Chris Rickert: Missing the Point

In his column today, Chris Rickert furthered his reputation for missing the point and engaging in obfuscation. On the Cronon affair he writes:

The state Republican Party responds by seeking to comb through his university email account and suddenly everyone from the New York Times editorial page to The Atlantic magazine is condemning the request as a fishing expedition aimed at intimidating Cronon and his learned ilk from speaking out.
It was. But so what?

When one party to a dispute is engaged in wrong-headed behavior you criticized them for it. No one should, and as far as I know, no one has argued that professors ought never be subject to open records requests. For example, emails and other documents dealing with hiring, promotion, and tenure decision are, regardless of motivation, clearly legitimate. In this case, however, as Rickert understand there is no misuse of office and the Republicans are engaged in intimidation. He, and the WSJ more generally, ought to condemn this.

So he is a bit dim. But he is also dishonest. Remember It Happened One Night? Clark Gable played a sort of loud-mouthed know-it-all reporter who really didn't know it all. He was constantly saying he could write a book about, for example, hitch hiking even as he failed to get a ride. Rickert tries to engage know it all and cynical discourse and, of course, he fails to understand what is really at stake.  In the same column, Rickert writes:

A heretofore below-the-radar UW-Madison history professor named William Cronon writes a blog post saying that — surprise! — political parties sometimes take their cues from ideological organizations and seek to crush their opponents.

But here's the thing, Walker and his ilk, the real party of let them eat cake, represent themselves as independent voices for what Wisconsonians and Americans more generally really want. By linking their agenda to a shadowy group of ideological fanatics Cronon exposed this claim as a lie. Walker and his cronies and their political allies are, in fact, acting as the agents of outsiders who have dedicated their lives to advaning the interests of a tiny minority of extraordinarily wealthy men and women even though this means that they have to legislate against the vast majority of their fellows' material, moral, and political interests.

Much like Gable's character, Rickert, predictably really, fails to understand why the Republicans are so upset at Cronon: he exposed the men and women behind the Great and Powerful Oz. And he fails to understand the damage this does to the Republicans' claims of independence, honesty, and forth-rightness.

What is is about Neoliberals and their persistent inability to face reality?