto our water. So why do they consider themselves failures. Of course the answer lies in the fact that environmentalism is not about the environment. They consider themselves failures because none of their grand schemes have taken hold, that their apocalyptic message remains unpersuasive to most, and that they are not at the controls running things with the power that they seek. Obviously this is a debatable point, and I am sure that many environmentalists actually see an improved environment as their goal, unsullied by baser motives. Still, there is much to be said about the disastrous strategic approach of the environmental movement (for a primer on their strategic boobishness, go here). What strikes me however is that the movement itself apparently see the basic reality of the strategic landscape, they didn't know what they were up against. Their next go around will have to be more modest and more in line with basic realities or else that too will be a dead before they are even out of the gates. We'll see.