The smallness of the right's big bad temper

Of all the right's sputtering and spitting and foaming and fulminating yesterday, my favorite came down to this rather meek entry in the Weekly Standard: "Obama could turn it down on the grounds that not all his peace plans have come to fruition yet, but why should he? And the Swedes could have waited a year on the same grounds, but why should they?"

To me, that subdued, petty putdown said so much more about the modern right and its Frankenstein mutation of neoconservatism than all of yesterday's more voluble manifestations combined. For there they were, the folks at "the Standard," the intellectual masters of the universe or at the very least this speck of a remote globe, but they had yet to learn that the "Norwegian Nobel Committee" is actually ... Norwegian.

But hey, who cares, right? Neoconservatives make reality, remember? They aren't shackled by the old, fussy Enlightenment standards of knowledge and rationality; they are the new, violent Romantics, whose passionate and self-righteous faith -- combined with a whole lot of firepower -- can make mere dreams come true.

And that was the U.S. quality of mind the global community had to endure for eight egregious years -- the insufferable arrogance and counterintellectual exceptionalism of illegitimate gangsters in the White House: their predatory doctrine of preemption; their unprovoked war, which threatened others; their sea-lawyer violations of international treaties; their sheer, swaggering go-it-aloneness, which no superpower, with its fingers inexorably in so many dikes, can possibly sustain.

At home, the gangsters piled up accelerating debt, bankrupted the armed forces, insulted its international citizenship, and dumped all the fallout in President Obama's lap.

So is it really a matter of mere speculation that the Nobel Committee's awarding of Barack Obama was, in fact, a necessary rebuke of George W. Bush? Of course it was, as it should have been. The Committee was only doing what little it could to help right a very twisted course: asking of the world to contrast and compare, as most every high-school essay question asks of its lay constituents, the present, unifying hopes with past, destabilizing brutalities.

But, you know those delicate, bleeding-heart Swedes, whom the neoconservative Weekly Standard mistakenly attacked, just as the neoconservative Bush administration attacked the wrong country. Can these clowns ever get anything right?

Elsewhere the entering clowns reacted with, depending on one's political point of view (and, perhaps, IQ), either unspeakable or joyous predictability -- they entered, that is, with characteristic bullying, adolescent envy, and more than a touch of racism.

The GOP's prime minister, Rush Limbaugh, in an email to the Politico, pronounced the incomparable award a "greater embarrassment" to America's reputation than the Olympics failure -- a castration of sorts, at which he incomparably rejoiced -- and then turned around and accused the "elites of the world" of relishing a "weakened, neutered U.S."

The peace prize, he added -- militating as it does, I heartily agree, against military escalations and preemptive bombings -- "is their way of promoting that concept," the outrageous one of Reason, Caution, Diplomacy, Collective Security, and Peace. Rush was really on to something sinister there: the peace prize means to promote peace. Oh dear.

Limbaugh's televised doppelganger, Glenn Beck, however, first opted for Twitter, congratulating Obama through his customary prepubescence: "Who's so cute? Yooouuuu R." This is what passes for instant right-wing analysis.

On the Internet there was RedState, offering the mammothly revealing -- of itself: "I did not realize the Nobel Peace Prize had an affirmative action quota for it, but that is the only thing I can think of for this news." One scarcely needs to illuminate that, so I won't.

I pluckily plowed through other online, right-wing "analyses" -- "most Nobel Peace prizes go to conventional leftwing types popular with European elites," ridiculed Mona Charen of the National Review; "The prize will provide a fitting occasion for another trip to Europe, and another speech!" snickered PowerLine -- but it became quickly evident that the assorted voices of the right were indistinguishable; that they had nothing to say outside the stenographic.

In retrospect there was no need to go on about that, however, as I have done here. For this morning I noticed in the NY Times that historian Douglas Brinkley has wrapped it up in eight little words: "To begrudge [Obama] the Nobel Prize is small."

And those last five little letters -- s-m-a-l-l -- pretty much define modern conservatism.