Joan Walsh Thinks It’s All About Her

“Bitter partisanship has left this woman a hulking, steaming pile of radioactive filth. She just hates. No amount of Obama/Democrat failure will shake her from what is, for all intents and purposes, a psychotic obsession with the ‘evil’ right.”
— Donald Douglas, American Power

Sometimes it’s just your turn as scapegoat, and the best you can do in your hour of shame is to maintain your personal dignity.

Alas, nothing in Joan Walsh’s experience of marching lockstep in the liberal herd prepared her for the sudden and severe beatdown she got after Ezra Klein, leader of the “Juicebox Mafia,” decided to take a shot at her on Twitter. Walsh had gotten out of step with the “smart” liberal take on the ObamaCare roll-out debacle, and Klein’s tweet on Tuesday was the signal that started a dogpile reaction.

“And then all hell broke loose,” Walsh writes in a long, solipsistic whine of a column at Salon.com, that failed fossil of the 1990s Dot Com Bubble which has been losing $2 million a year forever.

Did I ever mention how much Andrew Breitbart despised Joan Walsh? Because he did, you know. Her name was always an epithet to Andrew.

Donald Douglas at American Power shares that loathing: “Wretched Joan Walsh Whines About How Everybody Hates Joan Walsh.”

Walsh’s reaction to her sudden ignominy among liberals is instructive for several reasons, including what it tells us about the herd instinct of liberal pundits. There is a creepy Soviet-style conformity at times: “Here is the Party line. This is all the truth you need.”

Joan Walsh is like one of those old Bolsheviks who, after decades of service to the cause of the Revolution, suddenly found themselves arrested and hauled before one of Stalin’s show-trial courts, accused of Crimes Against the People’s Republic: “Saboteur! Trotskyist!”

Public humiliation is the renegade’s reward, and there is a deep irony in Joan Walsh’s scapegoat moment, in that she has always been so compliantly eager to please her comrades. You got the idea at times she wanted to be Homecoming Queen of Liberal High School.

A pathetic craving for popularity is a weakness, and when Klein’s quick jab punctured Walsh’s balloon with shocking suddenness, she inevitably collapsed into self-pity, inviting others to join her, invoking the ritual totems of identity-politics tribalism:

You’re derided as a purveyor of “agitprop” (thanks, Andrew Sullivan) and you’re an “Obamabot” . . .
Oh, and if you’re a woman? You’re also a cunt, a bitch, a hag; you’re old, fat and ugly, with bad teeth, chicken arms, 12 cats and a big unrequited crush on Ezra Klein. . . .
The reaction to Klein’s mildly aggrieved tweet about it set off a shitstorm. Lots of people found it easy to misrepresent what I’d written. There was a little bit of dudebro-ism afoot, as I watched my young white male blogger friends high-fiving one another for their intellectual courage and honesty, as contrasted with my venal hackdom. . . .

There is much, much more in the same vein, but the way Saint Joan climbs up on her cross, declaring that she is being crucified by her “young white male blogger friends,” is the key point: Walsh thought her service to The Sacred Cause had earned her “friends,” when in fact those younger pundits were merely political allies, each selfishly pursuing their own paths of ascent on the ziggurat of ambition. If it served their interests to praise Joan Walsh, she would bask in the glow of admiration. But once it served their interests to shun her, then all her past glories were instantly forgotten: “Saboteur! Trotskyist!”

You might think she would learn a valuable lesson from this experience, but if Joan Walsh were capable of learning lessons from experience, she would not be a liberal, would she?